With this data in mind, it’s exciting to see how widely the applications of AR can vary in a business. Here are just some of the ways we’ve been seeing innovative learning professionals integrate AR into their employee offering:
Onboarding - Onboarding is critical to ensuring new employees are given the most effective introduction to their new working environment. Of course, the quality of onboarding has lasting effects on both retention and the business itself, particularly in terms of making speed to competency as efficient as possible. As such, businesses have gradually been utilizing AR to reinvigorate the often all too familiar onboarding process - turning to immersive experiences to make them more engaging and memorable. In addition to creating a strong first impression, it’s empowered teams to re-purpose their existing printed materials to minimize waste, turning physical assets into portals which new employees can access with the device most important to them - their smartphone.
Simulated Interaction - Sometimes the toughest part about a job that involves direct interaction with customers is being able to prepare confidently for difficult scenarios on the shop floor. AR empowers employees to simulate common customer interactions directly in the context of their work area using their smartphone - particularly with AR’s ability to leverage interactive alpha video content without the potentially awkward baggage of employee-to-employee roleplays. By being able to replay and repeat realistic scenarios at their own pace, it enables employees to develop their confidence for the real thing.
Supporting Specialized Positions - Factory workers and production line employees often have unique jobs that are highly specialized that require significant hands-on experience. AR is enhancing training for these roles by providing a high level of process visualization that can reduce risk and increase confidence in the employee. By adding a digital layer of guidance directly to the equipment they will be using daily, AR experiences mean employees can increase competency in context without the associated risks.
These “robot-threads” developed by MIT expand on research done on so-called “hydrogels,” which are materials made mostly of water that work well within the human body. At the thread’s core is a material called “nitinol” that can bend, and is springy, meaning it has a natural tendency to spring back to its original shape when bent.
The material is coated in an ink-like substance, which is then bonded with a hydrogel, thus regulating it in a magnetically manipulable material that can still survive within the human body. Using a large magnet, the researchers could then steer the thread through a demonstration obstacle course they built to show off how it could work in a surgical situation.
MIT’s researchers also note that you can modify the core construction of the robot threads with other materials to serve different functions, and showed this by replacing the nitinol at its center with a fiber-optic filament, which in practice could be used to transmit laser light to blast away a blockage in a brain blood vessel.
The new entertainment pop-up at Westfield San Francisco Centre puts you into the Star Wars universe, where you can smell the rocket fuel and feel the impact from enemy blasters
The San Francisco pop-up is scheduled to stay open under the dome of Westfield San Francisco Centre for two months while The VOID builds a larger, permanent home on the mall's ground floor.
The US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple relating to a mixed reality headset with emphasis on Augmented Reality which allows a user to view real-world objects while viewing images overlaid on top of real-world objects.
Apple's invention covers an electronic device such as a mixed reality headset that has a laser light source such as a laser light source that emits light into a waveguide.
The key parts of the patent cover the light source for the display system and its many sensors. The list of sensors is extensive and includes the following:
For one example of innovation, researchers at Oxford have applied genetics data to virtual reality, to visualise how genes and strings of DNA sit within the chromosomes. Their resulting 3-D presentation clearly showed how genes sit in relation to each other and how they interact with each other. And the purpose? Visualising such interactions helps us better understand how DNA works and develops.
As Stephen Taylor, Head of the Computational Biology Research Group at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, stated: 'Being able to visualise such data is important because the human brain is very good at pattern recognition – we tend to think visually.’
VR/AR Association (VRARA) has over 50 chapters around the world and a community of over 4,200 companies, developers, agencies, universities etc interested in the fields of AR/VR technologies. This complements very well the interests of most of the 500 members of the European Photonics Industry
Consortium (EPIC), that encompass the entire value chain from photonics fields such as lighting, photovoltaic, photonics integrated circuits, optical components, lasers, sensors, imaging, displays, optic fiber and all other photonics related technologies.
In the past three years, the organization has already produced 12 VR projects by local filmmakers. It also operates the Kaohsiung VR Film Lab, the only VR theater in Taiwan.
Ting adds, “The development of any new technology must be matched by creativity. Taiwan already has an advantage in terms of manufacturing hardware for VR content. Our creators were also willing to embrace and explore this new technology. I think that’s why Taiwan’s VR films have developed so quickly and it’s why it has achieved an advantage in VR production.”
“It doesn’t take me one and a half years anymore. It takes half a year with Virtual Reality, VR goggles. This was the only way to answer the needs of our CEO Stephan Winklemann, to turn the brand where he wanted to go. Same with Centodieci, with Divo. Same with La Voiture Noire,” says Achim.
“Eighteen years ago Derek Jenkins, who was one of my idols and heroes, said that we would be walking around VR cars and they’d be so realistic that we would speak of them in VR. And now we are there. I am so happy that I was forced to adopt that process. Maybe possible because I have such a small area to overlook that I could take the whole team and put them on that stool."
Professor of cognitive science Donald Hoffman presents his theory that the world we perceive is a virtual reality. Hoffman has tested this theory by running successful computer simulations that suggest there is no objective reality.
When it comes to Nick Bostrom's simulation theory, Hoffman agrees with parts and disagrees with others. Hoffman argues that, while space time and physical objects do not correspond with objective reality, conscious experiences like the smell of garlic and the feel of velvet cannot be produced by the simulation.
"You can't start with unconscious ingredients and boot up consciousness," Hoffman says.
In the past three years, the organization has already produced 12 VR projects by local filmmakers. It also operates the Kaohsiung VR Film Lab, the only VR theater in Taiwan.
“It doesn’t take me one and a half years anymore. It takes half a year with Virtual Reality, VR goggles. This was the only way to answer the needs of our CEO Stephan Winklemann, to turn the brand where he wanted to go. Same with Centodieci, with Divo. Same with La Voiture Noire,” says Achim.
