After debuting its virtual Pocket Gallery last year with the works of Johannes Vermeer, Google Arts & Culture has released a sequel that brings even more artists into your home via augmented reality.
Available in the Google Arts & Culture app for iOS and Android, “The Art of Color” features 33 famous paintings from around the world organized into wings by color palette, with Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh among the featured artists.
Like the Vermeer gallery, users can anchor a miniature version of the virtual gallery in their physical environment via ARKit or ARCore.
To access “The Art of Color” feature, first open the app, then click on the camera icon button located at the bottom of the app. The next menu will show you a menu including the Pocket Galley option. Once you click on the Pocket Gallery menu option you’ll be prompted to look find a well-lit surface upon which to place the virtual gallery.
Once that tracking is done, you can then tap on the “Art of Color” icon, located at the bottom of the screen, and download the new feature. When that’s done, just tap the Enter button and you’ll be immersed in a virtual gallery in your real world location. The experience almost becomes a VR experience, except users can still see the real world through the exit doors of the gallery.
Once immersed in the gallery, users can walk around the virtual halls to view works of art more closely or double-tap to transport themselves to various wings of the digital museum. Also, tapping on a painting brings up a card with more information on the piece.
“One of the goals of the Google Arts & Culture team is to find new or unexpected ways to bring people closer to art. From renowned masterpieces to hidden gems, ‘The Art of Color’ brings together artworks like Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘Red Cannas’ and Amrita Sher-Gil’s ‘Mother India’ or Hokusai’s ‘South Wind, Clear Dawn,’” said Andy Joslin, design lead for Google Arts & Culture, in a blog post.
While Google has begun using augmented reality in many of its existing products, like Google Maps and Google Search, its seems like the Google Arts & Culture team has gone “all in” on AR, so much so that they’ve consolidated all of the AR tools under the Camera tab in the app.
In recent years, the Google Arts & Culture initiative has been best known for its VR experiments, but augmented reality is increasingly front and center for the team, including an Art Projector tool that brings life-sized individual works of art into the user’s personal space.
Outside of its mobile app, the team has also partnered with other organizations to tell their stories in augmented reality. For example, the team assisted CERN in using AR to explore the Big Bang. The Google team also spearheaded the Notable Womenproject, which featured an experience that used AR to digitally insert historically famous women into real currency.
Despite these wide ranging uses, it appears that showing off art in AR through a mobile app is becoming one of Google’s favorite palettes for immersive experimentation. And, until teleportation becomes a thing, it’s the only way to see the world’s most famous works of art in one space.
Dal palco dell’evento Inspire 2019 organizzato da Microsoft e in scena in questi giorni a Las Vegas, Julia White (Corporate Vice President di Azure) si è rivolta ai presenti in sala descrivendo in giapponese di una nuova tecnologia sviluppata. Julia White, però, non parla la lingua del Sol Levante. Lo ha fatto per lei il suo ologramma, un complesso e dettagliato modello tridimensionale che ne ha replicato fedelmente le fattezze, la voce, i movimenti e persino i vestiti.
Un ologramma per tradurre ciò che diciamo
È il frutto dell’incontro tra la Mixed Reality del visore HoloLens di seconda generazione e gli algoritmi di intelligenza artificiale gestiti sui server cloud dell’infrastruttura Azure. Per il rendering del parlato è stata impiegata la sintesi vocale di un sistema text-to-speech basato su rete neurale. È bene precisare che la conversione da essere umano a ologramma non avviene in tempo reale, ma necessita di uno scan preventivo del corpo nonché della registrazione di quanto far pronunciare allo speaker virtuale. Detto questo, la resa visibile nella demo qui sotto risulta piuttosto convincente.
HoloLens 2, annunciato nei mesi scorsi in occasione del MWC 2019 di Barcellona, è al momento un’esclusiva dell’ambito business. Entro fine anno arriverà anche la Developer Edition, accessibile dagli sviluppatori allo stesso prezzo di 3.500 dollari (o 99 dollari al mese). L’intento di Microsoft è quello di spingere l’evoluzione della Mixed Reality per avere successo laddove la realtà virtuale e quella aumentata hanno parzialmente fallito, arrivando a offrire non solo concept o esercizi di stile, ma prodotti e servizi che possano risultare realmente utili sia per i professionisti sia nel segmento consumer.
Players can be virtually splashed by a whale and chat with a hobbit. Credits: Air New Zealand
Air New Zealand is taking tourism promotion to the tabletop with a new augmented reality board game.
The Air New Zealand Fact or Fantasy Game of New Zealand sees players wear Magic Leap One headsets to view and interact with a 3D map of Aotearoa.
Using Magic Leap technology, users can virtually watch the growth of a kauri tree, interact with a rather grumpy hobbit and get splashed by a breaching whale.
The game was on display at the first L.E.A.P conference in Los Angeles this week.
Magic Leap’s technology works by layering digital objects onto the real world so that light enters the eye as it would with a real object. This means users can see detail both up close and from afar.
Air NZ has been working with the creative team at Framestore for the last 18 months to create its board game.
The airline’s Jodi Williams says it’s important Air NZ continues to discover new technologies to improve the customer experience.
“By getting in early and being both a developer and creator, we have been able to test and learn, creating an incredible platform,” she says.
Ms Williams also says the Magic Eye technology may be used to “reframe customers’ perceptions of the physical cabin environment”.
The Air New Zealand Fact or Fantasy Game of New Zealand can be played by four people and is aimed at educating and promoting New Zealand as a destination.
Unlike VR, when you’re talking about augmented reality, describing what an experience is like can be incredibly difficult — primarily because the experiences are even more contextual than relatively static virtual worlds that don’t involve real-world settings.
In AR, everything is about how “you” see things interacting with your real environment. Such is the case with what I’m calling the most important demonstration of Magic Leap technology to date in the form of an AI assistant called Mica.
Together, the team described a world in which a Magic Leap user will be able to interact with intelligent assistants in the form of fully realized augmented reality humans that can recognize your position in a room, as well as items in that room. Having mapped the area and your position within it, the AI assistant will then interact with you to help you do any number of things.
For example, as detailed in the presentation, the AI assistant might scan the Magic Leap One wearer’s eyes to detect his mood and then suggest an appropriate song to play through the home’s music system. Similarly, the AI assistant my access the Magic Leap One user’s preferences to adjust things such a the level of light in a room at a certain time of day.
We’re already becoming accustomed to such interactions on the audio plane via digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, and, to a lesser extent, Apple’s Siri. But what Magic Leap is describing is putting an even more robust and responsive version of such a digital assistant in the form of a human that inhabits the same space as you, thus taking the assistant metaphor to its highest level. It sounds and looks a bit like science fiction, but it’s not.
What Magic Leap is describing is so close to reality, the company now feels comfortable enough to offer demonstrations of a rudimentary version of the dynamic at work with the Magic Leap One in conjunction with its intelligent assistant Mica.
The result is a stunning experience that takes AR into brand new and exciting territory.
I met Mica for the first time earlier this week. And if you get a chance to meet her, she will fundamentally change how your view the Magic Leap One and augmented reality in general.
When Magic Leap’s team brought me into an empty room hidden deep in the bowels of an LA event center, I didn’t know what to expect. The space was designed to look like a normal room, complete with a table, two chairs, and other furniture situated around the table. Nothing looked particularly futuristic or tech-enabled, so I wasn’t expecting much. Wow, was I wrong.
Upon donning the Magic Leap One, I’m greeted by a virtual woman (Mica) sitting at the very real wooden table. Then, Mica, with an inviting smile, gestures for me to join her and sit in the chair opposite her. I oblige, and then a very weird interaction begins — she starts smiling at me, seemingly looking for a reaction.
I’ll admit, I deliberately avoided smiling (though it was really hard, Mica seems so nice) and kept a poker face in an attempt to see if I could somehow throw the experience off by not doing the expected, that is, returning the smile.
Undaunted, Mica continued to look into my eyes and go through a series of “emotions” that, surprisingly, made me feel a bit guilty about being so stoic.
It’s at this point that I should mention that she doesn’t speak yet, so all of our interactions were conducted in silence, and instead of using words, she communicated using gestures, eye moments, and various body language. At first, I thought this might be a limitation, but retrospect, I think this served to make the experience even more impactful.
That would have been enough to mildly impress me, but what came next was the kicker. She then pointed to a real wooden picture frame on the table, gesturing for me to hang it on a pin on the wall next to us. I did as asked, and… it was the eurekamoment. This was a virtual human sitting at a real world table and she just got me to change something in the real world based on her direction.
But then it got better. Once I’d hung the empty frame, Mica got up (she’s about five feet six inches tall) and began writing a message inside the frame, which in context looked about as real as if an actual person had begun writing on the space.
Alas, I don’t remember what the message was (honestly, I was too blown away by what was happening), but I’m assuming it was somewhat profound, as Mica then looked to me in a way that seemed to ask that I consider the meaning of the message. After a few beats, the life-sized, augmented reality human walked out of the room. But she didn’t just disappear into a wall in a flurry of sparkly AR dust. Instead, she walked behind a real wall in the room leading to a hallway. It was a subtle but powerful touch that increased the realism of the entire interaction.
As I said earlier, it’s incredibly difficult to describe just how profound this experience was, but if and when it’s made available to the public, you’ll be doing yourself a grave disservice if you pass the opportunity up. `
I’ve been trying to think of tool or app that would compel me to wear the Magic Leap One for an entire day. And while I’ve had the device for months now, I haven’t been able to think of anything that would get me to wear it beyond one hour spurts of activity. That’s all changed now. Although battery life and the experience itself aren’t quite ready for such rigorous and extended use, I could easily see coming home and slipping on the Magic Leap One for the rest of the night if it meant having access to such a fully realized AI assistant such as Mica.
After meeting Mica, I have no doubt that this is what the virtual assistant future will look like for most people in the very near future. It’s not assured that it will be Magic Leap that delivers it, but whichever company does, I think it’s safe to say that Magic Leap was first to show us that future in this particular way, and it’s incredible.
