Il medium videoludico si è spesso trovato di fronte a tematiche dal forte peso, molte legate alla violenza e alla presunta crescita sociale inadeguata del bambino. Questa situazione però, con la VR, non si è accentuata, in quanto facente parte ancora di una nicchia non proprio popolare quanto il videogioco stesso, ma ha formato pian piano delle discussioni ancora più complesse, che sono arrivate a toccare temi come la vita di tutti i giorni.
Tra Toy Box e Oculus Touch è ormai possibile interagire online con una persona in maniera incredibilmente diretta, tanto da ridurre le differenze che si potrebbero avere rispetto ad un incontro faccia a faccia, soprattutto considerando il fatto che Oculus Rift adesso è controllato da Facebook, social network che fa della sua componente sociale la sua caratteristica principale; è quindi quello che succederà in futuro? Vivremo in un mondo dove le comunicazioni saranno esclusivamente digitalizzate? Non secondo Sheryl Sandberg, direttore operativo di Facebook.
Possibile che le prossime iterazioni di Toy Box possano rivoluzionare il modo in cui comunicheremo? Durante un evento all’Economic Forum in Davos, Sandberg ha ribadito questa realtà; accompagnata inoltre da Satya Nadella, amministratore delegato di Microsoft, che ha voluto dire la sua nel dibattito: “La realtà virtuale porterà me e Satya a non avere più contatti umani? Quella che chiamano la quarta rivoluzione industriale porterà alla distruzione di tutti i lavori? La mia risposta a tutto ciò è no”. Per espandere ulteriormente le sue motivazioni ha tirato poi in ballo Clouds Over Sidra, un progetto in VR che ci faceva vivere la vita di una bambina siriana: “La realtà virtuale sta venendo utilizzata alla conferenza per mostrare un video chiamato Clouds Over Sidra, il quale racconta la storia di una rifugiata 12enne, descrivendoci la sua vita ed essendo in VR, ci risulta più facile empatizzare e ad avere un’esperienza più immersiva”. La VR quindi non sostituirà la nostra vita sociale e assolutamente non sarà quello il suo obiettivo. Avevate dei dubbi in merito?
Mobile technology a hot topic, while big data and security take a back seat. The customer continues to be the brightest star in retail, according to presenters and exhibitors at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York this week.
Retailers like Kroger and Macy’s presented sessions titled “Getting personal through customer science” and “Delivering personalized shopper journeys.” On the show floor, about 34,000 attendees experienced the latest and greatest in technology designed to help engage customers throughout the purchasing process.
Big data, which has been a strong theme at the show for the last few years, was less prevalent. Hershey’s and American grocer wholesaler Supervalu shared an interesting business case on micro-insights that allow retailers and suppliers to grow business by better understanding shopper motivations.
On the other hand, mobile technology and the concept of the connected consumer was a hot topic. Payment is increasingly added to the mobile conversation, as applications that make transactions easier are being developed and offered to consumer.
Retailers are also seeing benefits from providing unique experiences for their customers, even if those experiences don’t directly lead to a sale. Outreach effort is a critical way to stay relevant to the consumer.
For instance, it may seem counter-intuitive for a supermarket retailer to offer free yoga classes when they don’t typically sell mats or apparel, but these kinds of experiences are becoming all the more important as millennials choose to forgo traditional shopping trips in favour of shopping online.
One session at the conference gave the example of Target’s Cartwheel app, with which shoppers receive personalized deals based on their shopping history and can scan products while in store to see if there are deals available. The presenter, Google’s retail industry director Julie Krueger, said it was a “wonderful way to reward customers and add a little thing to the shopping experience.”
As always, there were a few real innovations presented. Augmented reality, for one, can be best described as incorporating stock images into an actual view on a digital device. For example, adding stock decorations from a catalog to a dinner table for a consumer or enhancing a store aisle set with images of new products or signage. IBM has an app that uses augmented reality technology to provide shoppers with personalized information while browsing the shelves.
Gamification is used by retailers to make otherwise onerous tasks like training and labour scheduling fun. LevelsPro, a start-up from Brooklyn, provides technology that helps retailers engage their employees through the playing of games that provide incentives to work smarter.
One interesting no-show at NRF this year was enterprise security. Last year, after a series of spectacular data breaches, dozens of vendors were promoting the safety of their systems and several more were presenting specific applications that addressed issues like payment fraud and cyber attacks. This year, the issue was barely discussed in the sessions and only a few exhibiters had signage on their booths around the issue, even as cloud solutions that have long worried retailers and other in terms of security have proliferated.
This is certainly the most intuitive way for interaction with any KNX controlled equipment:
– You launch the “realKNX” app on your smartphone and what you see is the camera picture. – Point it at the lamp and directly in the picture the button to switch the device appears.
Augmented reality allows recognition of objects that have been taught by scanning them with the smartphone. An object may be a lamp, a window/shutter/curtain, the outlet of a climate system, a speaker or even the pool in the garden.
Using our realKNX designer, it is possible to assign these real objects to any KNX function of your installation. That’s it!
As soon as an object is recognised with the realKNX app, the relevant information will be visible and the slider/button/text/value will be visible directly in the camera picture.
Interaction is possible and the feedback is immediate.
The technical challenges in streaming a 360 video is huge.
Facebook is preparing for a world in which video is no longer flat.
The social network’s push into virtual reality with its Oculus Rift along with similar initiatives by Microsoft and Google is expected to create a flood of video for the devices. Meanwhile, companies like GoPro FB 4.01% are developing cameras that people can use to film themselves in 360 degrees while skydiving and snowboarding.
To deal with the likely influx of huge video files, Facebook has built its own streaming technology that it says will work quickly and without straining its data centers. The social network discussed some of that innovation at its video technology conference on Thursday, joined by prominent streaming services like Netflix NFLX -1.59% and YouTube.
Facebook executives spent a significant amount of time discussing 360 video, which lets viewers put themselves into the scene and gives them a view in any direction they choose. This 3-D view is considered to be an improvement over the two-dimensional video widely used today.
Three-D videos are closely related to virtual reality, albeit with slight differences, explained Jay Parikh in an interview with Fortune. Virtual reality is more immersive than 360 video in that people can interact with the content itself, he said. For example, in a virtual reality game like the upcoming Minecraft VR game, users can pick up objects and build towers in a virtual environment that seems to surround them.
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In anticipation of its users uploading 360 video to its servers, Facebook FB 4.01% has developed video processing and encoding techniques to help efficiently deliver the images. Because 360 video files are much bigger than for regular video, Facebook had to figure out a way to shrink them to reduce the load on its servers, said Facebook software engineer David Pio.
Part of the reason the files are so big is because of the way the 360 videos are formatted to accommodate the screens of computers and mobile devices. Think of 360 video as being a traditional rectangular image that is stretched and wrapped around an imaginary sphere, so that people can view it at different angles, Pio explained.
However, this creates some problems with how the video looks because some parts appear distorted as the image stretches to accommodate the sphere. Pio likened this to how land near the North and South Poles appears stretched on a globe and doesn’t accurately reflect its true size.
Additionally, stretching makes file sizes larger than they need to be. An excess of pixels end up having to be streamed.
To shave them off, Facebook instead decided to wrap the video around an imaginary square rather than a sphere. Essentially, each side of the square displays a portion of the 360 video and represents a different viewing perspective. Facebook’s video system then stitches the chunks back together and streams it without the distortion and excess imagery.
Facebook has worked on similar techniques to reduce the size of 360 videos when displayed through virtual reality devices like the Oculus. In this case, the 360 video files must be even bigger because the devices require files to be displayed at higher resolutions than traditional flat screens. This bulk results in file sizes that can lead to buffering, or long loading times, for people with slow Internet connections.
To solve this problem, Facebook developed a way to stream the 360 videos to VR devices that involves cutting the video into chunks. Only images in the viewer’s line of sight are streamed.
While gawking at a 360 video of the Eiffel Tower, for example, you’d want the monument to appear clearly while you may not care about how the buildings to the left look because they only appear in your peripheral vision. However, when you move your head, those buildings would appear sharper.
Facebook essentially cuts the video into 30 sections that represent different viewing perspectives of the scene. Additionally, each section has five different resolutions that Facebook’s servers can stream to viewers depending on their Internet connection.
In effect, Facebook’s system automatically streams the right viewing perspective of the video at its highest quality each time a person turns his or her head with the rest of the video streaming in chunks at lower qualities.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based company recently hired VR expert Doug Bowman from Virginia Tech, The Financial Times reported, which TIME has confirmed. Bowman worked at the university as a computer science professor, also serving as director of the institute’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction.
Bowman is an accomplished researcher in the virtual reality space, having received the 2014 Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee technical achievement award from the Institute of of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
The hire is Apple’s latest move signaling it’s exploring possibilities around virtual reality. Apple last year poached a key audio engineer from Microsoft’s HoloLens team, which Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster first pointed out in a research note from August. In May of last year, Apple acquired augmented reality startup Metaio, and in November it purchased motion-capture firm Faceshift.
Industry watchers speculate that the technologies developed by both of these companies could give Apple the assets necessary to create some type of augmented or virtual reality device.
Augmented reality gadgets, such as Microsoft HoloLens or Google Glass, overlay virtual images on top of the real world. Virtual reality differs from augmented reality in that it takes the viewer into a completely virtual environment.
