philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

22 new and notable augmented reality apps and games from the last four months (3/24/18 – 7/30/18)

See the full story, which lists the apps and has images and videos, here: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/07/30/22-new-notable-augmented-reality-apps-games-last-four-months-3-24-18-7-30-18/

Apple Adds Former DAQRI Designer to the Team, Bolstering AR Smartglasses Rumors

Apple continues to build its augmented reality hardware and software team in stealth mode. The latest addition comes via the hiring of a former DAQRI user experience designer and VR app developer.

First reported by Variety, Sterling Crispin joined Apple in May as a prototyping researcher. Before joining Apple, Crispin published VR painting app Cyber Paint for the Oculus Go, Daydream, GearVR, and HTC Vive in 2017 through his own development company. Prior to that, Crispin spent a little over two years at smartglasses maker DAQRI, first as an artist-in-residence and then as a lead UX designer.

See the full story here: https://next.reality.news/news/apple-adds-former-daqri-designer-team-bolstering-ar-smartglasses-rumors-0186289/

Partnerships Can Light The Path To Effective Oil And Gas Digitisation

At the recent LiveWorx event in Boston, PTC President and CEO Jim Heppelmann laid out the solutions that are available. The most interesting use cases for oil and gas are around connected workers, smart maintenance of refinery, connected refinery and remote asset monitoring with predictive maintenance capability that improves the uptime of the plant and refinery.

With its industrial innovation platform, based on both ThingWorx and Vuforia, PTC has helped customers to source, contextualize and analyze data, and to orchestrate flows that optimize how business processes work, and to engage users and new applications that unlock productivity. “We certainly feel like we've been doing our part to enable this digital transformation, but it's a very big world out there, and we can't do it all alone,” Heppelmann adds. “That's why we turned to Microsoft.”

In a partnership that PTC and Microsoft announced in January, they have agreed to align PTC's PLM, IoT and AR software with Microsoft's Azure IoT, the HoloLens mixed reality technology, and their Dynamics ERP, in an integrated solution for industrial IoT and digital product lifecycle management. At the center of this collaboration is PTC’s selection of Microsoft's Azure and IoT hub as its preferred cloud platform.

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markvenables/2018/07/31/partnerships-can-light-the-path-to-effective-oil-and-gas-digitisation/#7e2449a03084

9 Powerful Real-World Applications Of Augmented Reality (AR) Today

Award-winning airport app

The Gatwick airport passenger app ...

Ikea Place, Dulux Visualiser, and Lowe’s help remodel

For those who have purchased furniture and discovered once it was delivered it didn’t work in the space, the Ikea Place app ...

Sephora Virtual Artist and Rolex

Cosmetic company Sephora uses AR technology to allow customers to try out different looks and eye, lips and cheek products as well as colors right on their own digital face....

Augmented reality in healthcare

AccuVein is a handheld device that can scan the vein network of a patient that leads to a 45% reduction in escalations.

AR for fun

Rather than increase sales, sometimes AR is just created for fun or to engage with customers such as the Bic DrawyBook app or teeth brushing games from Georgia-Pacific’s Dixie brand.

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/07/30/9-powerful-real-world-applications-of-augmented-reality-ar-today/#1847e242fe95

Can Women Make Virtual Reality Mainstream?

The female bosses behind the new Oculus Go headset are on the front lines of a technological revolution.

So how can VR companies win over women? Hire them.

As key decision makers, the women shook up the status quo by rethinking the physical headset (it’s cordless, lined with the same fabric found in bra straps, and a dove gray rather than Oculus’s signature stark black) and the social experience. (The Venues and Spaces apps allow users to hang out, cheer on sports teams, or watch movies with friends who are physically in different locations.)

...

Enter Rachel Franklin, head of social VR at Facebook. After designing high-profile games, including the Sims, Franklin, 47, joined Facebook in 2016 to perfect Oculus avatars. Many of the headset’s virtual experiences require you to generate one, and she wanted to make the options as inclusive as possible. “We created bouncy curls, Afros, tight curls,” she says. Franklin thought of her children—she is Caucasian and her husband is African-American—and a coworker with alopecia (and therefore no hair or eyebrows) when crafting the virtual personas. “People need to have a ‘digital me’ to feel part of the experience.”

...

See the full story here: https://www.marieclaire.com/career-advice/a22560159/virtual-reality-for-women-oculus-go/

Farmers Insurance scales training with virtual reality

Farmers Insurance Group is leverage VR to accelerate the training of its claims adjusters by giving them the opportunity to experience thousands of scenarios.

"We've been watching the VR space for a number of years now," says Jessica Decanio, head of claims training, Farmers Insurance Group. "When we first looked at it four years ago, it was very cost-prohibitive. The price point has finally got to the place that we knew this was going to be part of our future."

See the full story here: https://www.cio.com/article/3293817/virtual-reality/farmers-insurance-scales-training-with-virtual-reality.html

Baobab Studios To Debut Crow: The Legend At Venice Film Fest

Crow: The Legend is inspired by the origin of the crow, played by John Legend, who is a brilliantly plumbed bird who is nominated by his fellow animals to bring warmth back to a world stuck in an endless winter. His journey is rewarded and he carries the gift of fire back to his fellow animals in his beak however, in doing so he sacrifices what is most dear to him.

“Crow: The Legend is inspired by long-told Native American folklore, but brought to life in 21^st-century ways.  With its focus on how we can all do better for the world around us, I was honored to participate,” said Eagle Heart, CEO, Native Americans in Philanthropy.

See the full story here: https://www.vrfocus.com/2018/07/baobab-studios-to-debut-crow-the-legend-at-venice-film-fest/

More than paint on a wall: Hands-on with VR and AR in art museums from Chicago to Seattle

My juried verdict? AR/VR applications can be be startling and cool, or just museum pieces that don’t do much more than add a layer of technological lacquer to the art.

Seattle Art Museum’s “Double Exposure”

But the portrait animations were mesmerizing, adding a magical depth to the work on the wall. A static figure holding a violin was now playing it. A woman wearing an elaborate Native dress was suddenly dancing in it.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s “I Was Raised on the Internet”

However, neither VR experience appeared real enough to fully immerse me, and the reason may have to do with how quickly our expectations of technology change. Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s Phantom was created in 2014-15; Jon Rafman’s Transdimensional Serpent, in 2016.

As to my observation of the outdated appearance of some of the VR, Wexelblatt said it actually may provide useful context. “If anything, the aging process opens the door for future viewers and art historians to contend with the convergence of technology and aesthetics at a particular moment in time,” she said.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “René Magritte: The Fifth Season”

Maybe the best way to understand surreality and abstraction in art is to become one with it, inside a participatory gallery at the end of a special exhibition. That’s what the well-known San Francisco-based design firm Frog (it helped shape the Apple IIc and several early Macintosh models), has done for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s wide-ranging retrospective of the surrealist Rene Magritte.

See the full story here: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/paint-wall-hands-vr-ar-art-museums-chicago-seattle/

Eye Tracking Used To Determine Personality Traits In New Study

Over the past few years, eye tracking technology has emerged as a field of much academic and corporate interest. With major acquisitions by Apple (SMI) and Oculus (The Eye Tribe), it's clear that major international companies regard eye tracking technology as an vital facet of Industry 4.0 -- particularly in its integration with virtual and augmented reality technologies (VR/AR), which involve persistent interaction with the human eye.

An announcement Friday, July 27, from the University of South Australia (UniSA) -- in partnership with the University of Stuttgart, Flinders University, and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics -- points to some of the widespread implications of eye tracking in daily life.

In the study, researchers tracked 42 participants' eye movements while going about their day on a university campus, and matrixed these findings against user questionnaires.

The results assert that machine learning can in fact deduce important personality traits with appropriate datasets -- with the algorithm reliably identifying four of the "Big Five" human personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and neuroticism.

In a statement from UniSA, Senior Lecturer of Psychology Dr. Tobias Loetscher explained that this research establishes a meaningful link between our eye motions and our innate and learned characteristics:

This research provides opportunities to develop robots and computers so that they can become more natural, and better at interpreting human social signals.

Eye-tracking will allow VR/MR creators to have access to an unprecedented level of usage analytics — not only they’ll know exactly what users have looked at or ignored throughout an experience, they’ll also be able to accurately measure engagement through pupil tracking.

You may have heard that human pupils dilate on physical attraction: but it goes much further than that. Pupil expansion betrays not only physical attraction, but also mental strain and emotional engagement. It can even go as far as to predict actions of a user seconds before they do it (explored and explained in detail in my article about the future of immersive education).

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2018/07/28/eye-tracking-used-to-determine-personality-traits-in-new-study/#286f6f4978f5

I rode half of the world’s longest zipline in virtual reality

It was a modified version of the headset with the plastic casing from the front removed and some super secure bungee ropes holding in a Samsung Galaxy S7 so it wouldn't fall down and smash on someone's head. I was then asked to put it on at the top of the 35 meter tall tower for my second ride.

If I hesitated after it told me to jump, the video would just go ahead anyway and resetting the headset would mean holding up the queue of paying customers stood behind me. That was it – I had to jump.

I had that slight moment of panic as I set off and the rope became taught. Suddenly I had the surreal moment of being transported to a gorge full of sand in the United Arab Emirates.

This is by far the most terrifying experience I've had in virtual reality, and while I won't be clamoring to jump out of a plane or parasailing with a Samsung Gear VR on my face.

You can now ride the VR zipline at Zip Now in Archbishop's park in London and is open now everyday until September 9, 2018.

See the full story here: https://www.techradar.com/news/i-rode-half-of-the-worlds-longest-zipline-in-virtual-reality