Mapbox Acquires Fitness AR To Build Augmented Reality Apps
Weeks after Fitness AR used Mapbox technology to build digital 3D maps that help endurance athletes on Strava visualize trail routes, the augmented reality activity-tracking app has been acquired by Mapbox to build all sorts of sports, fitness and consumer apps for clients.
As part of the deal, Fitness AR co-founder Adam Debreczeni will help Mapbox build out a team of designers and developers focused on creating practical augmented and virtual reality applications in key verticals, such as sports, weather, travel and gaming.
Mapbox’s clients span a range of consumer-facing industries, with major brands such as Strava, Uber, Snapchat and The Weather Channel using its maps to provide location-based services to consumers.
See the full story here: https://www.sporttechie.com/mapbox-acquires-fitness-ar-augmented-reality-apps/
Apple supplier Quanta just entered a huge partnership with Lumus on augmented reality glasses
Quanta Computer — a major supplier of components for the AppleWatch — announced a major deal on Monday that would significantly expand the availability of augmented reality glasses by 2019.
The licensing deal is with Lumus, an optics company that makes the core display components for augmented reality glasses. Lumus provides a projector-like technology that overlays images onto the "screen" of a spectacle lens.
Lumus, founded in Israel in 2000, has a long patent history in the augmented reality arena. In particular, the company focuses on embedding multiple prisms into a single piece of glass, to increase the size and breadth of images while keeping the lenses discreet and "non-dorky," CEO Ari Grobman said.
See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/04/quanta-lumus-announce-augmented-reality-licensing-agreement.html
Virtual reality gets its groove back
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/02/virtual-reality-gets-its-groove-back/
Technology and Hollywood Meet Up at Fox Innovation Lab
“A number of years ago, we internally pitched the idea to management that on a small scale we should start an innovation lab where we would have the opportunity to work with external technology partners, as well as different groups within the studio, to test new technologies, to essentially try to create for ourselves the future of entertainment and next-generation entertainment,” says Danny Kaye, exec VP and managing director, Fox Innovation Lab.
The Lab is working to advance HDR’s capabilities with HDR10+, an open, royalty-free HDR technology featuring “dynamic metadata,” which more precisely adjusts content to the capabilities of different TVs.
“Scene by scene and even frame by frame, that movie is being adjusted to be optimized to that particular TV,” Kaye says.
That virtual reality experimentation helped result in this year’s creation of an entire new business unit at the studio, FoxNext, which not only works on VR, but on video games and also theme parks.
Fox Innovation Lab now also has its eye on incorporating artificial intelligence, or machine learning, both in the entertainment production and distribution process and in the content itself.
See the full story here: http://variety.com/2017/digital/spotlight/technology-hollywood-meet-fox-innovation-lab-1202630433/
Amazon Debuts Intel-Powered DeepLens Camera to Teach AI
On November 29 at the AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services introduced its AWS DeepLens, a video camera whose main purpose is to teach developers how to program AI functions. The camera comes loaded with different AI infrastructures and AWS infrastructure such as AWS Greengrass Core and a version of MXNet. Developers can also add their own frameworks like TensorFlow. The 4-megapixel camera can shoot 1080p HD video and offers a 2D microphone system for recording sound, in the form factor of an action camera on top of an external hard drive.
Digital Trends reports that, “the camera system uses an Intel Atom processor fast enough to run deep learning algorithms on 10 frames in one second,” and “the 8 GB of memory houses both the pre-stored code along with custom algorithms.” The system could also potentially use cloud computing, via Wi-Fi, for “algorithms too large to run on the internal hardware.”
Use cases include face and object detection, activity recognition, artistic style transfer.
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/amazon-debuts-intel-powered-deeplens-camera-to-teach-ai/
Virtual reality movies are coming to Dubai as part of the Dubai International Film Festival 2017.
Taking place between Wednesday December 6 and Wednesday 13, DIFF will present ten fully immersive movies made for VR at the special du VR Cinema, located at Madinat Jumeirah’s events and conference centre.
See the full story here: http://www.timeoutdubai.com/films/news/80503-virtual-reality-movie-theatre-coming-to-dubai
The ZED mini camera brings an AR twist to your VR headset
The ZED mini device is actually two cameras 65 mm (2.56 inches) apart, designed to mimic the human eyes. They can sense user position and depth, so digital graphics can be programmed to interact with real world objects in a way that looks and feels genuine, complete with realistic lighting.
All of this stereoscopic video and depth information is fed through a USB-C connection into the Vive or Rift, at a 720p resolution running at 60 frames-per-second. That's not the maximum resolution these headsets are capable of when they're rendering VR worlds, but if apps don't need the high FPS rate then the resolution can be upped to the full 2k.
The ZED mini can be preordered now for US$449 and ships on December 18. You can a taste of what's on offer in the video below.
See the full story here: https://newatlas.com/zed-mini-ar-camera/52464/