Lifeboat Foundation

AI plays an important role across our apps — from enabling AR effects, to helping keep bad content off our platforms and better supporting our communities through our COVID-19 Community Help hub. As AI-powered services become more present in everyday life, it’s becoming even more important to understand how AI systems may affect people around the world and how we can strive to ensure the best possible outcomes for everyone.

Several years ago, we created an interdisciplinary Responsible AI (RAI) team to help advance the emerging field of Responsible AI and spread the impact of such work throughout Facebook. The Fairness team is part of RAI, and works with product teams across the company to foster informed, context-specific decisions about how to measure and define fairness in AI-powered products.

Microsoft won a nearly $22 billion contract to supply U.S. Army combat troops with its augmented reality headsets.

Microsoft and the Army separately announced the deal Wednesday.

The technology is based on Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets, which were originally intended for the video game and entertainment industries.

All of which would be nice and handy, but clearly, privacy and ethics are going to be a big issue for people — particularly when a company like Facebook is behind it. Few people in the past would ever have lived a life so thoroughly examined, catalogued and analyzed by a third party. The opportunities for tailored advertising will be total, and so will the opportunities for bad-faith actors to abuse this treasure trove of minute detail about your life.

But this tech is coming down the barrel. It’s still a few years off, according to the FRL team. But as far as it is concerned, the technology and the experience are proven. They work, they’ll be awesome, and now it’s a matter of working out how to build them into a foolproof product for the mass market. So, why is FRL telling us about it now? Well, this could be the greatest leap in human-machine interaction since the touchscreen, and frankly Facebook doesn’t want to be seen to be making decisions about this kind of thing behind closed doors.

Continue reading “Facebook’s upcoming AR wrist controllers will hijack your nerves” »

TL;DR: Last week, we kicked off a three-part series on the future of human-computer interaction (HCI). In the first post, we shared our 10-year vision of a contextually-aware, AI-powered interface for augmented reality (AR) glasses that can use the information you choose to share, to infer what you want to do, when you want to […].

“NFTs can go into an augmented reality, 3D asset space,” contemporary artist Krista Kim told CNBC.

Facebook is showing off its mind-reading wrist device and an augmented reality keyboard that it is working on as it prepares to release its smart glasses.

TOWARDS a METAMATERIALLY-BASED ANALOGUE SENSOR FOR TELESCOPE EYEPIECES jeremy batterson.

(NB: Those familiar with photography or telescopy can skip over the “elements of a system,” since they will already know this.)

Continue reading “Navy engineer devises new way to enhance night vision for ground forces” »

Smart contact lenses are finally becoming a reality. And the future of this intriguing technology is nothing like what you might expect.

Today, at a special AR/VR focused event held inside its virtual reality community platform Altspace, Microsoft showcased a new product aiming to provide their AR HoloLens platform and VR Windows Mixed Reality platform with a shared platform for meetings.

The app is called Microsoft Mesh and it gives users a cross AR/VR meeting space to interact with other users and 3D content, handling all of technical hard parts of sharing spatial multi-player experiences over the web. Like Microsoft’s other AR/VR apps, the sell seems to be less in the software than it is in enabling developers to tap into one more specialization of Azure, building their own software that builds on the capabilities. The company announced that AltspaceVR will now be Mesh-enabled.

In the company’s presentation, they swung for the fences in showcasing potential use cases, bringing in James Cameron, the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil and Pokémon Go developer Niantic.