Eyeglasses with Face Un-Recognition Function to Debut in Japan
Dr. Isao Echizen at Japan's National Institute of Informatics has spent the better part of two years cooking up a pair of specs that render people's faces undetectable to autofocusing cameras and (with any luck) the facial recognition tech that power the web's social services.
The Privacy Visor, created by the government-affiliated institute and an eyeglass maker in Japan’s Fukui prefecture, uses unique angles and patterns on its lens that reflect or absorb light. This prevents the recognition systems in digital cameras and smartphones from spotting a human face in a shot and focusing on it.
Tests with cameras on smartphones showed that the eyeglasses were able to trick the facial-recognition system 90% of the time.
See the full story here: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/08/eyeglasses-with-face-un-recognition-function-to-debut-in-japan/?mod=ST1
Augmented reality baseball app shown off by Joe Girardi
[Philip Lelyveld comment: with all the stories today about VR in Football, its nice to see one story about another sport.]
Joe Girardi, the New York Yankee’s manager, typically makes headlines for guiding his team to hold the first place, but recently he was in the spotlight as he showed off his new augmented reality science-fiction baseball game app, called Portalball.
The application was launched mobile app development company Appetizer Mobile. It provides the user with the ability to use the smartphone camera to allow them to take part in a virtual baseball game. Within it, they need to hit balls that have been pitched to them, throw the ball, or catch it. The balls come from and are sent into portals that appear in augmented reality over the 360 degree view of the real world, which is used as the game’s playing field. This game can be played wither in solo mode, or as a multiplayer experience.
See the full story here: http://www.qrcodepress.com/augmented-reality-baseball-app-shown-off-by-joe-girardi/8530774/
Vice Sports Uses YouTube’s 360-Degree Virtual Reality for New Series
Vice Sports has teamed up with lead sponsor Reebok for The Moment, which will spotlight athletes and give viewers a first-hand experience of extreme sports. The Moment uses YouTube's 360-degree virtual reality functionality.
The series launched today with Parkour athlete and stuntman Ronnie Shalvis as he performs, jumps and flips through Goblin Valley State Park. The 360-degree virtual view kicks in around the four-minute mark of the six-minute video. Each episode can be watched either in standard definition or using a 360-degree view on the YouTube player.
"The Moment really captures the focus and preparation required of some of the best athletes in non-traditional sports," said Will Kiersky, Vice Sports publisher. "What's even better is that we can leverage the 360-degree view on YouTube to really provide our audience with a fully immersive and interactive experience from wherever they want to watch."
And this all comes as the editorial staff at Vice voted last week to unionize, joining the Writers Guild of America, East.
See the full story here: http://www.adweek.com/news/television/vice-uses-youtube-s-360-degree-vr-new-sports-series-166305
How VR Filmmakers Can Make Classics in Their All-New Medium
Virtual reality is clearly different than film, but it might need to emulate it for a while in order to catch on, Georgia Tech media scholar Jay Bolter says.
Currently VR is caught in a dance between genuflection to—and disruption of—cinematic storytelling. Chris Milk’s experimentation with documenting protests in the streets of New York and Syrian refugee camps via VR, for example, is both in dialogue with and in defiance of cinéma vérité.
The Naïve Spectator Phase
And not only should we expect VR to stand on the shoulders of storytelling giants as it strives to earn legitimacy, we should also expect the self-consciousness of VR to subside as audiences adapt to its conventions. Like the first forays into VR storytelling we’ve seen in recent months, early cinema was obsessed with its proximity to reality, and even carried this obsession over to its plot lines by placing a “naive spectator” in those preliminary films.
Milk even pays homage to this in his work. In his Evolution of Verse, a train is shown rushing towards your retinas, begging you to flinch the way theater audiences did during 1895’s L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.
As Denise Mann, a media professor at UCLA, points out, television really began to take off when it figured out how to create stories that fit into the daily lives—and physical spaces—audiences occupy.
...television actually adapted to the contemporary structure of the American home. Soap operas, for instance, featured predictable plot lines that allowed a housewife to ignore the show for a while and complete a domestic duty without losing the thread.
Where VR finds its viewing “space” will also influence how it develops story. ... Real success, though, may depend on creating stories that really fit the activities audiences tend to do in those spaces.
Dan Archer, a graphic novelist and fellow at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, meticulously recreated the suburban St. Louis scene and police evidence from the Michael Brown shooting to create the interactive and VR experience “Ferguson Firsthand.” But then he faced an even bigger issue: What role would the audience play?
Good animators are obsessed with this “in-betweening,” Saschk Unseld says, because “they understand the emotional impact of changing these.”
This simple understanding, which Unseld is using as a demonstration of how his team is trying to get the main character in their new film Henry to react to your (virtual) presence in his story, may be emblematic of a larger moment in VR storytelling history.
“We’re currently labeling it ‘audience-aware storytelling’ or ‘audience-aware acting,'” Unseld says. Every story requires that you relate to its hero (or antihero), but rarely—if ever—have they met your gaze while doing it. The effect is gripping. You’re still a naive spectator in Henry’s story, but the first time he looks you in the eyes (and he does), you’re also an empathetic one too.
If you believe that Roger Ebert was right when he said that films were “empathy machines” (he was), then immersing yourself in a world where a lonely hedgehog looks at you before popping his new balloon animal friend with a hug might be the starting point for some of the greatest movies we’ll ever see.
See the full story here: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/virtual-reality-storytelling-essay/?curator=MediaREDEF