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Category: augmented reality

As the artificial brain races towards the singularity, what we often forget is the boost to human brainpower that will accompany it. As we increase our senses and perceptions, humans have a choice what to do with these new superpowers, that can be used to reinforce one’s tunnel vision of life or to ignore it.

This story is part of What Happens Next, our complete guide to understanding the future. Read more predictions about the Future of Fact.

Not everyone experiences the world in the same way. Whether it’s how you react to the results of an election or what tones you hear in a sound clip, observable reality is often not as objective as you think it is.

Emerging technologies such as augmented reality will further blur this line. With AR on mobile devices and head-mounted displays, we’re well within the start of what it means to live an augmented life. Humans are doing a lot of fun things right now, like integrating playful games into our world and painting ourselves with digitally applied effects and makeup. We’re also starting to find utility for AR in the workplace and with hardware designed specifically for the enterprise market.

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September 27 is World Tourism Day, which has been celebrated each year by the United Nations World Tourism Organization since 1980. The theme this year is “Tourism and the Digital Transformation,” as digital technology has permeated the tourism industry.

Virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, Internet-plus — these terms have gradually become familiar to people travelling in China, as the country is heading to its tourism industry 3.0. A wide range of cutting-edge technologies have been innovatively applied in almost every part of China’s tourism industry.

A smart robot helps a passenger carry a handbag at Ningbo Railway Station in Zhejiang Province, on August 7, 2017. The smart robot has been activated to help passengers search for ticket fares, print route maps and carry their luggage. [Photo: VCG]

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I don’t know about you, but I had to look them both up to get a solid understanding of these terms. Of course, these ideas aren’t new. And the brave new world of biohacking, I mean grinder biohacking, is fodder for edgy and future forward media outlets as well as the nightly news. What interests me is the shift to a more commonplace reference like Gartner report. Their analysis of over 2,000 innovations from quantum computing to augmented reality, lead them to choose that fine line between man and machine. It’s important and a bold wake-up call to humanity.

Is humanity about to enter its greatest point of transformation?

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Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore may have multi-million-user installed bases, but so does Niantic’s Pokémon Go, the first hit augmented reality game. Now Niantic plans to offer its custom AR software to other developers as the Real World Platform, and is teasing advanced features that go beyond the capabilities of Apple’s and Google’s development kits.

Already used in Pokémon GO, Ingress, and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the Real World Platform is an evolving software engine that adds digital characters and shared social experiences to real-world map data. Niantic has recently bolstered the AR platform’s development team by acquiring computer vision specialist companies Escher Reality and Matrix Mill (which also has machine learning expertise).

Matrix Mill’s machine learning will power one of the Real World Platform’s upcoming tricks — a realtime AR occlusion engine. As demonstrated, the feature enables 3D versions of Pikachu and Eevee to disappear behind real world objects and people, even as both the camera and people move. Niantic is using a machine-trained neural network to determine which objects should be considered “foreground” or “background” versus the AR characters.

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Seattle’s virtual and augmented reality scene just got a boost, courtesy of the University of Washington and three tech giants.

The UW announced today a new VR and AR research hub called UW Reality Lab, funded by Facebook, Google, and Huawei, which each contributed $2 million for the initiative.

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The holographic display of the future is here and you can have one on your desk for under $600.

Ever since I saw Princess Leia appealing to Obi Wan that he was her only hope when I was 11, I’ve wanted a holographic display. Movies like Minority Report and Back to the Future II (do you remember the shark hologram that ate Marty?) have consumed thousands of people’s lives over the past few decades. But until now, no one has been able to make a scalable device that would let groups of people, unaided by a VR or AR headset, see and touch a living and moving 3D world.

That’s changing today with the launch of the Looking Glass, a new type of interface that achieves that dream of the hologram we’ve been promised for so long. The Looking Glass is technically a lightfield and volumetric display hybrid, but that’s pretty nerdy-sounding. I like to just call it a holographic display.

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