The company built on the fundamental technologies used in Tango, another AR platform by Google, but ARCore is scalable across the Android ecosystem as it doesn’t require any additional hardware.

The new AR platform has been rolled out to Google Pixel and Samsung S8 which run on Android 7.0 Nougat and above.

Google is working with manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, LG, ASUS and other major smartphone makers for quality and performance checks.

ARCore, which works with ‘Java/OpenGL’, ‘Unity’ and ‘Unreal’ technologies mainly focuses on three features—motion tracking, environmental understanding and light estimation.

The tech giant has also built ‘Blocks’ and ‘Tilt Brush’ applications for creation of 3D content for use in AR apps.

Last month, Apple had unveiled its ARKit platform focussing on augmented reality applications at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, to allow developers to build apps that could place virtual content on top of real-world scenes.

IANS

Picture courtesy: Alamy

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“Augmented reality is a technology that combines computer-generated images on a screen with a real object or scene,” said researcher Koichi Ueda of Osaka Medical College, Japan.

“We sought to develop a sophisticated yet simple and modifiable AR technique for use during plastic and reconstructive surgery,” Ueda said.

The researchers used a high-definition digital camera to capture 3D image of the facial surface and computed tomography scans to obtain digital information on the underlying facial bones for each patient.

These digital data were then manipulated to create 3D simulations of the ideal final results.

For example, in a patient with a fractured cheekbone, the reconstruction was simulated by obtaining and reversing an image of the opposite, uninjured bone.

Using a pair of commercially available smart glasses, the surgeon was able to superimpose the 3D digital simulation image of the desired appearance over the patient’s face during surgery.

The group used free, open source software products to solve various technical problems, including manipulating and displaying the 3D simulations and lining them up (registration) with the surgical field.

Ueda, Daisuke Mitsuno, and their colleagues from Osaka Medical College described their preliminary experience with AR system in patients undergoing reconstructive facial surgery.

The AR system helped in planning and confirming reconstruction of the underlying facial bones, for example, in a patient with a congenital bone development disorder and another patient with a complex facial fracture.

In all cases, the 3D simulation of the body surface provided a visual reference of the final facial appearance.

With each new case, the group made additional technical refinements to address limitations of the AR system.

Although the experimental system was not actually used to guide surgery in this initial experience, it helped in visualising the planned correction and confirming the final outcome.

IANS

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Google has provided British news agency Press Association $805,000 to build software that will gather, automate and write nearly 30,000 local stories a month.

Dubbed as “Radar” (Reporters And Data And Robots), the software will “automate local reporting with large public databases from government agencies or local law enforcement”.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has introduced an automated reporting system “Soccerbot” to produce news on football games.

Associated Press and Thomson Reuters are using machine learning algorithms to write stories and The New York Times plans to automate its comment moderation.

So whose jobs are at stake as AI-powered software becomes common in the newsroom?

“For simple, factual-based news reporting and gathering—it is possible for AI-powered bots to do that. However, it’s less likely for point-of-view type of stories or feature articles that require more human input,” said Xiaofeng Wang, Senior Analyst at global research firm Forrester.

Personalised communication at scale is one of the strengths that bots can deliver on more efficiently.

“There are already bots designed for research purposes, but they act more like assistants to humans. When designing these bots, humans can define the purpose clearly and imagine a personality for it but the AI technology today still has limitations,” Wang told IANS.

Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, researchers at the University of Oxford, have predicted that the combination of robotics, automation, AI and machine learning would impact journalists too, among others.

According to a survey by the University of Oxford and Yale University, AI would outperform humans in many activities in the next 10 years, such as translating languages (by 2024) driving a truck (by 2027), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053).

“There are dynamic changes happening and we as journalists can see that. AI and robots will write stories in the future and they will get better at doing it as humans will fine tune it,” noted Ramesh Menon, a senior journalist and author.

“But the best stories will come from writer-journalists who can put in fine detail, empathy, drama, colour and analysis into their stories. What is good is that we can tomorrow get robots to do the routine stuff that today takes 80 per cent of the journalists’ time,” Menon told IANS.

This can help reporters and editors concentrate on big ticket stories that require a lot of footwork in terms of getting to the right people, getting them to talk, analysing the present and even talk of the way forward, he emphasised.

Researchers claim that there is a 50 per cent chance that machines will outperform humans in all tasks within 45 years.

Yonhap’s “Soccerbot” would write stories related to the English Premier League (EPL) football tournament.

The system had a successful test in covering all games of the 2016-17 EPL season. It produced a total of 380 automatic experimental articles, each within one or two seconds of a game’s end.

The “Radar” software project at Press Association, scheduled to be launched in early 2018, will hire five journalists who will help identify datasets and curate and edit news articles generated by “Radar”.

According to Rajeev Vaid, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder, machine Intelligence platform Kognetics, AI is now being used by leading global media houses for automation of press coverage.

“In future, we expect to see a wide-scale use of automated systems to analyse content quickly, in real time, and produce insights in a consumable and usable format to the journalists,” Vaid told IANS.

The initial impact of AI on journalism would be seen at four levels: Content gathering, content creation, moderation and scale.

“AI can be used to scan through structured and unstructured news corpus to gather information restricted to an area, territory or region. Similarly, it can be used to disseminate content to a targeted section with local news via Internet, social and print media,” Vaid stressed.

For Atul Rai, CEO and Co-Founder, Staqu, a Gurgaon-based AI startup, AI could be used in most of the domains which are data excessive but identifying fake news is another big challenge today for humans as well as bots.

“Media is a domain where plenty of data is collected and created and, therefore, it is easier to use these data points to create stories. I would reiterate that the problem set is not to create news or content but is filtering out the malicious, fake and rumoured content or news,” Rai told IANS.

As the media fraternity prepares for a new reality, the news business would only ramp up incorporating the AI-based tools into the newsroom.

“Though many of us are apprehensive today, it may not be such a bad thing. Good journalists will always have jobs; no one can replace them in the world of tomorrow as they would be needed more than ever,” Menon said.

For Wang, AI would help journalists work more efficiently if they know how to use (not create) these bots. “Bots are not ready to replace journalists yet. Replacing the journalist’s assistant? Maybe,” she added.

IANS

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The promise of augmented and virtual reality was a big focus of Facebook’s annual conference for developers on Tuesday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the gathering of programmers and other tech folks by talking about augmented reality tools he envisions on Facebook.

Augmented reality involves the overlay of computer-generated images into real-world surroundings. Zuckerberg said new phone-based applications might let you create a three-dimensional scene from a single two-dimensional photo or splatter the walls of your house with colorful digital art. (You’d see the digital additions by looking “through” your phone at the augmented physical world.)

MAKING CHORES MORE INTERESTING

Facebook executives stressed that the technology is still in its early stages, and that the “journey to the future of augmented reality is just 1 percent finished,” as Deb Liu, vice president of platform and marketplaces, put it.

Zuckerberg envisions the marriage of augmented reality and Facebook’s camera feature enabling people to make even mundane chores, like doing the dishes, look entertaining with digital effects. Of course, it could also result in people staring into their smartphones even more intently as they marvel at an alternate reality instead of their actual surroundings.

“Over time, I think this is going to be a really important technology that changes how we use our phones,” Zuckerberg predicted.

Facebook also launched a virtual world, called Facebook Spaces, designed to let users of its Oculus Rift VR headset hang out with avatar versions of their friends in a virtual world. It’s the first time the company has connected the Rift to its social network in a meaningful way, though it’s a development Zuckerberg hinted at when the company bought Oculus back in 2014 for $2 billion.

COMING YOUR WAY … EVENTUALLY

While the new tools and features are impressive, analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research cautioned that that “most of them won’t be in users’ hands anytime soon.”

That’s especially true for the Spaces app, since relatively few of Facebook’s 1.9 billion members are using Oculus’s VR headset, which sells for about $500 and requires an expensive computer to make it work.

But Facebook could still have the edge on rivals such as Snapchat, which also launched some augmented reality features on Tuesday, likely to coincide with Facebook’s news. “Facebook has the resources to move fast in this area and the audience to spread those features much more widely than Snapchat,” Dawson wrote in a brief research note.

Snap representatives did not immediately respond to an email for comment on Tuesday afternoon.

Facebook’s focus on smartphones over high-tech glasses or headsets makes sense given how familiar they are, said Gartner analyst Brian Blau. “People already have cameras and are used to having fun and being creative with them,” he said. “This will give people a chance to experience augmented reality in a way that isn’t so scary or off-putting.”

Until the past year or so, it seemed like it would be at least another decade before augmented reality would have a chance to become a widely used technology, said Ficus Kirkpatrick, Facebook’s director of engineering. But advances in image and object recognition, along with the ubiquity of smartphone cameras, “has put us on the course to bring augmented reality,” Kirkpatrick said in an interview.

CHATTING WITH COMPANIES

Facebook also announced a bevy of updates to Messenger, its increasingly independent messaging app.

Messenger head David Marcus claims the app has become the de facto “white pages” of messaging, since people can find and chat with friends without knowing their phone number. Now, Messenger wants to do the same for businesses, creating a “yellow pages” of sorts that let companies communicate with their customers.

Messenger will also let people chat with outside businesses as a group. That would, for instance, allow groups of friends to share Spotify playlists or to make a restaurant reservation through OpenTable that keeps everyone on the same page. The idea is simplify what might otherwise require a flurry of texts and sharing of links.

CLEVELAND MURDER

Zuckerberg also briefly addressed a tragedy that took place Monday, when a man posted video of a murder on Facebook. That raised questions about Facebook’s ability to monitor gruesome material on its site.

The Facebook founder said his company has “a lot of work” to do on this front.—AP

Image: AP

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Unlike Virtual Reality, which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but hopefully allows an improvement on what is happening presently, Cook said in the interview.

But the Apple CEO stopped short of detailing what the company would do with AR.

“I regard it as a big idea like the smartphone. The smartphone is for everyone, we don’t have to think the iPhone is about a certain demographic, or country or vertical market: it’s for everyone. I think AR is that big, it’s huge,” Cook said.

“I view AR like I view the silicon here in my iPhone, it’s not a product per se, it’s a core technology,” he added.

This is, however, not the first time Cook spoke favorably of AR.

Virtual reality “probably has a lower commercial interest over time” and that “augmented reality is the larger of the two, probably by far” technology website The Verge quoted Cook as saying last year.

The Virtual Reality Society (VRS), an information and news resource for virtual reality and its related technologies, describes augmented reality as a technology that takes the real world of the present and projects digital imagery and sound into it whereas virtual reality immerses your senses completely in a world that only exists in the digital realm.—IANS

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