Lifeboat Foundation

You may have heard of Magic Leap, future purveyors of “cinematic reality” (augmented reality) headsets. This is a company without a single commercial product, and yet it’s worth $4.5 billion. Many are invigorated by the company’s potential, but a tour of its most recent, 160,000-word, 350-page patent application — especially with current events in mind — could suggest other, less exciting applications for the emerging technology.

No one really knows what to expect from the company: by design, it’s mysterious. (Out of silence comes allure.) We’ve seen two videos, we’ve investigated its job postings, and we know that wealthy organizations love throwing money its way. But we do have access to Magic Leap’s patent applications, and it published its most recent one in late January.

People are excited about VR and AR. With reason, too: the demos, previews, and new releases we get to watch are striking. The games we imagine playing in the future are enthralling. The mere idea of a virtual or augmented world, either distinct from or mixed with the actual (boring, depressing, what-have-you) world, is enough to invigorate all of our wayward souls.

Continue reading “Here’s Magic Leap’s Covert Vision for Its Augmented Reality Headsets” »

BMW Concept

BMW believes this is the future of innovation and mobility. Autonomous, shape-shifting and augmented-reality guides you.

Personally, I cannot wait to visit historical sites where they are leveraging AR to bring history to life. Visiting Versailles or the Winter Palace in Russia and seeing historical figures acting out as they did then would be pretty amazing.

DALLAS, TX — (Marketwired) — 03/07/16 — Parks Associates today announced Glenn Hower, Research Analyst, will address the evolving virtual reality market at the Cablefax Multiscreen Summit this week in New York City.

“Virtual reality is still in its earliest days, though there are clear signs that VR is about to move from concept to market reality,” Hower said. “The big change for 2016 is the emergence of multiple players making VR headsets. The Oculus Rift is currently the most recognized brand, but HTC, Samsung, and Sony have all expanded the market with their own models, which could help move this market beyond gaming and into new use cases such as virtual field trips, training, and recreation of historical events.”

Continue reading “Parks Associates Analyst to Discuss Digital Content and Virtual Reality at Cablefax Multiscreen Summit” »

Many opportunities in the VR/ AR space for enterprise Apps, Platforms, and services. Over the years we all have seen many opportunities missed where companies did not do the proper value map assessment and apply their finding to their own prod roadmaps. I personally have created my own value map of VR & AR opportunities across various industries and their biz caps.; and hope that others have done the same around this technology.

But augmented reality might be the best stepping stone, Hardware, Gadgets, Developer, Internet of Things, Wearables, Google, HTC, Fujitsu, Epson.

Last month, Meta CEO Meron Gribetz wowed TED with a sneak peak at the company’s new Meta 2 augmented-reality product. Today, Meta announced that the Meta 2 Development Kit is now available for pre-orders.

Meta 2′s Iron-Man-like immersive functionality appears similar to Hololens and Magic Leap, but with a wider 90-degree field of view, 2560 × 1440 high-DPI display, and natural hand-controlled operation.
Meta | Meta 2 Development Kit — Launch Video

Continue reading “First ‘natural machine’ augmented reality product Meta 2 launches to developers” »

Meta 2 Augmented-Reality Headset.

I see VR & AR changing how the entire back office and front office interact with their applications, network, and platforms. In HR for example, VR will enable HR a new way to view candidates & the candidate’s video resume, with AR glasses/ contact lenses capabilities no longer does a person have to locate their tablet or laptop to entire changes/ideas/ etc. because with VR they can efficiently capture information on the spot, the list goes on. The bottom line is with VR/ AR, companies are more efficient in its operations.

Karyne Levy/Business Insider Meta CEO Meron Gribetz There’s … Continued The post An engineer replaced his 4 monitors with Meta glasses — and it might be the future of work appeared first on Business Insider.

K-Glass, smart glasses reinforced with augmented reality (AR) that were first developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2014, with the second version released in 2015, is back with an even stronger model. The latest version, which KAIST researchers are calling K-Glass 3, allows users to text a message or type in key words for Internet surfing by offering a virtual keyboard for text and even one for a piano.

Currently, most wearable head-mounted displays (HMDs) suffer from a lack of rich user interfaces, short battery lives, and heavy weight. Some HMDs, such as Google Glass, use a touch panel and voice commands as an interface, but they are considered merely an extension of smartphones and are not optimized for wearable smart glasses. Recently, gaze recognition was proposed for HMDs including K-Glass 2, but gaze is insufficient to realize a natural user interface (UI) and experience (UX), such as user’s gesture recognition, due to its limited interactivity and lengthy gaze-calibration time, which can be up to several minutes.

As a solution, Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo and his team from the Electrical Engineering Department recently developed K-Glass 3 with a low-power natural UI and UX processor to enable convenient typing and screen pointing on HMDs with just bare hands. This processor is composed of a pre-processing core to implement stereo vision, seven deep-learning cores to accelerate real-time scene recognition within 33 milliseconds, and one rendering engine for the display.

Like where VR is heading in the near future.

Unexpected convergent consequences…this is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once.

This post (the third of seven) is a look at virtual and augmented reality. Future posts will look at other tech areas. And be sure to read the first two posts if you haven’t already:

Continue reading “The Near Future of VR and AR: What You Need to Know” »