xR Announcements - 2017 Q2

Recent xR announcements
include but are beyond head mounted displays

Facebook: 
Use cases for AR
- information
- digital objects
- enhancements

Focused on the camera as the AR platform

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFkEHEWPZSU 

Building Blocks
- Precise Location
- (SLAM) Simultaneous Localization & Mapping
- Mapping 3D scenes from still photos
- 3D Effects
- Object recognition 

Use Cases visualized
Leave directions or notes for friends.

Give people more information about where they are

Drop digital objects other people can find and interact with right there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_bTzosFGUs

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MSFT

- Use by airlines to make jet engines
- To manager factories with data overlaid
- For medicine
- In education
Released hand held controllers (they are the only 6DOF multi-hand controllers you can set down on a flat surface).
 

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Google Lens:
“Vision based computing capabilities”
Tango is now ARCore - 
based on:
- Camera movement
- Approximate Lighting
- Planar tracking (horizontal only)

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Apple: 
ARKit
- Approximate lighting
- Amazon has a game development engine.
The implications for commerce are huge.

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They don’t have to be in HMDs
Newly announced experiences are mobile based.

But… whatever devices we wear will offer functionality of replacing everything that we do with current mobile phones.

Torch 3D has people ask, "This prototyping tool your creating. If you don’t think people will use it for games…what will they use it for?"
Torch 3D's answer is “For everything else. Everything that we currently use our phones for.”

It is immediately important to understand how it affects your business beyond the CMO role and across your organization.

Highlights from the preview of ARiA

From Charles' Finks preview of Augmented Reality in Action on Forbes.

1. It’s already here.

“What's visible to the consumer right now are tricks like masks, filters, and games that nibble at the edges of visual computing, but what's invisible is the way AR has been integrated into every day life. For example, most new cars have a heads up display: data projected onto the driver's windshield. Broadcast news and sports now routinely lay data, graphics, and animation onto the physical world. AR has become ubiquitous in ways that have nothing to do with smart glasses.”

2. It’s going to get bigger

“ 'AR is on the verge. It’s exciting to watch it take shape. In the end, it won’t even be called AR. That it will disappear,’ says Bob Metcalfe, Professor of Innovation at the University of Texas, Founder of 3Com, who famously formulated Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.”

3. It’s going to be really big

“ Many industry insiders see AR/VR as the fourth wave of modern computing following mobile computing, the internet, and personal computing. With each subsequent wave dwarfing the previous in market size and social impact, this is one wave you may want to catch. AR is likely to replace not only the majority of screens in use but alter the way we interact with computers forever.”

Read in full here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2018/01/15/aria-the-ar-conference-at-mit-is-the-anti-ces/#6f3bdd133e7c

Teaching Prototyping for VR/AR/xR

I'm teaching a full day workshop at R/GA on Prototyping VR/AR/xR.
Two years ago, I spoke about skill gap when designing for xR. People asked me what I mean by xR. I replied "Extended Realities" but initially meant x for whatever form or degree of reality we are designing for when it comes to spatial computing and three dimensional interfaces.

This class shows the fundamentals of designing in three dimensionally rendered space to prototype across the reality-virtuality spectrum from VR to AR using web based technologies.

This approach of using web based technologies allows participants to developer a prototyping pipeline that can be experienced cross platform. So the output is not application dependent such as Snap Lens Studio or Facebook AR Studio. Nor do the experiences rely on Unity and Unreal to produce platform dependent applications for  ARCore on iOS and ARKit on Android.
The web has largely brought about a democratization of information consumption and production.  This full day course makes prototyping the next generation of computing accessible.

Join the class

Snap Lens Studio

Acquisition by Apple

Acquisition by Apple

R/GA University and Prototyping In VR.

Fresh off the MIT Media Lab Reality Virtually Hackathon and getting inspired by the NYVR Expo, I'm really excited to be part of R/GA U's public launch.

“This full-day intensive course is a deep dive into one of the most exciting technological developments.”

Image Courtesy R/GA-U.

Take part in this course I teach with a Creative Director from the semi-top-secret Prototype Studio.

Want to Prototype VR?

or learn more about R/GA U

Tony Parisi (Unity): Face the Future - Computing in an Augmented World

We capture only the photons in front of us.

The expense (of creating 3D content) has never been justified for rendering it on a flat screen - except for a game.
until now…

The creation and access are cheaper

Today’s kids are tomorrow’s xR natives.
With XR there’s nowhere to go but in.

3 areas (for growth):
Software
Content
Services 

4 Waves of AR - examples

This is how AR will be diffused and adopted.

Keynote - Into The Future: A World Without Edges with Graeme Devine

Conclusions:

• "Iteration in a new medium is a must"
  • seen with radio, television, video games.
• "It takes time for a platform to find itself (and construct a comfortable, unwritten contract with the player, the view viewer" for what that format for experience really is. i.e, "TV episode, that radio play, that video game" control and interaction system).
  
  Video games developed a formula where one controller moves the character, one controller moves the camera. It took about 20 years for us to reach that contract with the player. What is interaction in Mixed Reality?
   
• Cats always win

Catastrophe - from Magic Leap Pitchfest

Why Mixed Reality?
Would it be more fit for a different platform?
People often present something to me - and it might be better experienced in a normal, non-mixed reality format. Such as a map or normal app.

1. Theme park - increase entertainment.
2. Warehouse - increase productivity.
3. Profession - i.e.: Spinal surgery - I can look up at the spine but don’t have to look up at the monitor - the surgery takes less time, the person has a chance to heal better and survive better.

Reality Virtually Hackathon

http://www.realityvirtuallyhack.com/