Lifeboat Foundation

With batteries, motion sensors, and a microLED on board, Mojo lets me try out its first apps.

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a single star whose light has traveled for 12.9 billion years to Earth, having come from a universe just 900 million years old. It’s currently the most distant star known, and the team has dubbed it Earendel*.

The discovery is a huge jump, as the previous record-holder for more distant star existed in a universe 4 billion years old.

Continue reading “Looking Through Mojo Vision’s Newest AR Contact Lens” »

American Robotics CEO Reese Mozer has no beef with drone deliveries, but he thinks all the hoopla surrounding aerial transport of burgers and burritos is drowning out news about farther-reaching UAV activities that are dramatically changing the way businesses operate. He tells DroneDJ about that transformative innovation, and how American Robotics’s (AR) leading role in the complete automation of critical drone services to industry is set to take wing.

Nevertheless, Mozer adds, that action manages to generate sufficient media and public excitement to divert attention from the more complex, vital, and – in total financial terms – valuable surveying and inspection services drone automation provides heavy industry, energy, railroad, and infrastructure operators. And that’s precisely the UAV sector activity he predicts will begin taking off and turning heads this year.

Continue reading “American Robotics CEO Reese Mozer calls 2022 an ‘inflection point’ in automated drone services” »

InWith Corporation says it’s created the world’s first soft electronic contact lens that could work with smartphones or other external devices to show its wearer augmented reality.

Andy on Twitter : @theandyaltman.

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Computer engineers at Duke University have developed virtual eyes that simulate how humans look at the world accurately enough for companies to train virtual reality and augmented reality programs. Called EyeSyn for short, the program will help developers create applications for the rapidly expanding metaverse while protecting user data.

The results have been accepted and will be presented at the International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), May 4–6, 2022, a leading annual forum on research in networked sensing and control.

“If you’re interested in detecting whether a person is reading a comic book or advanced literature by looking at their eyes alone, you can do that,” said Maria Gorlatova, the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke.

HP appears to be strengthening its position as a provider of XR software for enterprise companies. Today it announced the release of a mobile device management (MDM) solution that’s designed to make deploying and managing large-scale VR easier.

Called HP ExtendXR, the software as a service (SaaS) was built in collaboration with ArborXR, an AR/VR device management company that came out of the VR arcade space in 2016.

HP says its collaboration with ArborXR is targeting companies who want to more easily scale their VR deployments, but also take advantage of HP’s global support and HP Horizon secure cloud infrastructure.

When video chatting with colleagues, coworkers, or family, many of us have grown accustomed to using virtual backgrounds and background filters. It has been shown to offer more control over the surroundings, allowing fewer distractions, preserving the privacy of those around us, and even liven up our virtual presentations and get-togethers. However, Background filters don’t always work as expected or perform well for everyone.

Image segmentation is a computer vision process of separating the different components of a photo or video. It has been widely used to improve backdrop blurring, virtual backgrounds, and other augmented reality (AR) effects. Despite advanced algorithms, achieving highly accurate person segmentation seems challenging.

The model used for image segmentation tasks must be incredibly consistent and lag-free. Inefficient algorithms may result in bad experiences for the users. For instance, during a video conference, artifacts generated by erroneous segmentation output might easily confuse persons utilizing virtual background programs. More importantly, segmentation problems may result in unwanted exposure to people’s physical environments when applying backdrop effects.

Continue reading “Meta AI Researchers Upgrade Their Machine Learning-Based Image Segmentation Models For Better Virtual Backgrounds in Video Calls And Metaverse” »

Byron Cook, the head of Amazon’s automated-reasoning (AR) group, think his field is entering a “golden era”, driven by a virtuous cycle of improving tools and b… See more.

Distributing proof search, reasoning about distributed systems, and automating regulatory compliance are just three fruitful research areas.

Continue reading “Automated reasoning’s scientific frontiers” »

A report by Business Insider says Microsoft has scrapped plans for its own HoloLens 3 and has instead partnered with Samsung—but that no one really knows what’s going on.

Microsoft has reportedly scrapped its third-generation HoloLens, leaving the company’s “metaverse” plans in disarray.

According to a report from Business Insider, Microsoft killed off the HoloLens 3 in 2021, shifting to a planned device with Samsung instead. The problem? According to the publication, the company’s mixed-reality/augmented reality/virtual-reality division isn’t sure what it plans to do. That’s resulted in employees leaving for Meta and other companies instead.

Continue reading “Report: Microsoft HoloLens 3 is dead as its mixed-reality vision implodes” »

Nike translates its virtual world experience to augmented reality features in Nike’s NYC store.