Lifeboat Foundation

By Thomas Frey | Sep 1, 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, no one understood at the time how disruptive that device would be to existing technology. Now with rumors of Apple launching their augmented reality (AR) smart glasses products next year, people are speculating about how disruptive this technology will be.

Since iPhones are one of Apple’s primary revenue streams, they may be cautious about releasing a product that may encroach on their own turf. However, as we’ll suggest below, it may not be an either/or situation for users.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgp_0FvKyyg

At the moment I think Meta VR gets laughed at, but this is a good explanation.

Clip from The Joe Rogan Experience #1863 with Mark Zuckerberg.
August 25th 2022

Continue reading “Augmented Reality & Not Needing Physical Objects — Mark Zuckerberg & Joe Rogan” »

As the world increasingly embraces Web3, corporations are turning to metaverse applications to stay ahead of the curve. Based on Verified Market Research, the Metaverse market is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 39.1 percent from 2022 to 2030, reaching USD 824.53 Billion in 2020 and USD 27.21 Billion in 2020. This is due to the increasing demand for AR/VR content and gaming and the need for more realistic and interactive training simulations.

These startups show Proof of Concept with a working product and clear value proposition for businesses and consumers.

● Launch a corporate accelerator: Another way to increase your exposure to the Metaverse is to launch a corporate accelerator. This will give you access to a broader range of startups and help you build a more diverse portfolio. In addition, it will allow you to offer mentorship and resources to the startups you invest in.

Continue reading “A Case Study For The Industry: LG Investing In Metaverse” »

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Artificial intelligence (AI) systems must understand visual scenes in three dimensions to interpret the world around us. For that reason, images play an essential role in computer vision, significantly affecting quality and performance. Unlike the widely available 2D data, 3D data is rich in scale and geometry information, providing an opportunity for a better machine-environment understanding.

Data-driven 3D modeling, or 3D reconstruction, is a growing computer vision domain increasingly in demand from industries including augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Rapid advances in implicit neural representation are also opening up exciting new possibilities for virtual reality experiences.

It’s an everyday scenario: you’re driving down the highway when out of the corner of your eye you spot a car merging into your lane without signaling. How fast can your eyes react to that visual stimulus? Would it make a difference if the offending car were blue instead of green? And if the color green shortened that split-second period between the initial appearance of the stimulus and when the eye began moving towards it (known to scientists as the saccade), could drivers benefit from an augmented reality overlay that made every merging vehicle green?

Qi Sun, a joint professor in Tandon’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), is collaborating with neuroscientists to find out.

He and his Ph.D. student Budmonde Duinkharjav—along with colleagues from Princeton, the University of North Carolina, and NVIDIA Research—recently authored the paper “Image Features Influence Reaction Time: A Learned Probabilistic Perceptual Model for Saccade Latency,” presenting a model that can be used to predict temporal gaze behavior, particularly saccadic latency, as a function of the statistics of a displayed image. Inspired by neuroscience, the model could ultimately have great implications for highway safety, telemedicine, e-sports, and in any other arena in which AR and VR are leveraged.

“Augmented books, or a-books, can be the future of many book genres, from travel and tourism to education. This technology exists to assist the reader in a deeper understanding of the written topic and get more through digital means without ruining the experience of reading a paper book.”

Power efficiency and pre-printed conductive paper are some of the new features which allow Surrey’s augmented books to now be manufactured on a semi-industrial scale. With no wiring visible to the reader, Surrey’s augmented reality books allow users to trigger digital content with a simple gesture (such as a swipe of a finger or turn of a page), which will then be displayed on a nearby device.

View insights.

In a paper distributed via ArXiv, titled “Exploring the Unprecedented Privacy Risks of the Metaverse,” boffins at UC Berkeley in the US and the Technical University of Munich in Germany play-tested an “escape room” virtual reality (VR) game to better understand just how much data a potential attacker could access. Through a 30-person study of VR usage, the researchers – Vivek Nair (UCB), Gonzalo Munilla Garrido (TUM), and Dawn Song (UCB) – created a framework for assessing and analyzing potential privacy threats. They identified more than 25 examples of private data attributes available to potential attackers, some of which would be difficult or impossible to obtain from traditional mobile or web applications. The metaverse that is rapidly becoming a part of our world has long been an essential part of the gaming community. Interaction-based games like Second Life, Pokemon Go, and Minecraft have existed as virtual social interaction platforms. The founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, and many other security experts have lately been vocal about Meta’s impact on data privacy. Since the core concept is similar, it is possible to determine the potential data privacy issues apparently within Meta.

There has been a buzz going around the tech market that by the end of 2022, the metaverse can revive the AR/VR device shipments and take it as high as 14.19 million units, compared to 9.86 million in 2021, indicating a year-over-year increase of about 35% to 36%. The AR/VR device market will witness an enormous boom in the market due to component shortages and the difficulty to develop new technologies. The growth momentum will also be driven by the increased demand for remote interactivity stemming from the pandemic. But what will happen when these VR or metaverse headsets start stealing your precious data? Not just headsets but smart glasses too are prime suspect when it comes to privacy concerns.

Continue reading “Metaverse Headsets and Smart Glasses are the Next-gen Data Stealers” »

Microsoft’s big defense contract that looks to supply the US Army with modified HoloLens AR headsets isn’t going so well. As first reported by Bloomberg, the Senate panel that oversees defense spending announced significant cuts to the Army’s fiscal 2023 procurement request for the device.

Microsoft announced last year it had won a US Army defense contact worth up to $22 billion to develop an Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), a tactical AR headset for soldiers based on HoloLens 2 technology.

Now the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee announced it’s cut $350 million from the Army’s procurement plans for IVAS, leaving around $50 million for the device. The subcommittee cites concerns based around the program’s overall effectiveness.

If used improperly, the metaverse could be more divisive than social media and an insidious threat to society and even reality itself.