Lifeboat Foundation

Mojo Vision’s smart contact lens has finally made the leap to human testing, bringing the future of AR a major step closer.

“I always think it’s important that people understand what something is,” Cook told Dutch publication Bright (via Google Translate). “And I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is.” In other words, despite persistent reports of Apple’s interest in building all manner of AR and VR hardware, Cook isn’t ready to claim that the company is working towards any so-called “metaverse.”

Mark Zuckerberg has a different view. Earlier this year, the Meta CEO told his employees that the company is in a “very deep, philosophical competition” with Apple to build the metaverse. “This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience,” Zuckerberg said, contrasting what he says is Apple’s closed approach with Meta’s more interoperable development.

As anyone who has recently tried out an augmented reality headset knows, the technology is not yet ready to be part of our everyday lives. Researchers have been working to perfect high-performing augmented reality (AR) glasses, but there are a number of challenges. One major problem with conventional AR glasses is that there is a tradeoff in terms of quality and brightness between the external scene you actually see and the contextual information you also want to visualize.

Early solutions like Google Glass used multiple bulky optical components that were partially reflective and partially transmissive to mix the real-world and contextual scenes, with the result of a dimmed and distorted vision of both scenes.

More recent AR head-mounted-display eyeglasses have been patterned with diffractive gratings (fine grooves) with wavelength-sized spacing that deflect contextual information from a miniprojector beside the glasses to the viewer’s eye. But these eyeglasses still dim and distort the external scene because real-world light passing through the glass inevitably gets scattered and dispersed by the gratings. The distortions get worse when several sets of overlapping gratings must be used to handle multiple distinct colors from the miniprojector.

The science fiction icon who coined and popularized the term “metaverse” is pausing his literary career to build his own.

As revealed by Wired, “Snow Crash” author and cyberpunk pioneer Neal Stephenson is working with a crypto bro to create an open metaverse platform that will, its creators hope, be a more decentralized version of the types of Big Tech metaverses like those run by Fortnite and Facebook.

“It’s like Neal is coming down out of the mountains like Gandalf, to restore the metaverse to an open, decentralized, and creative order,” said robotics and augmented reality entrepreneur Rony Abovitz, who is also acting as a strategic advisor to Lamina1, the company Stephenson is cofounding with Bitcoin Foundation head Peter Vessenes.

Those who are venturing into the architecture of the metaverse, have already asked themselves this question. A playful environment where all formal dreams are possible, where determining aspects for architecture such as solar orientation, ventilation, and climate will no longer be necessary, where – to Louis Kahn’s despair – there is no longer a dynamic of light and shadow, just an open and infinite field. Metaverse is the extension of various technologies, or even some call them a combination of some powerful technologies. These technologies are augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and a 3D world.

This technology is still under research. However, the metaverse seems to make a significant difference in the education domain. Also, its feature of connecting students across the world with a single metaverse platform may bring a positive change. But, the metaverse is not only about remote learning. It is much more than that.

Architecture emerged on the construction site, at a time when there was no drawing, only experimentation. Over time, thanks to Brunelleschi and the Florence dome in the 15^th century, we witnessed the first detachment from masonry, a social division of labor from which liberal art and mechanical art emerge. This detachment generated different challenges and placed architecture on an oneiric plane, tied to paper. In other words, we don’t build any structures, we design them. Now, six centuries later, it looks like we are getting ready to take another step away from the construction site, abruptly distancing ourselves from engineering and construction.

Microsoft’s augmented reality headset the HoloLens has been in the works for years now, but it’s been a while since we’ve heard any news. We were seeing demos of it way back in 2015 (opens in new tab), but Microsoft has been pretty quiet on the tech in recent years when it comes to a consumer release.

What we’ve heard tons about is Microsoft’s deal to supply the United States Army with HoloLens tech. We first got wind of the deal back in 2018 (opens in new tab) with talks of a $480 million contract to help “increase lethality” of combat missions. It wasn’t until 2021 that Microsoft officially signed a much pricier $22 billion dollar contract (opens in new tab) with the army for military grade HoloLens supply.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) were first developed, greatly enhancing the quality of new vision synthesis. It was first suggested as a way to rebuild a static picture using a series of posed photographs. However, it has been swiftly expanded to include dynamic and uncalibrated scenarios. With the assistance of sizable controlled datasets, recent work additionally concentrate on animating these human radiance field models, thereby broadening the application domain of radiance-field-based modeling to provide augmented reality experiences. In this study, They are focused on the case when just one video is given. They aim to rebuild the human and static scene models and enable unique posture rendering of the person without the need for pricey multi-camera setups or manual annotations.

Neural Actor can create inventive human poses, but it needs several films. Even with the most recent improvements in NeRF techniques, this is far from a simple task. The NeRF models must be trained using many cameras, constant lighting and exposure, transparent backgrounds, and precise human geometry. According to the table below, HyperNeRF cannot be controlled by human postures but instead creates a dynamic scene based on a single video. ST-NeRF uses many cameras to rebuild each person using a time-dependent NeRF model, although the editing is only done to change the bounding box. HumanNeRF creates a human model from a single video with masks that have been carefully annotated; however, it does not demonstrate generalization to novel postures.

With a model trained on a single video, Vid2Actor can produce new human poses, but it cannot model the surroundings. They solve these issues by proposing NeuMan, a system that can create unique human stances and novel viewpoints while reconstructing the person and the scene from a single in-the-wild video. Figure 1’s high-quality pose-driven rendering is made possible by NeuMan, a cutting-edge framework for training NeRF models for both the human and the scene. They first estimate the camera poses, the sparse scene model, the depth maps, the human stance, the human form, and the human masks from a moving camera’s video.

You need to wait till 2023 to get them though.

Lenovo has unveiled its T1 Glasses at its Tech Life 2022 event and promises to place a full HD video-watching experience right inside your pockets, a company press release.

Mobile computing devices have exploded in the past few years as gaming has become more intense, and various video streaming platforms have gathered steam. The computing power of smartphones and tablets has increased manifold. Whether you want to ambush other people in an online shooting game or sit back and watch a documentary in high-definition, a device in your pocket can help you do that with ease.

Continue reading “No VR or AR: A new pocket-size eyeglass will be just big screen experience in your eyes” »

By Thomas Frey | Sep 1, 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, no one understood at the time how disruptive that device would be to existing technology. Now with rumors of Apple launching their augmented reality (AR) smart glasses products next year, people are speculating about how disruptive this technology will be.

Since iPhones are one of Apple’s primary revenue streams, they may be cautious about releasing a product that may encroach on their own turf. However, as we’ll suggest below, it may not be an either/or situation for users.