Axon Sees Virtual and Augmented Reality in Its Future
When taser and body camera maker Axon (NASDAQ:AAXN) announced on Monday that it had hired a "team of world-renowned imaging and VR/AR experts," it came as a bit of a surprise.
This group will focus on enhancing the capabilities of Axon's future wearable and in-car cameras and developing a platform for future advancements that leverage Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The team had been part of Nokia, and then Microsoft, gaining industry expertise in the imaging market. But with Microsoft shutting down Nokia, the respected team of imaging engineers needed a home for their talents, which is where Axon stepped in.
How Axon views VR and AR
You see Axon's vision for its next-generation products starting to form. It invested in artificial intelligence capabilities last year, and is now adding virtual and augmented reality. Long term, I could see the company being able to create fully immersive views of incidents using the feeds from multiple Axon cameras. It's also likely their content will be searchable using artificial intelligence, meaning law enforcement would be able to find a person or item, then follow it through the video stream.
See the full story here: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/07/axon-sees-virtual-and-augmented-reality-in-its-fut.aspx
BBC To Launch Augmented Reality App Civilisations AR
Developed by BBC Research & Development and Nexus Studios, the app is part of a major collaboration between the BBC and more than 30 museums from across the UK and to mark the launch of new landmark arts and culture series, Civilisations.
Major themes from the new Civilisations series will be incorporated into the AR app enabling people to explore some of the most important exhibits from UK museums in the comfort of their living rooms. They’ll be able to view, explore and discover a range of fascinating artefacts have been digitally scanned like an ancient Egyptian mummy from the Torquay Museum, Rodin’s The Kiss from the National Museum of Wales, The Umbrian Madonna and Child from the National Museum of Scotland.
The app will include several unique features, including ‘magic spotlight’, allowing users to uncover annotations, audio and imagery that enrich the story of each exhibit; X-ray, to see through or inside an object; Restoration, to rub through the layers of history, bringing lustre to a metal chalice or colour to a faded sculpture; and Navigation, where users can browse the exhibition geographically using an AR globe or via the themes of the series.
Civilisations AR will be available for iOS and Android from the beginning of the new series via BBC Taster. For any further updates from the BBC, keep reading VRFocus.
See the full story here: https://www.vrfocus.com/2018/02/bbc-to-launch-augmented-reality-app-civilisations-ar/
Real-time tomographic holography for augmented reality
Abstract
The concept and instantiation of real-time tomographic holography (RTTH) for augmented reality is presented. RTTH enables natural hand–eye coordination to guide invasive medical procedures without requiring tracking or a head-mounted device. It places a real-time virtual image of an object’s cross section into its actual location, without noticeable viewpoint dependence (e.g., parallax error). The virtual image is viewed through a flat narrowband holographic optical element (HOE) with optical power that generates an in-situ virtual image (within 1m of the HOE) from a small spatial light modulator display without obscuring a direct view of the physical world. Rigidly fixed upon a medical ultrasound probe, an RTTH device could show the scan in its actual location inside the patient, even as the probe was moved relative to the patient.
------
Most medical imaging augmented-reality systems depend on tracking of the viewer relative to either the world and/or to some image-scanning device [1]. To avoid the undesirable technical and ergonomic requirements imposed by use of a tracking system [2], some researchers have previously mechanically mounted a 2D display and a half-silvered mirror in the proper positions on an ultrasound probe such that by the law of reflection the mirror produces a virtual image of the 2D display that is in situ, i.e. precisely located (registered) in 3D space with the slice of tissue scanned by the ultrasound probe, regardless of viewpoint or probe position [3, 4]. An entire 3D volume can be interrogated tomographically (i.e. in a series of slices) by moving the ultrasound probe to show multiple ultrasound slices in their correct 3D locations; the correct ultrasound data will be displayed at each point in the entire 3D volume inside the patient. This see-through autostereoscopic augmented-reality display technique has been termed Real-Time Tomographic Reflection (RTTR) [4].
Here we present an extension of the RTTR concept, which we first proposed but had not yet implemented in [5]. By replacing the semi-transparent mirror with a narrow-band holographic optical element (HOE), as shown in Figure 1, we are able to maintain all of RTTR's above benefits without our device geometry being constrained by the law of reflection and without the substantial attenuating effects of a semi-transparent mirror. Our approach, analogously termed real-time tomographic holography (RTTH), can produce a 2D virtual image that is always correctly positioned and larger than the source spatial light modulator (SLM) display, with a less obscured view of the patient and with substantial flexibility in the position and orientation of the HOE and the (monochromatically illuminated) SLM. These benefits derive directly from the flexibility of an HOE. A flat-surface (e.g. volume phase) HOE appears transparent if it has sufficiently narrow bandwidth (Bragg window). An HOE can act as a focusing optic and simultaneously as a diffraction grating.
See the full article here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3022476/
Video from Erick Moen: Stetten has been working on stuff like this for a while. It only works with monochromatic light, but it is widely adopted in the medical field. My brother is a PA and told me they use it in some hospitals to find veins for blood draws, etc. I found a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=114&v=ERle45xg9l8
Virtual Reality Porn: The Next Greatest Threat to the Church?
"While virtual-reality pornography may feel like something out of a science fiction movie, it already has a formidable, if underground, presence," the newspaper reported. "According to one porn site, views of VR porn are up 275 percent since it debuted in the summer of 2016. Now the site is averaging about 500,000 views."
"Is the church ready for this? No, because they are not aware of it," Josh McDowell of the Josh McDowell Ministry said in a press release.
That's why KingdomWorks Studios has produced a new DVD series titled 'The Conquer Series: A Battle Plan for Purity" that can help men and churches win the battle against sexual addiction. The Conquer Series is a powerful cinematic 12-disc DVD series which has already helped over 500,000 men conquer porn and walk in freedom. The series website also has resources to help churches set up Conquer groups.
See the full story here: http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/2018/february/virtual-reality-porn-the-next-greatest-threat-to-the-church
Spurious Correlations
See more plots here: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
A four-sentence Apple HomePod review (with appendices)
Buy a HomePod if you already have Apple Music or you want to have it and you’re in the market for a single incredibly over-designed and radically impressive speaker that will give you really great sound with basically no tuning, fussing, measuring or tweaking.
The HomePod has a single, upward-firing shock dampened sub. While the Home Max definitely bumps, it also requires the use of a separate rubber pad that you have to place like a bass trivet to prevent unwanted vibration while it’s on a surface. The HomePod transmits so little of the movement from the sub cone through the body that it’s in no need of anything more than the integrated rubber foot. It’s not as much boom, but it’s much better utilized.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/06/a-four-sentence-homepod-review-with-appendices/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter
Columbia Engineers Win $4.7M DARPA Grant to Revolutionize Augmented Reality Glasses
An interdisciplinary Columbia Engineering team is working with colleagues at Stanford, UMass Amherst, and Trex Enterprises Corporation to come up with an alternative solution. Thanks to a $4.7 million, four-year grant from DARPA, they are developing a revolutionary lightweight glass that is able to dynamically monitor the wearer’s vision and display contextual images that are vision-corrected.
“We are creating a game-changer, a completely novel glass design that enables high resolution projection and detection of light with no moving parts,” says Michal Lipson, Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia, a pioneer in nanophotonics who is leading the team. “Our design will be a key technology enabler for the Department of Defense, industry, and the general public. Our ultimate deliverable will be an ultrahigh-resolution, see-through, head-mounted display with a large field of view and vastly reduced SWaP (size, weight, and power consumption), coupled with the ability to correct users’ ocular aberrations in real time and project aberration-corrected visible contextual information onto the retina.”
The proposed AR glass relies on the ultrafast generation of arbitrary wavefronts, both in VIS and NIR. Fast arbitrary wavefront generation in these spectral ranges has been one of the major challenges in optics due mainly to a lack of actively tunable optical materials.
“We are proposing an ultra-compact platform for arbitrary wavefront generation with high speed that is based on tunable metasurfaces in the VIS and NIR,” says Yu, assistant professor of applied physics. “The metasurfaces are based on two critical innovations we’ve made at Columbia Engineering: our EnMats with highly tunable complex optical refractive indices and optical resonators that further enhance the electro-optic effect of the EnMats.”
“We will couple laser light into a bus waveguide, distribute it over a network of branch waveguides covering the entire surface of the AR glass, evanescently couple it into the SiN resonators, and then scatter it into the eye,” Lipson notes.
The team plans to develop a scalable fabrication process that is based on standard CMOS techniques, such as Deep UV lithography, and well-established procedures, such as dry transfer methods, to integrate the EnMats into the SiN integrated photonics platform.
See the full story here: http://engineering.columbia.edu/news/darpa-grant-augmented-reality-glasses
Intel may be the next company to jump into intelligent eyewear.
Intel's New Devices Group (which reportedly axed its wearables division last July) has been quietly working on just such a pair of glasses, dubbed Vaunt, and plans to offer them up to developers in an early access program later this year.
How has nobody thought to put smarts in normal-looking glasses before? Well, it's been pretty tough to fit a miniature display and a decent-size battery into traditional eyewear. But here, Intel has managed to combine a very low-power red laser and a holographic reflector to beam simple images directly onto your retina, according to The Verge.
(An executive tells the publication that Intel's targeting 18 hours of battery life, despite the fact that the battery -- and everything else -- has to fit into the glasses' stem.)
See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/intel-vaunt-smart-glasses-prototype/