Crytek’s ‘The Climb’ is The Best Selling Rift Game To Date
Oculus has confirmed that Crytek’s The Climb is the platform’s best selling Rift game to date, and among a handful of titles that have grossed more than $1 million on the company’s VR storefront.
... the exact metric behind the listing is not known, nor the time period over which it’s calculated.
Rubin however confirmed that The Climb is the Rift’s “#1 seller” of all time, which we take to mean by unit sales (though given the game’s $50 price tag, it’s likely to be the top grossing too). That, of course, means that the game is one of four titles which the company recently confirmed have made at least $1 million on the Oculus store alone.
The Climb is somewhat unique because it managed to be something of a double-launch title; first with the Rift launch in early 2016—played at the time with the gamepad—and then with the Touch launch in late 2016 when it was updated to be played with motion controllers.
Blippar is embracing licensing as it faces competition from Apple and Google
In a major strategic shift, Blippar also said it would license the new technology to third parties to embed in their own apps.
Business Insider has documented Blippar's historical struggles to decide on a business model, as recounted by former staff. The startup has pivoted from being a creative agency to being a visual browser, raising almost £80 million, axing sales staff, and shuttering offices along the way.
An obvious revenue-generating move for Blippar would have been to license or white-label its technology more aggressively.
At one time, after buying Amsterdam rival Layar in 2014, the company did offer its Layar software development kit (SDK) to third parties. That theoretically meant companies could embed Blippar's augmented reality technology into their own applications.
Blippar has previously told Business Insider that there are apps that white-label its tech — but there aren't any recent examples on its site.
See the full story here: http://www.businessinsider.com/augmented-reality-app-blippar-says-it-will-finally-sell-its-tech-to-third-parties-2017-7
LA-based augmented reality company to open a site in Oakland County, Michigan
A Los Angeles-based augmented reality company announced it is choosing among sites in Oakland County for an automotive product development center. It will announce the location in the upcoming weeks, according to a news release of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.
See the full story here: http://www.theoaklandpress.com/business/20170719/la-based-augmented-reality-company-to-open-a-site-in-oakland-county
AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?
“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network”–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.
Indeed. Humans have developed unique dialects for everything from trading pork bellies on the floor of the Mercantile Exchange to hunting down terrorists as Seal Team Six–simply because humans sometimes perform better by not abiding to normal language conventions.
The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another.
Microsoft was more interested in human-to-computer speech. Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all also focusing incredible energies on developing conversational personalities for human consumption. They’re the next wave of user interface, like the mouse and keyboard for the AI era.
As Dauphin points out, machines might not think as you or I do, but tokens allow them to exchange incredibly complex thoughts through the simplest of symbols. The way I think about it is with algebra: If A + B = C, the “A” could encapsulate almost anything.
“Getting the data into a format that makes sense for machine learning is a huge undertaking right now and is more art than science. English is a very convoluted and complicated language and not at all amicable for machine learning.”
See the full story here: https://www.fastcodesign.com/90132632/ai-is-inventing-its-own-perfect-languages-should-we-let-it
MIT’s glasses-free home 3D tech could make help 3D movies more popular
... the MIT CSAIL research team behind this new tech created Home3D, a conversion algorithm that can run in real-time on a GPU like those found in the Xbox One or PlayStation 4, eliminating the format compatibility issue.
Home3D also allows viewers to customize the depth effect depending on their comfort level, and it combines both phase-based rendering and depth image-based rendering techniques for a method that doesn’t sacrifice all that much resolution while still being able to accurately render 3D even for scenes with significant depth, where the left-eye and right-eye images are considerably different from one another.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/12/mits-glasses-free-home-3d-tech-could-make-help-3d-movies-more-popular/
The four waves of augmented reality (that Apple owns)
Let’s start by defining them:
- Mobile AR software: AR software that works on standard smartphones/tablets, like Apple ARKit for iOS and Facebook’s Camera Effects Platform.
- Mobile AR hardware: dedicated smartphone/tablet AR hardware and software, like Google Tango phones.
- Tethered smartglasses: AR smartglasses requiring a smartphone/tablet or PC host, like Meta smartglasses.
- Standalone smartglasses: Self-contained AR smartglasses with no host, like Microsoft HoloLens (which they call mixed reality).
See the full, lengthy story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/18/the-four-waves-of-augmented-reality-that-apple-owns/