Mapping Ararat: An Augmented Reality Walking Tour for an Imaginary Jewish Homeland
This article reviews Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project that utilizes augmented reality (AR) to create a walking tour that envisions what would have happened if Mordecai Noah’s 1825 plan to transform Grand Island, New York into a city of refuge had succeeded. Using mobile devices, tourists interact with Ararat artifacts and monuments created using 3D modeling software and inserted into the Grand Island landscape. The article reviews Mapping Ararat as a new form of mediated and virtual Jewish tourism and its implications for such fields as sensory ethnography, counterfactual history, and Jewish cultural studies. It also contextualizes the project in terms of augmented reality art and its extension of site-specific installation using locative media. The final section highlights four electronic monuments on the AR walking tour (flag, cornerstone, gravestones, and synagogue) with documentary video clips.
See the full story here: http://anthrovision.revues.org/2339
Another Price Slash Suggests the Oculus Rift Is Dead in the Water
Now, in yet another sign that VR is failing to capture the imagination of the public, the company has just cut the price of its Oculus Rift hardware for the second time this year.
For the next six weeks, the Oculus Rift headset and its matching controllers will cost just $399. That’s $400 less than when it first hit the market, and $200 less than when its price was first slashed in March. It means that the Rift now costs less than the package offered by its cheapest rival, Sony, whose PlayStation VR currently totals $460 including headset and controllers.
See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608257/another-price-slash-suggests-the-oculus-rift-is-dead-in-the-water/
Inside Station F, the startup megacampus that just opened in Paris
STATION F.
Halle Freyssinet, 55 boulevard Vincent Auriol Paris 13eme
STATION F est le plus grand campusde start-up au monde.
Le projet est une initiative de Xavier Niel.
29/06/2017
WILMOTTE & ASSOCIES ARCHITECTES
©Patrick TOURNEBOEUF/TENDANCE FLOUE
La halle Freyssinet est un batiment ferroviaire mise en service en 1929 qui a abrite jusqu'en 2006 les messageries de la gare d'Austerlitz. Elle tient son nom dÕEugene Freyssinet, lÕingenieur qui lÕa conue. Des sa realisation, le batiment a ete le sujet d'articles dans la presse specialisee montrant sa grande qualite technique et architecturale dans sa reponse au programme de la Compagnie. Le 23 fevrier 2012, la halle Freyssinet a ete inscrite au titre des monuments historiques dans son integralite, l'exclusion des batiments de bureaux situes au nord-ouest. Xavier Niel, le fondateur de Free, devient l' acqueur de la halle pour realiser un mega incubateur destine a accueillir 1000 start-ups.
Son entree est situee au 55 boulevard Vincent-Auriol, dans le 13e arrondissement de Paris.
Station F is the world’s biggest startup campus. Thousands of entrepreneurs are currently moving into the new building here in Paris.
Station F is a massive building that has been completely renovated and now features thousands of desks, dozens of conference rooms, VC firms, a stage and more. It’s the size of the Eiffel Tower laying down, and it’s quite impressive in person.
The various open office areas are divided into many different pieces. Some chunks of the building are managed by Station F’s partners, such as Facebook, Zendesk, Vente-Privée, HEC, Microsoft, etc. Those big tech companies pick young startups to come and work at Station F and collaborate with them.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/inside-station-f-the-startup-megacampus-that-just-opened-in-paris/?ncid=tcdaily&utm_medium=TCnewsletter
‘Lone Echo’s’ Virtual Hands Are an Unexpected VR Innovation
When it comes to arms in VR, the rule-of-thumb is to not show the player’s arms because it’s difficult to estimate their position when only the locations of the hands and head are known in a system of many joints. If the estimation of the arm is far off from the player’s actual arm position, it can be an immersion breaker. That’s why you see so many armless avatars in VR games.
Lone Echo turns that rule-of-thumb on its head with some of the best arm inverse kinematics (IK) that we’ve seen to date. Together with the procedural hand gripping, these systems drive added immersion in VR because it makes it easier to feel as if the arms and hands in front of you are really your own. Lone Echo & Echo Arena double down on this achievement by making many of the game’s interfaces and interactions touch-based, with functional virtual touchscreens rather than the all too often seen laser-pointer interface.
See the full story here: https://www.roadtovr.com/lone-echos-virtual-hands-unassuming-vr-innovation/?platform=hootsuite
Artificially intelligent painters invent new styles of art
An artificial intelligence has been developed that produces images in unconventional styles – and much of its output has already been given the thumbs up by members of the public.
The idea is to make art that is “novel, but not too novel”, says Marian Mazzone, an art historian at the College of Charleston in South Carolina who worked on the system.
The team – which also included researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey and Facebook’s AI lab in California – modified a type of algorithm known as a generative adversarial network (GAN), in which two neural nets play off against each other to get better and better results. One creates a solution, the other judges it – and the algorithm loops back and forth until the desired result is reached.
In the art AI, one of these roles is played by a generator network, which creates images. The other is played by a discriminator network, which was trained on 81,500 paintings to tell the difference between images we would class as artworks and those we wouldn’t – such as a photo or diagram, say.
The clever twist is that the generator is primed to produce an image that the discriminator recognises as art, but which does not fall into any of the existing styles.
See the full story here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2139184-artificially-intelligent-painters-invent-new-styles-of-art/
Apple Developers Join The WebVR Community Group
Today, Brandon Jones from Google (who is one of the chairs in the official WebVR Community Group,) noticed that developers from Apple have officially joined the group. With their inclusion this now means that every major web browser vendor (Apple = Safari for example) has input into WebVR’s development. In the Community Group there are 147 non-Chair participants as of the time of this writing.
From Apple there are now three members: long-time Multimedia and Software Standards representative Dave Singer, Senior Front-End Developer Brandel Zachernuk, and WebGL Spec Editor Dean Jackson. Notably Jones was quick to point out on Twitter that “group participation does not necessarily imply a commitment to implement” but it’s still a step in the right direction.
See the full story here: https://uploadvr.com/apple-webvr-community-group/
VRstudios Announces Eight Player Warehouse-Scale VR Platform VRcade Arena
VRcade Arena is a new platform that supports warehouse-scale VR for up to eight players in a location-based environment. Using the company’s Attraction Management Platform (AMP), facilities will be able to set up either own VR installations offering full-motion VR experiences. AMP provides support for customers including easy installation and help with maintaining the platform.
VRcade Arena has a shot at making an impact on the steadily growing VR arcade scene, though the space is becoming hotly contested. HTC, for example, has its own Viveport Arcade scheme which allows locations with Vive units to rent out software for use in arcades for a certain amount of time.
See the full story here: https://uploadvr.com/vrstudios-announces-eight-player-warehouse-scale-vr-platform-vrcade-arena/
Clay Brings Gesture Tracking To Apple’s ARKit With No Extra Hardware
Developers may already be familiar with Clay, it’s an SDK that allows smartphone apps to track the user’s hand in 3D with just the phone’s camera. It can recognize more than 30 gestures users make with their hands, allowing for controller-free navigation of experiences.
After Apple introduced ARKit to the world last month the Clay team set about integrating functionality into the SDK, and the company tells us that it will be ready within the next week or two.
On paper, that means ARKit could get simple, accessible control options when it launches in full with iOS 11.
See the full story here: https://uploadvr.com/clay-brings-gesture-tracking-to-apples-arkit-with-no-extra-hardware/
FRIGHTENINGLY ACCURATE ‘MIND READING’ AI READS BRAIN SCANS TO GUESS WHAT YOU’RE THINKING
What CMU scientists have been working on is a system that can apparently read complex thoughts based on brain scans, possibly even interpreting complete sentences.
This involved gathering data from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, and then using AI machine learning algorithms to pinpoint — and sometimes reverse-engineer — the building blocks the brain uses to construct complex thoughts.
The discovery of this correspondence between thoughts and brain activation patterns tells us what the thoughts are built of.”
After training the algorithm on 239 of the 240 sentences and their corresponding brain scans, the researchers were able to predict the final sentence based only on the brain data. It was able to do this with an impressive 87 percent accuracy, as well as doing the opposite: being given sentence information and then outputting an accurate image of how the brain would be activated during that sentence.
See the full story here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ai-predicts-what-youre-thinking/
VR World NYC Offers an Open Buffet of 50+ VR Experiences
Kent Bye covers location-based VR operations, pricing structures, crowd management and throughput, and reaching the mass audience in this 30-minute Voices of VR podcast interview with the founders of VR World NYC. The new midtown Manhattan portal, which opened June 24th, features over 50 VR experiences spread over three floors in a 20,000 square foot space near the Empire State Building. Visitors pay $39 in the afternoon and $49 in the evening for unlimited stay and play.
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/vr-world-nyc-offers-an-open-buffet-of-50-vr-experiences/