Monthly Archives: July 2022

Retired pathologist Lily Mauricio climbed to the summit of Mount Everest recently to bond with her daughter, who decades earlier, when she was in her mid-20s, had reached an Everest base camp 18,000 feet above sea level. The younger Mauricio shares her mothers name but goes by the nickname Ditas.

Though shes a seasoned climber herself, the elder Mauricio, now a 78-year-old living in the White Sands assisted living community in La Jolla, California, scaled the worlds tallest mountain virtually.

To do so, Mauricio donned a virtual reality (VR) headset provided to White Sands by Rendever, a Somerville, Massachusetts, company in theAARP Innovation Labs AgeTech Collaborative portfolio.Rendever has deployed VR headsetsin more than 400 older adult living facilities across the United States, Canada and Australia in the past five years.

Courtesy: Brenda Zielinski of White Sands La Jolla

I shared this experience mentally and with her, Mauricio said of Ditas. It was very moving. It was awesome. It was so realistic. You could see a panoramic view of everything below, above, to the right, to the left.

Some older adults are embracing VR to overcome the physical, mental and social challenges that come with aging. Theyre using VR for attending concerts, confronting phobias, doing physical therapy, exercising, playing games, rekindling memories,traveling to exotic localesand, yes,connecting socially.

The social part may seem counterintuitive, considering fully immersive virtual reality experiences begin when a person shuts out the outside world by placing goggles or a headset on their noggin.

VR knocks down every single barrier an older adult may have in experiencing the world, and it does that in a way that really beautifully allows seniors to check off bucket list items, says Kyle Rand, Rendevers chief executive. But more important is this missing ingredient: They get to do it together.

While VR is carving out a place in assisted living settings, theres also a push to reach older adults at home. In August, Dallas startup MyndVR will be launching a VR kit with HTC Vive Flow goggles, a companion tablet for caregivers or family, and access to a library of company-produced and licensed VR content.

Users can peer down at Earth from the International Space Station, ride a zipline or watch an intimate Broadway performance of The Lion King, among other fare. The cost is $495 for the glasses under a current promotion, plus $20 a month for the content; the price climbs to $645 with the tablet.

MyndVRs library also includes cognitive apps. In one, a person must correctly identify the source of sounds played in a kitchen, such as water running in the sink.

In Westchester County, New York, 67-year-old singer Nenad Bach regularly plays ping-pong virtually via the Eleven Table Tennis app on a Meta (Oculus) Quest headset. Its very social, because youre talking to the whole world, says Bach, who has competed against players in Africa, Canada, Germany, the Philippines and across the U.S.

Courtesy: Metas Community Voices film series

Bach, whos been diagnosed with Parkinsons disease, still performs in person, and he plays real ping-pong too, as a form of physical therapy. Some things are even better [in VR], because you dont need to pick up the ball from the floor, he says. You just press a button and its in your hand.

Stephen Harris, 39, used to bond with his dad, Jim, 76, over putt-putt golf, but thats no longer possible because his father has Alzheimers. Instead, father and son, who both live in Denver, play the Walkabout Mini Golf game on Quest.

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Virtual Reality Looks to Bring People Together - AARP

Tucked away in a gray state government building in downtown Baton Rouge, a vibrant world of virtual reality has come to life.

Developers and designers with FastStart, Louisiana Economic Developments workforce training program, have created a series of virtual reality training programs for ExxonMobil Baton Rouge. The petrochemical giant asked FastStart to help build the digital modules to train its workforce on the technical processes at its soon-to-be expanded polyolefins plant on Scenic Highway.

The programs lean heavily on the reality part of virtual reality. The 3-D worlds capture the sprawling nature of the winding pipelines and towers at ExxonMobils facilities, and they feature enough rust and chipped paint to make the environment seem real.

FastStarts team spent Monday morning in a ninth-floor studio at the Iberville Building testing an ExxonMobil module that is being adapted into an educational tool for the Louisiana Community and Technical College System. The module takes users through a delicate process with dozens of steps that can lead to catastrophic failure following a single slip-up.

We want them to see that real world, said Jeff Elliott, FastStarts senior manager of creative solutions.

Spurred both by FastStart and a healthy interactive design community in south Louisiana, the use of virtual reality for training programs is on the rise in the states industrial sector. FastStart officials said theyre talking to more companies about virtual reality, though they declined to divulge names because negotiations are ongoing. Some digital firms in the area are also seeing an uptick in business.

All parties involved are optimistic the trend will continue, assuming a wider audience begins to hear about the benefits the technology provides.

I think in Louisiana its still pretty nascent, said Brian Lozes, CEO of Kinemagic, a Metairie-based virtual and augmented reality firm. Its just beginning to get its traction in the state. I think it has a long way to go.

Andrew Rhodes, interactive training specialist at Louisiana Economic Development's FastStart program, uses a virtual reality headset and controllers moved by his hands to test for playthrough and bugs of a 'catalyst mixing and dumping' virtual reality module made for ExxonMobil that is being edited for use at community colleges, Monday, July 18, 2022. FastStart is a big driver of the of development of virtual reality programs for safety and operator training at Louisiana industrial facilities.

Companies with experience in virtual and augmented reality which differs from virtual reality by adding digital imagery to real-world environments were operating here well before ExxonMobils polyolefins expansion began in 2019.

In Baton Rouge, Pixel Dash Studios opened in 2011, and King Crow Studios followed in 2015. Kinemagic started five years ago under an engineering firm before branching out on its own in 2019. Top Right Corner, another New Orleans agency, began working in Louisiana in 2017. All four firms were ExxonMobil vendors.

Years ago, virtual reality wasnt widespread because the technology was too expensive, said Evan Smith, co-founder and creative director of Pixel Dash Studios.

Theyre more cost-effective now, and developers have more access to the hardware, he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated demand for virtual reality, though Lozes called it the most brutal gift because revenue from industrial clients just disappeared overnight in the pandemics early stages. As work-from-home programs endured, more companies saw the benefit of remote learning driven by XR, the industry term for augmented and virtual reality.

XR training is growing exponentially every year, said Cody Louviere, CEO of King Crow Studios. If you look at some market data, youre going to notice very quickly that your location-based training will most likely be replaced with enhanced things like AR, XR, VR in general in the next three to five years.

Louviere said the industrial sector has been using virtual reality for safety training procedures that cant be re-enacted live, like gas leaks.

Some of those companies, they kind of kept it close to the heart and that way they had that competitive advantage, he said. As more and more information gets out, people see the benefit of XR training in general, and theyre starting to reach out.

Mario Vaccari, the director of project operations at Louisiana Economic Development's FastStart program, which is a big driver of the of development of virtual reality programs like the one running on the monitor, at right, for safety and operator training at Louisiana industrial facilities, Monday, July 18, 2022.

Though it certainly isnt the only user of the technology, ExxonMobils entry into virtual reality helped spur the industry further in Louisiana.

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FastStart had experimented with XR technology for a while, but the ExxonMobil project offered an opportunity to put it into action, said Mario Vaccari, the programs director of project operations.

ExxonMobil used a significant portion of its FastStart grant for the polyolefins expansion to build virtual reality training for new and existing employees, said Ken Miller, a retired engineering manager who led the companys virtual reality efforts in Baton Rouge.

The company sought out local firms to help build its training modules. It worked with FastStart to identify eight companies seven of which were based in Louisiana.

We were surprised to find, frankly, that the capability was very, very high but a surprisingly small percentage of their work was coming from the local area and within Louisiana, Miller said.

FastStart partnered with the firms to create about 20 digital training modules for ExxonMobil. They took anywhere from a few months to two years to build based on subject complexity and stakeholder availability.

FastStart and ExxonMobil identified which plant processes needed a training program, then determined which programs would be best suited for VR. From there, FastStart mapped out what those worlds would look like, then brought in the outside firms for programming and interactive expertise.

The purpose of the modules is to train inexperienced employees in a safe environment before they head into potentially hazardous assignments some of which might only happen once a year. Its also meant to engage users in a meaningful, visual way so theyre more likely to retain their teachings.

Youve got to get them engaged, said Elliott, of FastStart. The old school way of doing it in a classroom or just sitting there with a manual, thats really falling away.

Andrew Rhodes, interactive training specialist at Louisiana Economic Development's FastStart program, looks for edits of a 'catalyst mixing and dumping' virtual reality module made for ExxonMobil that is being modified for use at community colleges, Monday, July 18, 2022. FastStart is a big driver of the of development of virtual reality programs for safety and operator training at Louisiana industrial facilities.

Miller hopes the modules built in Louisiana can be adapted for the corporations other sites, as well as for high school and college students interested in industrial careers.

ExxonMobil corporate officials agreed. The company is already using VR in one way or another at its Baytown, Beaumont and Corpus Christi sites in Texas.

Virtual reality is relatively new in the whole process of enterprise scale, said Kyle Daughtry, digital and extended realities architect at ExxonMobils headquarters. Were doing it well. We want to do it better. We want to be able to scale these things out even further.

Other companies are slowly but surely catching on, according to digital firms in Louisiana.

Lozes, of Kinemagic, said his company has also worked with Shell and is in preliminary talks with Marathon, Koch Industries and BASF.

What will help his company, and others, in the future is a faster process. Kinemagic built a platform called Stratus that takes in 3-D models and images from industrial companies to recreate a plant environment virtually. Lozes said his firm no longer builds custom programs from scratch because they take too long.

I think theres a lot of expansion ahead of us with this industry, he said. Louisiana, I think to be frank, is trailing some of the other states in doing this. I dont know thats because of the nature of the state or just because a lot of the customers that we work with, their headquarters are in other places.

Meanwhile, Top Right Corner worked with the University of New Orleans to build a virtual chemistry lab, said Dan Clifton, the companys founder and creative director.

Clifton, who has worked in New York and California, said he senses more support for virtual reality in Louisiana than other states. He credited the FastStart program for identifying best practices to create VR programs.

I think people are really trying to use these new technologies as soon as possible, he said. For us theres been tremendous interest, especially over the past few years.

Read the rest here:

Virtual reality training is growing in Louisianas industrial sector. Will the momentum continue? - The Advocate

James Lozano, left and Stephanie Aliman, right, wear VR headsets as they play the virtual reality game Far Cry at Zero Latency in Vancouver, a 1,900-square-foot space in a mall.Rafal Gerszak/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

At Zero Latency VR arcade in Vancouver, a group of gamers face down a horde of zombies. The group rushes through an abandoned skyscraper, making their way up the floors, dodging, and shooting the undead, all to reach the helicopter on the roof. When they meet the chopper, one of the post-apocalyptic survivors makes a jump for it but falls over. In the real world, they leapt into thin air and onto the floor. But with the free-roam VR game, it felt real.

What shocks first-timers, Zero Latency Vancouver owner Winston Cabell says, is how immersive it really is. You feel like youre a part of it, and not in a 1,900-square-foot space in a West Coast mall. Social media pages for the arcade show videos of users, fully invested in their digital escape, struggling to cross non-existent ramps high in the air or experiencing the shock and horror of monster armies careening toward them.

The availability and accessibility of virtual and augmented reality has accelerated over the past decade as consumer-grade headsets such as the PlayStation VR, the Oculus Meta Quest Two and the HTC Vive Pro 2s full kit system hit the mainstream with retail prices of $299, $459 and $1,849, respectively. These headsets remain a niche gaming product in the eyes of most consumers.

But major investments from tech giants like Google, Meta and Amazon have garnered headlines and stoked public curiosity over the eventual mass adoption of the technology.

Facebook, which formally changed its name to Meta last October, has bet on VR after purchasing the Oculus headset company for US$2-billion in 2014 and announcing a US$10-billion investment in its Reality Labs in 2021.

Metas Project Cambria, announced late last year, will offer an all-in-one VR setup designed for work-related uses. Google previously invested in Google Glass, a set of AR glasses, while Amazon announced an AR virtual try-on function that shows how a new pair of shoes may look on your feet through your phone screen.

Researchers, while thrilled by the potential of VR and believing it to be on the cusp of mainstream saturation, say the technology is still in a stage of experimentation and development.

We have pretty good consumer-grade tech, and now is the time where its going to be really exciting, says Tony Tang, director at University of Torontos RICELab (Rethinking Interaction, Collaboration and Engagement), which studies human-computer interaction and technologies like VR. Still, though, Mr. Tang says, its a bit of a mixed bag.

At this stage, he says, VR and AR dont solve any evident problems that smartphones and computers cant. For many of the things that we do, the phone you have in your pocket is perfectly capable of doing all the things that you want.

However, Mr. Tang acknowledges the same could have been said in the early days of smartphones and touch screens. Lets be honest, many [early apps] were crappy games, but through that we were able to identify what kinds of games would work well on mobile, he says, which ultimately drove the innovations for the apps we use and rely on every day.

You might argue that VR and AR technologies havent found that killer app, that really niche thing that everybody actually needs.

James Lozano helps Stephanie Aliman put on a headset.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail

In the search for that killer app, companies like Meta, Google and others have pursued partnerships with developers and research facilities such as Mr. Tangs RICELab, which received $30,000 from Meta to explore emerging use cases. For example, RICELab member Warren Park is studying how business or academic presentations can be optimized in VR settings. RICELabs $30,000 grant was part of a larger $510,000 Meta sent to 17 labs across the country.

Many of these ideas are going to fail completely, Mr. Tang says, though those failures can lead to future breakthroughs. With other ideas, there could be a little nugget where its like: oh, that might be kind of interesting. And then we build on that.

University of Waterloo professor Lennart Nacke says that while it hasnt reached mainstream, [VR is] thriving in health care, automotive and all of these industries. But to take that step beyond industrial or business-to-business applications and into the consumer realm, he says developers must leverage the immersion of VR with a strong narrative in their game, film or software.

Mr. Nacke, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Games group at Waterloos Games Institute who previously studied animation, draws comparisons between VR and CGI (computer-generated imagery) technology in video games and film. After 20-plus years of innovation and experimentation, it wasnt until the release of Jurassic Park in 1993 that CGI would capture the publics imagination. The film not only earned nearly US$1-billion at the box office but started a dinosaur-themed craze throughout the 90s that would even inspire the naming of the Toronto Raptors.

The seamless blend of advanced technology and gripping narrative propelled interest in CGI beyond the world of developers, programmers and animators and into pop culture. It was one of these aha moments, Mr. Nacke says.

For VR to pierce its way into public consciousness, it must have a similar cultural moment, he explains. But this whole idea of: how do we make the next Jurassic Park moment for consumers? That hasnt happened.

From the printing press to radio, film, television and video games, the public appeal of these technologies has always been rooted in the universal pull of storytelling.

Enabling that storytelling to the best of the ability of that technology is always what pushes forward that technology, Mr. Nacke says.

Original post:

Why virtual reality hasn't hit the mainstream yet - The Globe and Mail

Google AR glasses prototype

Google

Google will test augmented reality prototypes in public settings, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Some prototypes will look like normal glasses and will be equipped with microphones and cameras as well as transparent displays.

The new glasses aren't a product yet and aren't available to the public, but Google wants to test apps like real-time translation or showing the user directions inside glasses lenses, especially in environments like busy intersections.

The tests represent a significant advance in Google's development of augmented reality, a technology that many in Silicon Valley believe could be a major shift in computing like the smartphone and PC before it. Augmented reality superimposes computer-generated images over the real world, unlike virtual reality, which completely immerses the viewer in an artificial world or "metaverse."

By announcing plans to test in public, Google is also trying to get ahead of the kind of privacy concerns that helped sink Google Glass, one of the first augmented reality devices, almost a decade ago.

Google Glass was equipped with a front-facing camera, and critics worried about users recording people without their permission. Glass wearers received a derogatory nickname, and in 2014 a woman wearing the glasses said she was attacked at a San Francisco bar. Eventually, Google repurposed the glasses to focus on business customers rather than consumers.

"It's early, and we want to get this right, so we're taking it slow, with a strong focus on ensuring the privacy of the testers and those around them," Google product manager Juston Payne wrote in the blog post about the new product.

"These research prototypes look like normal glasses, feature an in-lens display, and have audio and visual sensors, such as a microphone and camera," Google said in a support page about the testing.

The device features an LED light that turns on when the glasses are recording image data. Google says the glasses will not record video or take photographs for users to store and view later, but they may capture and use image data to perform functions like identifying objects or showing directions. Testers won't wear the glasses in schools, government buildings, healthcare locations, churches, protests, or other sensitive areas, Google said. The testing will be conducted by "a few dozen Googlers and select trusted testers" and will take place somewhere in the U.S.

Google revealed its AR glasses at its developers conference in May with a focus on translating speech in real time, so that a person would see a foreign language translated in front of their eyes. One Google employee called the glasses "subtitles for the world" during the presentation.

Google is fiercely competing with other tech giants including Apple, Meta, and Microsoft to build the first next-generation augmented reality glasses. All four companies have invested billions in augmented reality software and hardware, hoping for a breakthrough that could enable a new computing platform, but current products have yet to catch on.

"The magic will really come alive when you can use them in the real world without the technology getting in the way," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the announcement.

Apple is reportedly preparing to announce a mixed reality headset as soon as next year. Meta has announced an advanced mixed reality headset that supports augmented reality features releasing later this year. Microsoft's Hololens is the most advanced augmented reality hardware on the market from a big tech company for now.

Originally posted here:

Google will once again test augmented reality glasses in public - CNBC

MetaX has joined the ranks of companies suing social media giant Meta over its name, according to CNN.

MetaX, an immersive reality company founded in 2010, is suing Meta for trademark infringement. The company claims in a lawsuit that Meta "obliterated" the company's business, CNN reported. "Meta's small business stands no chance against the corporate behemoth," the complaint said.

Facebook's parent company changed its name to Meta in October.

Meta declared at the time it would represent the shift to virtual reality and augmented reality, "the next evolution in a long line of social technologies."

The "metaverse" has already struggled with safety and is still in its early stages.

According to CNN, MetaX filed the complaint Tuesday in the Southern District Court of New York and is looking to get an injunction to get Meta to stop using the name.

"Facebook's actions, illegally usurping our name and mark, have not only put our business in jeopardy, but that of the entire industry and the intellectual property rights of the innovators that have helped build it," Justin Bolognin, MetaX's CEO, said in a press release Tuesday.

The suit further argues Meta, even though it tried to say the companies were different, has copied its strategy for events -- and has permanently connected MetaX with "the toxicity that is inextricably linked with the Facebook brand," CNN added.

It's not the first time Meta has been accused of brutally edging out the competition. Virtual reality startups are struggling to sell products that can compete with the $299 headset from Meta, Recode reported in 2021. Meta has also been on a buying spree focused on VR companies, the outlet reported.

Stephanie Llamas, a metaverse researcher, told the outlet that Meta's involvement and approach could also be scaring away startups.

"I've spoken to a lot of developers who feel they don't even have a chance to enter the market because Facebook is buying up the technology that they're trying to develop," she said.

Multiple regulators are looking into the overall issue, sources told Bloomberg in January.

Meta has also been aggressive in pursuing metaverse-related patents, Insider reported in January.

At least one other company with a similar name, Meta Company, planned to sue Meta, Business Standard reported in November. (The company's website says it has "proceeded to file the necessary legal action.") Meta acquired the domain MetaPay.com from MetaBank in December 2021 for $60 million, according to Payments Cards & Mobile.

At Meta's most recent earnings call in April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said a "web version" of the metaverse would come out "later this year." That means you could see it without a VR headset.

The company's stock is down about 46% year to date. "While we're focusing on the biggest opportunities and challenges of today, I think it's important to build the foundation for the next era of social technology as well," Zuckerberg added in the call.

A representative for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Meta-Facebook Sued By Virtual Reality Startup Over Its Name - Entrepreneur