Lifeboat Foundation

Wearable displacement sensors—which are attached to a human body, detect movements in real time and convert them into electrical signals—are currently being actively studied. However, research on tensile-capable displacement sensors has many limitations, such as low tensile properties and complex manufacturing processes.

If a displacement sensor that can be easily manufactured with high sensitivity and tensile properties is developed, it can be attached to a human body, allowing large movements of joints or fingers to be used in various applications such as AR and VR. A research team led by Sung-Hoon Ahn, mechanical engineering professor at Seoul National University, has developed a piezoelectric strain sensor with high sensitivity and high stretchability based on kirigami design cutting.

In this research, a stretchable piezoelectric displacement sensor was manufactured and its performance was evaluated by applying the kirigami structure to a film-type piezoelectric material. Various sensing characteristics were shown according to the kirigami pattern, and higher sensitivity and tensile properties were shown compared to existing technologies. Wireless haptic gloves using VR technology were produced using the developed sensor, and a piano could be played successfully using them.

Canada-based ecommerce site Shopify has demonstrated an unexpected use of Apple’s RoomPlan API to clear a room before filling it with furniture via Apple AR.

Apple announced RoomPlan at WWDC 2022, but by itself this AR technology will not be any Apple app. Instead, RoomPlan is an API that developers can tap into in order to provide its features as part of their own apps.

It’s been anticipated that retailers could use the RoomPlan API in order to show customers what particular items of, say, furniture would look like in their home. Ikea has already been doing this since shortly after Apple announced ARKit in 2017, but RoomPlan leverages the newer LiDAR technology.

For the first time, an augmented reality contact lens was worn on the eye of a human subject. It has about 30x the pixel density of an iPhone.

Meta’s AI translation work could provide a killer app for AR.

Social media conglomerate Meta has created a single AI model capable of translating across 200 different languages, including many not supported by current commercial tools. The company is open-sourcing the project in the hopes that others will build on its work.

The AI model is part of an ambitious R&D project by Meta to create a so-called “universal speech translator,” which the company sees as important for growth across its many platforms — from Facebook and Instagram, to developing domains like VR and AR. Machine translation not only allows Meta to better understand its users (and so improve the advertising systems that generate 97 percent of its revenue) but could also be the foundation of a killer app for future projects like its augmented reality glasses.

Continue reading “Meta open sources early-stage AI translation tool that works across 200 languages” »

For the first time, the immersive AR experience surpasses the physical by offering the contextuality that consumers need. They can see the end outcome of the purchase decision before even making the decision — the experience of seeing the couch in the context of their space is transformed — giving them more confidence in their decision.

AR and its effects on consumer psychology

AR is not taking a share of the digital pie as we know it today, but instead increasing the overall size of the pie. There are 100 million consumers shopping with AR online and in stores today. This powerful technology fundamentally changes consumer psychology in three distinct ways: changing the ecommerce model from a push to a pull experience, giving consumers new confidence in their purchases; driving conversion by giving consumers visual context before buying; and giving consumers a new way of experiencing in-person shopping.

An Interview with COO Dijam Panigrahi.

“a unified and shared software infrastructure to empower enterprise customers to build and run scalable, high-quality eXtended Reality (XR) – Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) – applications in public, private, and hybrid clouds.”

What does that all mean?

Continue reading “GridRaster Uses the Metaverse to Build High Tech Prototypes and Finished Products” »

Bye bye, AR headsets?Mojo Vision, a California-based company that wants to make augmented reality (AR) capable smart contact lenses, has already conducted the first human trial of its technology. Last week, the company’s CEO Drew Perkins became the first person to use the contact lenses and shared his experience in a blog post.

Mojo Vision’s device design includes many firsts and now the prototype is good enough to be trialed. Is the future already here?

Research led by Suresh Alahari, Ph.D., Professor of Biochemistry at LSU Health New Orleans schools of Medicine and Graduate Studies, suggests a combination of drugs already approved by the FDA for other cancers may be effective in treating chemo-resistant triple-negative breast cancer. The results are published in Molecular Cancer.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) tumors lack estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). A subtype representing 12–55% of triple-negative breast cancer tumors has androgen receptors (AR). Since androgen receptors stimulate tumor cell progression in estrogen receptor-negative breast cancers, they have become a target of triple-negative breast cancer therapy. As well, since a substantial number of patients with triple-negative breast cancer develop resistance to paclitaxel, the FDA-approved chemotherapeutic agent for triple-negative breast cancer, new therapeutic approaches are needed.

Working in a mouse model and tissue from patients with triple-negative breast cancer, the research team screened 133 FDA-approved drugs that have a therapeutic effect against androgen receptor cells. They found that ceritinib, an FDA-approved drug for lung cancers, efficiently inhibited the growth of androgen receptor triple-negative breast cancer cells. To improve the response, they also selected enzalutamide, an FDA-approved androgen receptor antagonist for prostate cancer treatment.

Forget your bulky AR headsets, smart contact lenses are coming to place augmented reality displays right there on your eyeball. Last week, Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins volunteered to test the first feature-complete prototype of his company’s design.

Smart wearables are all about super-portable convenience, and until scientists can plumb an AR display directly into your visual cortex, the smallest and most portable form factor we can imagine is that of a contact lens. Mojo Vision has been working on a smart contact lens design since 2015, and its latest prototype Mojo Lens packs in a pretty impressive amount of gear – especially for something that has to live behind your eyelid.

For starters, it has the world’s smallest and highest-density display capable of showing dynamic content – a green monochrome MicroLED display measuring less than 0.5 mm (0.02 in) in diameter, with a resolution of 14,000 pixels per inch. It’s got an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5-GHz radio capable of communicating at ultra-low latency, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, allowing the image to stay stable even as you move your eyes around.