Qualcomm (and Machinima / WB) Has a New Reality Show Competition For Creating Virtual Reality Apps
To promote its new virtual reality platform, Qualcomm created the “VR Developer Challenge,” pairing game developers with YouTube stars in a competition to create the most engaging VR experience. The series, which debuted on YouTube last week, gives viewers a peek behind the scenes of what it takes to think of and execute a project within VR.
The show features three VR developers (Sam Maliszewski, Jordan Mann and E McNeill) selected by Warner Bros.-owned Machinima, which produced the series with Qualcomm. Each developer had a month to create a project of their choosing using Qualcomm’s new standalone headset, the Snapdragon 835 VR developer kit. The headset is more advanced than some of the mobile phone-enabled headsets, but—unlike the more popular headsets such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive—is untethered.
The episodes capture the developers going from concept to creation: talking about their ideas, overcoming personal obstacles, and even facing user testing.
See the full story here: http://www.adweek.com/digital/qualcomm-has-a-new-reality-show-competition-for-creating-virtual-reality-apps/
Inside China’s Big Tech Conference, New Ways to Track Citizens
An artificial intelligence company touted a robot that could help doctors with diagnoses. A start-up displayed a drone designed to carry a single passenger 60 miles per hour.
And in a demonstration worthy of both wonder and worry, a Chinese facial recognition company showed how its technology could quickly identify and describe people.
If there were any doubts about China’s technological prowess, the presentations made this week at the country’s largest tech conference should put them to rest. The event, once a setting for local tech executives and leaders of impoverished states, this year attracted top American executives like Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google, as well as executives of Chinese giants like Jack Ma of Alibaba and Pony Ma of Tencent.
The technology enabling a full techno-police state was on hand, giving a glimpse into how new advances in things like artificial intelligence and facial recognition can be used to track citizens — and how they have become widely accepted here.
A fast-growing facial recognition company, Face++, turned its technology on conferencegoers. On a large screen in its booth, the software identified their gender, described their hair length and color and characterized the clothes they wore.
The people overseeing China Unicom’s booth openly discussed the data, a sign of how widely accepted such surveillance and data collection have become in China.
China Telecom showed off its ability to measure the amount of trash in several garbage cans and detect malfunctioning fire hydrants.
Investors and analysts say China’s unabashed fervor for collecting such data, combined with its huge population, could eventually give its artificial intelligence companies an edge over American ones. If Silicon Valley is marked by a libertarian streak, China’s vision offers something of an antithesis, one where tech is meant to reinforce and be guided by the steady hand of the state.
The contradictions of using sites like Twitter to change opinions abroad, while blocking them domestically, were often evident but almost as often unremarked upon.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/business/china-internet-conference-wuzhen.html?_r=0
Academic Research on depth perception in VR
In 2015, Fulvio found that people were flunking her simple test of three-dimensional perception using a flat screen and standard 3D movie glasses. They were not good at discerning which direction a target was moving.
"Most importantly, they confused whether the object was coming toward them or going away from them," she says. "It was a surprising finding. Nobody believed it, because it's not something that happens often in the real world. You'd get hurt."
What Fulvio and Rokers found was that when most people put on a virtual reality headset, they still treat what they see like it's happening on any run-of-the-mill TV screen.
"There's no depth to a computer screen. There are no binocular cues. Close one eye, close the other eye, nothing changes," says Rokers, whose work was funded by Google. "If you take that expectation into a VR headset, where you do have binocular cues, you somehow just don't use them."
The visual feedback nearly doubled success rates.
When she turned off the VR system's head tracking, taking away the effects of players' head movements and making them passive viewers, they were bad again. When she gave a little of that freedom back—restoring the system's response to head movements, but making the virtual world shifts lag behind players by as much as half a second—they were still bad.
The results—that tiny head movements and typical binocular cues of motion are there for the taking in virtual reality, but that most people only use them if they are actively shown how VR differs from a flat computer screen—should help virtual reality creators improve uptake of their products.
Rokers says showing the effects of teaching people to use cues to three-dimensional motion that they are otherwise ignoring may ultimately help refine treatment for vision disorders such as blind spots or amblyopia ("lazy eye") in which the brain can be trained to compensate for perceptual limitations.
See the full story here: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-12-virtual-reality-users.html
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/