The Last Medium
[Philip Lelyveld comment: This story is an excellent overview of recent events and current thinking on VR in entertainment. It is good prep material for the upcoming ETC DTS.]Google Working on Large-Scale Video Displays
See the full story here: http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-working-on-large-scale-display-technology-1412346897
Google X Is Developing Screens That Can Connect Like Legos to Form a Big Seamless Image
Google Inc. is building self-driving cars and balloons to beam Internet service from the sky. Now it also wants to make giant TVs.
Google’s secretive advanced-projects lab is developing a display composed of smaller screens that plug together like Legos to create a seamless image, according to three people familiar with the project.
With the modular pieces, the screen could be made into different sizes and shapes, the people said.
The previously undisclosed project is led by Mary Lou Jepsen, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor best known for co-founding the One Laptop Per Child project, an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful project to give cheap laptops to tens of millions of children in poor countries.
Ms. Jepsen co-founded three startups around display technology. The most recent, Pixel Qi, specializes in low-power displays that can be read in direct sunlight. She now heads the display division inside Google X, Google’s futuristic products lab. Her small team appears to include veteran engineers from Samsung Electronics Co. and Qualcomm Inc. among other companies, according to profiles posted on LinkedIn.
“I loved flashing colored lights as a kid, and I just kept going with that,” she said in a talk to developers at a Google conference in 2013. According to her website, she created a system in the early 1990s to project video on the Moon but abandoned it for health reasons.
Much about her current project isn’t known, including the size of the modules, the potential size of the giant display, or why Google is interested. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.
In theory, such a large screen might be used to watch television or movies, browse the Internet and read email, perhaps simultaneously, said Riddhi Patel, research director at NPD DisplaySearch.
Ms. Patel said the largest TV screens today are about 110 inches diagonally, slightly more than nine feet. A Samsung model that measures 105 inches is listed for $120,000 on Amazon.
Even so, Ms. Patel said she doesn’t see a current need for ultra-large screens in homes. Before consumers would adopt such technology, she said, manufacturers will have to make the screens cheaper and easier to install and use.
Among the problems that the group is trying to solve, the people familiar with the project said, is how to make display modules that are “seamless” so that people looking at a giant screen wouldn’t see the borders between the modules.
The project remains at an early stage and has been kept secret, even within Google, partly because the technical challenges are as large as the planned screens, one of the people said.
“The big challenge is to electronically, and through software, do the stitching between the seams,” another person familiar said. Google X is trying to recruit more display experts to work on the problem, the person added.
Google X may be getting help from Gecko Design, a mechanical engineering and product design company that the research lab acquired in August.
Gecko worked on the One Laptop Per Child project. In August, Gecko Chief Executive Jacques Gagné said Gecko had been working with Google X since 2013 on a project that he wouldn’t disclose. He said Gecko was joining the research lab to work on a “variety of cutting-edge projects.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Gagné declined to comment on whether his team is working on the Google X display effort.
Microsoft Corp. also has been working on large display technology since at least 2012 when the software company acquired Perceptive Pixel. Founded by Jeff Han, the startup has made touch-screen systems larger than 80 inches for many years.
During a Microsoft developer conference in 2012, Mr. Han predicted that giant displays someday will be in every meeting room, conference room and classroom.
Google has had mixed results with its hardware. Google Glass, its Internet-connected eyewear, has recently seen employee defections ahead of an anticipated broad rollout in 2015. The device so far has suffered from its nerdy image and privacy concerns. However, Google’s cheap Chromebook laptops and its Chromecast wireless TV streaming device are both popular with consumers.
Google has previously disclosed a handful of projects inside its Google X operation. Besides Google Glass, the research lab also is home to Google’s self-driving car project; a futuristic contact lens for diabetics that could use tears to measure blood-glucose levels; a project to deliver Internet access from balloons in the stratosphere; as well as a new life sciences team collecting data to understand human health.
Experiment Shows Stylized Rendering Enhances Presence in Immersive Augmented Reality
[Philip Lelyveld comment: the researcher found that if you use pass-through headsets and allow you to blend the real world image with virtual objects, and if you stylize the real world image so it starts to look like a virtual world, the viewer has an increased sense of 'presence,' she has a harder time telling what is real from what is virtual.]
In a paper published by the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, it is demonstrated that stylized rendering can help blur the boundary between real and virtual when it comes to immersive augmented reality applications.
In order to genuinely feel present in a virtual space, sensory patterns must stimulate the brain in specific ways resulting in a psychological response. To achieve this, latency needs to be low across the entire pipeline. Field of view needs to be large as well. This gives the person the ability to perceive like they are somewhere else.
William Steptoe is senior researcher in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at University College London; he recently posed the question, “What is presence in immersive augmented reality” in a post on his research blog. Previously, William detailed the process of how to design and build a stereo camera rig for the Oculus Rift known as the “AR-Rift”. With this type of rig, which has cameras on the front to let users “see through” the headset, developers can begin to explore mixing real-life objects with virtual ones in an immersive way.
Several experiments were established using the the AR-Rift which tested users’ ability to distinguish between physical items and virtual models. Conventional rendering, where the real and virtual objects are displayed as-is, produced an error rate of 27%. For the most part, people were able to pick out the difference based on subtle graphical inconsistencies at first. However, the amount of uncertainty increased to 44% as a stylized rendering condition blended non-photorealistic effects together. This made it more difficult to point out the contrasting elements. Inaccuracy jumped even further to 72% during a virtualized simulation where sketch-like outline and cartoonish filters were applied.
See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/experiment-shows-stylized-rendering-can-enhance-presence-in-immersive-augmented-reality/
Lexus creates an Oculus Rift-powered virtual test drive
Lexus wants to put you in the seat of its 2015 RC F, even if it means you're sitting in a virtual version of its latest performance vehicles. The car manufacturer recently launched a beta version of the RC F Rift, a virtual reality representation of the car's interior using the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 at the 2014 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in Monterey, California.
The motion-controlled driving simulator includes "genuine RC F elements," such as the car's steering wheel and foot pedals, and has players driving around a virtual racetrack. Lexus said it took less than eight weeks to build the 360-degree virtual environment. The company provided a demo video as well as a schedule of events for fans to take the Oculus demo for the spin in person in the coming months, both found after the break.
Jun Rekimoto, who studies augmented reality at Sony Computer Science Labs, is using cameras, drones and sensors to capture and share what others are seeing and feeling.
"When you combine that viewing experience, it really creates a new way of communicating," said Brian Blau, a consumer-technology analyst for research firm Gartner. "Seeing someone else's viewpoint, I think, is going to be a powerful paradigm."
Rekimoto sits further out on the developmental curve, with some of the ideas he's working on not expected to reach the market for years. In one project, he and a team are developing a headset called LiveSphere, which includes six cameras and can capture 360 degrees around someone wearing the device.
See the full story here: http://www.cnet.com/news/sony-researcher-works-to-put-you-in-someone-elses-head/
The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later
[Philip Lelyveld comment: this story is a really good summary of McLuhan's thoughts.]
Today, of course, the water we swim in is an ocean of information and perpetual connectivity to almost anyone anywhere. To newborns, the latest iPhone will appear just as natural as a pair of glasses or sneakers. In a lecture on McLuhan’s legacy delivered in 1999 at Fordham University, Tom Wolfe stated that McLuhan considered the gap between generations as neurological, not ideological. Children raised on television were simply wired differently than their parents. For the last generation to experience life without the Internet, things are about to change yet again.
See the full article here; http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/medium-message-50-years-later-91552/?curator=MediaREDEF
Toshiba Satellite P50t 4K laptop review: The world in UHD
The Satellite P50t is a large laptop with a 15.6-inch multi-touch screen. It has a brushed aluminium body with a grille above the keyboard that houses the harmann/kardon speakers.
And this screen is the hero of this device, after all it has a 3840x2160p resolution screen.
If you are one of these who has access to 4K content and will need to work on these files, you should not think twice before buying this laptop.
See the full story here: http://philiplelyveld.com/wordpress/wp-admin/post-new.php
4K Ultra HD Inches Closer To Mainstream Adoption
VIZIO, known for producing affordable, high-def displays, also launched its new P-Series, which features a 50” model priced at only $999, a 70” model at $2499, and a trio of different sized models in between. “Our P-Series collection offers an outstanding Ultra HD picture and performance,” said Matt McRae, Chief Technology Officer, VIZIO. “The shift towards 4K has left consumers demanding new solutions that deliver the right innovations to enhance their viewing experience. The P-Series Ultra HD line-up is…equipped with HEVC H.265 codec and 802.11 ac dual-band Wi-Fi for faster streaming and the latest HDCP 2.2 support for playback of protected Ultra HD content. This combination of technologies leaves consumers with the solutions that matter most in an Ultra HD set.”
Support for H.265, 802.11ac, and HDCP 2.2 are all well and good, but it’s the P-Series’ price points and VIZIO’s penetration in discount chains like Costco that will grab consumer attention. When viewed side by side with similarly priced HD televisions, the UHD / 4K VIZIO P-Series is going to look mighty tempting. Even if there isn’t as much native 4K content available just yet, there is some, and 4K displays can scale 1080P content just fine—it’s a clean 4-to-1 ratio (4K displays have 4x the number of pixels at 1080P displays, 8.29MP vs. 2.07MP).
There is still a lot that has to happen before 4K goes fully mainstream, but we’re a heck of a lot closer today then we were just a few weeks ago.
See the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2014/09/29/4k-utlra-hd-inches-closer-to-mainstream-adoption/
Why a leading professor of new media just banned technology use in class
[Philip Lelyveld comment: these paragraphs are the gist of a very long article.]
Over the years, I’ve noticed that when I do have a specific reason to ask everyone to set aside their devices (“Lids down,” in the parlance of my department), it’s as if someone has let fresh air into the room. The conversation brightens, and more recently, there is a sense of relief from many of the students. Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting; when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change.
On top of this, multi-tasking doesn’t even exercise task-switching as a skill.A study from Stanford reports that heavy multi-taskers are worse at choosing which task to focus on. (“They are suckers for irrelevancy”, as Cliff Nass, one of the researchers put it.) Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.
See the full story here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/25/why-a-leading-professor-of-new-media-just-banned-technology-use-in-class/