Lifeboat Foundation

Quantum will be the most important technology in 2017; as it will touch everything as well as change everything. Until we see a better integration of AR in Enterprise Apps, platforms, and published services; AR like VR will remain a niche market gadget.

I do know companies like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle have been looking at ways to leverage AR in their enterprise platforms and services such as ERP and CRM as well as Big Data Analytics; however, to see the volume of sales needed to make VR or AR have staying power on a large scale; the vendors will need to it a pragmatic useful device on multiple fronts. And, yes it is great that we’re using VR and AR in healthcare, defense, engineering, and entertainment (includes gaming); we just need to make it an every consumer device that people canot live with out.

2016 has been a remarkable year that’s brought continued growth and awareness to the worlds of Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality. Set to become a $165 Billion dollar industry by 2020, there’s still a common question that lingers among many newcomers trying to understand this fast moving digital phenomena we are just beginning to watch evolve: What’s the difference between them and how will it impact the digital world as I currently know it?

Continue reading “Mixed Reality will be most important tech of 2017” »

The coming year promises to be a good one for those of us watching the augmented and mixed reality world. And the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), starting Jan. 5 in Las Vegas, Nevada, for its 50th year, is bringing 2017 in with a bang—we’re expecting a ton of great announcements on the horizon.

From the HoloLens developers edition release and ever-churning Magic Leap rumor mill, to Pokémon Go and the resurgence of the smart glasses movement, augmented, mixed, and virtual realities have been all over the place in 2016. So, it’s no surprise that for its second year, CES will dedicate an entire section of the floor to augmented reality called the Augmented Reality Marketplace.

The HoloLens field of view issue has been preoccupying Microsoft for some time, and they have been exploring a number of solutions, which tend to show up in their patent filings.

As Microsoft writes:

Continue reading “Microsoft patents Holodeck-style projection room” »

If you loathe having to talk out loud when ordering a meal at a fast-food restaurant, and you happen to love KFC, then you might want to start considering packing it up and moving to China where Baidu has just teamed up with the major chicken brand to create a more automated restaurant. The venture aims to use the company’s latest technologies to bring novel ways of providing service to KFC customers.

As an added feature, the outlet also offers augmented reality games via table stickers, a concept also made available to 300 other KFC locations in Beijing.

Baidu’s tech in this new restaurant, however, is all about guessing what you want before you can even ask; image recognition hardware installed at the KFC will scan customer faces, seeking to infer moods, and guess other information including gender an age in order to inform their recommendation.

Continue reading “KFC’s latest weird tech suggests an order based on your face” »

The year 2016 presented the world with a number of big surprises. Some positive, some negative, depending on whom one asks. Here at Medgadget, 2016 will be remembered for many amazing and pleasantly unexpected medical technology developments, many of which are foreshadowing cures for spinal cord injuries, effective treatment of diabetes, new ways to fight heart disease, and many other long sought-after medical solutions. Virtual and augmented reality systems, new imaging techniques, and innovative delivery approaches are changing the way doctors learn and take care of patients.

Looking back on the past year, we selected what we felt to be the most important, innovative, and surprising medical technology developments. They naturally fell into a few categories. Here we share with you Medgadget’s choices of Best Medical Technologies of 2016.

A new supercomputer has been deployed at the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC) in Germany. Called QPACE3, the new 447 Teraflop machine is named for “QCD Parallel Computing on the Cell.”

QPACE3 is being used by the University of Regensburg for a joint research project with the University of Wuppertal and the Jülich Supercomputing Center for numerical simulations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is one of the fundamental theories of elementary particle physics. Such simulations serve, among other things, to understand the state of the universe shortly after the Big Bang, for which a very high computing power is required.

The demand for high performance computers to solve complex applications has risen exponentially, but unfortunately so has their consumption of power. Many supercomputers require more than a megawatt of electricity to operate and annual electricity costs can easily run into millions of Euros. The energy supply is therefore a significant part of the operating costs of a data center. According to recent analyst studies, this represents the second-largest factor in addition to personnel and maintenance costs. The upcoming boom with (3D) video streaming, augmented reality, image recognition and artificial intelligence is driving up the demand for data center capabilities, thereby placing new challenges in the power supply sector.

Demo of lifelike interactive digital artist performance. This demo showcases one of the immediate possible applications for Mixed Reality.

We have brought to life a highly realistic, detailed character who performs for and interacts with users, while being rendered purely in real time on untethered mobile devices.

LIFELIKE DIGITAL CHARACTERS

In March this year Microsoft unveiled their new project – Holoportation, which they envision as the future of teleconferencing.

Holoportation is a new type of 3D capture technology that allows high quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed, and transmitted anywhere in the world in real-time. When combined with mixed reality displays such as HoloLens, this technology allows users to see and interact with remote participants in 3D as if they are actually present in their physical space.

Continue reading “Microsoft gives a detailed presentation on Holoportation at the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction UIST ‘16 symposium” »

A synchronization of HoloLens and Ultrahaptics.