Tag Archives: augmented reality

dystopian world of “Rainbow’s End” inching closer to reality!

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at least augmented reality, which now seems to be called mixed reality. A company called “Oppo” seems to be a player and has a new prototype.

Following the rapid rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, generative AI has begun to show up in everything from productivity apps to search engines to smartphone software. Oppo is one of several companies — along with TCL and Meta — that believe smart glasses are the next place users will want to engage with AI-powered helpers. Mixed reality has been in the spotlight thanks to the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro headset in early 2024. 

Like the company’s previous smart glasses, the Air Glass 3 looks just like a pair of spectacles, according to images provided by Oppo. But the company says it’s developed a new resin waveguide that it claims can reduce the so-called “rainbow effect” that can occur when light refracts as it passes through. 

Waveguides are the part of the smart glasses that relays virtual images to the eye, as smart glasses maker Vuzix explains. If the glasses live up to Oppo’s claims, they should offer improved color and clarity. The glasses can also reach over 1,000 nits at peak brightness, Oppo says, which is almost as bright as some smartphone displays. 

cnet.com

Who cares about AI playing music with my glasses? I want to see things labeled when I am out and about in the real world.

The Metaverse (what is it?)

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This supposedly influential article from January 2020 (remember that innocent time?) is called The Metaverse: What it is… But at the end, you are still not quite sure what it is. It will involve references to Snow Crash and Ready Player One, obviously. It will be the successor to the current internet. It will be interoperable between platforms and technologies, and it will be always on and always accessible. It will not be a “virtual world”. Okay, I have to admit that is exactly what I thought it would be.

There are a couple things I can imagine coming in the near future. One is much better video conferencing using avatars with facial expressions and eye contact. Those of us who have participated in the last year and a half of mostly remote work have learned that video conferencing has come a long, long way, but this is a key next step to make it more engaging and realistic. I still think augmented reality has to be a big deal (see Rainbow’s End). This will project an additional layer of information/content onto the real world, which I personally am looking forward to although I can imagine it becoming addictive and making the un-augmented real world seem dull and ultimately be neglected (see Rainbow’s End). We just need the right sort of unobtrusive glasses or visor to make it work in the short term.

People will be able to live much farther off the (physical) grid if that is what they want to do, and real-world cities might suffer as a result. On the other hand, real-world cities might become even more interesting than they are now. Cities are information and experience-rich, after all.

December 2020 in Review

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2020 is officially in the books!

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The “Map of Doom” identifies risks that should get the most attention, including antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology (also see below), and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues.

Most hopeful story: The Covid-19 vaccines are a modern “moonshot” – a massive government investment driving scientific and technological progress on a particular issue in a short time frame. Only unlike nuclear weapons and the actual original moonshot, this one is not military in nature. (We should be concerned about biological weapons, but let’s allow ourselves to enjoy this victory and take a quick trip to Disney Land before we start practicing for next season…) What should be our next moonshot, maybe fusion power?

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Lists of some key technologies that came to the fore in 2020 include (you guessed it) mRNA vaccines, genetically modified crops, a variety of new computer chips and machine learning algorithms, which seem to go hand in hand (and we are hearing more about “machine learning” than “artificial intelligence” these days), brain-computer interfaces, private rockets and moon landings and missions to Mars and mysterious signals and micro-satellites and UFOs, virtual and mixed reality, social media disinformation and work-from-home technologies. The wave of self-driving car hype seems to have peaked and receded, which probably means self-driving cars will probably arrive quietly in the next decade or so. I was surprised not to see cheap renewable energy on any lists that I came across, and I think it belongs there. At least one economist thinks we are on the cusp of a big technology-driven productivity pickup that has been gestating for a few decades.

Comet ATLAS

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And now for something fun and, by definition, not coronavirus related. Not that some people won’t see this as a concurrent sign of the apocalypse. But there is an unusually bright comet called ATLAS out there, and we might be able to see it with the naked eye sometime in April or May.

As to how bright Comet ATLAS will get, that’s anybody’s guess. It might become faintly visible to the naked eye under dark sky conditions by mid- or late April. By mid-May, when it disappears into the bright evening twilight, perhaps it will have brightened to second magnitude — about as bright as Polaris, the North Star.

Space.com

I thought I remembered seeing Halley’s comet in the 1990s, but after reading up on it, I probably remember people talking about Halley’s comet in the 1980s (when I was in elementary school) and then saw either Hyakutake or Hale-Bopp in the 1990s (when I was in college). I live in a brightly lit city now, and am not allowed to leave my house, but back then I lived in Central Pennsylvania and if I drove for 10 minutes in any direction it would get pretty dark.

Anyway, Atlas is supposed to be visible in the North to Northwest sky. I wouldn’t mind learning to read star charts if I ever get the time, but I recently discovered that there are a ton of astronomy apps out there. I’ve been using Sky View, and it’s great but just one of many. You just point your tablet at the sky and it labels whatever is there for you. You can convince yourself it is accurate just by pointing it at the moon. It actually works just fine in the daytime, on a cloudy night, or if you point it down at the ground and want to know what a person looking up at the sky in the Australian outback might be seeing. Space is predictable like that, and GPS works that well on the average device owned by the average Joe. Pretty neat.

And as for the Apocalypse, nobody is suggesting this thing is actually headed anywhere near earth. This article says it will be 273 million miles from the Sun. The Earth is about 90 million miles from the Sun, so that is only three times the distance, but I don’t know if the Earth is on the same side as the comet right now, so it might be more. It’s far and we have plenty of other things to worry about here on our little blue dot.

augmented reality on Google Street View

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Google is rolling out some augmented reality features intended to assist pedestrians in Street View.

The feature overlays a live video feed on the map. Directional arrows and street names appear on the video feed to provide more intuitive navigation and give the user a sense of exactly where they are and where they need to go.

Google Glass is back

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According to Wired:

Google relaunched the gadget as a tool for businesses called Google Glass Enterprise Edition. Pilot projects have involved Boeing workers using Glass on helicopter production lines, and doctors wearing it in the examining room.

Anat Karni, product lead at Plataine, slid on a black version of Glass Tuesday to demonstrate the app. She showed how the app could tell a worker clocking in for the day about production issues that require urgent attention, and show useful information for resolving problems on the device’s display.

A worker can also talk to Plataine’s app to get help. Karni demonstrated how a worker walking into a storeroom could say “Help me select materials.” The app would respond, verbally and on the display, with what materials would be needed and where they could be found. A worker’s actions could be instantly visible to factory bosses, synced into the software Plataine already provides customers, such as Airbus, to track production operations.

augmented reality and Rainbow’s End

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This video is meant to convey a concept of what augmented reality could look like in the not-too-distant future. Which reminded me of Rainbow’s End, a fantastic Vernor Vinge novel set in the not-too-distant future. In Rainbow’s End, people have wearable computing and contact lenses that allow them to project pretty much anything they want onto the world, from basic information to, yes, strange fantastic beasts. The dark side of the novel is that weapons of mass destruction have also progressed quite a bit, and various governments and groups are fighting that behind the scenes unbeknownst to most of the people and their gadgets.