iMyth

Tag: AR/VR Technologies

  • Google Releases Real-time Hand Tracking

    Google Releases Real-time Hand Tracking

    In a recent web-article on Road to VR: Google hand tracking, I found out about a technology Google has just made available to the public called, BlazePalm, which is part of their MediaPipe, an open source cross-platform framework for developers looking to build processing pipelines to handle perceptual data, like video and audio. BlazePalm is a new approach to hand perception which provides high-fidelity hand and finger tracking via machine learning, which can infer 21 3D ‘keypoints’ of a hand from just a single frame.

    21 Key Point Tracking

    Google Research engineers Valentin Bazarevsky and Fan Zhang describe their work in their full blogpost . While I have not read the full blogpost myself, Bazarevsky and Zhang describe, “Whereas current state-of-the-art approaches rely primarily on powerful desktop environments for inference, our method achieves real-time performance on a mobile phone, and even scales to multiple hands.” A few of the major points from the blogpost are:

    • The BlazePalm technique is touted to achieve an average precision of 95.7{76c5cb8798b4dc9652375d1c19c86d53c1d1411f4e030dd406aa284e63c21817} in palm detection, researchers claim.
    • The model learns a consistent internal hand pose representation and is robust even to partially visible hands and self-occlusions.
    • The existing pipeline supports counting gestures from multiple cultures, e.g. American, European, and Chinese, and various hand signs including “Thumb up”, closed fist, “OK”, “Rock”, and “Spiderman”.
    • Google is open sourcing its hand tracking and gesture recognition pipeline in the MediaPipe framework, accompanied with the relevant end-to-end usage scenario and source code, here.
    Google Hand Tracking Indoors

    While this is an interesting technology geared towards the mobile community, I feel it has far greater impact into the AR/VR/MR communities as well. First, this looks like some pretty decent hand recognition technology being made available to the entire community, free of charge. While this may have deep financial impact to companies such as Leap Motion, I feel it democratizes the hand recognition world. While I will need to reserve judgement until I see the technology in action but this may have even better performance than Leap Motion and without the purchase of expensive external hardware.

    Google Hand Tracking Outdoors

    Being able to implement hand tracking into a VR experience today was only an expensive pipe dream. But now, with a bit of time and ingenuity, this technology can be brought to real-time VR without expensive hardware and software. As the researchers continue to work on refining and tightening their technology, I can’t help but wonder if other tracking barriers, such as facial tracking, are also in the verge of crumbling!

    Multiple Hand Tracking

  • Smell-O-Vision Is Here!

    There has been a ton of VR activity the last couple of weeks. The Tech community is going crazy. Just as I had envisioned it years ago, the wave is breaking! With the seeming commercial success of one VR application; Occulus, Hololens, we will see an influx of money flowing to the technological development of the other sense.

    As expected, Smell-O-Viosn has made its footstamp.

    Although just a kickstarter, FeelReal is just the first of non-visual haptic feedback systems. There will be more for sure. I’ll need to dig deep into the Raconteur coffers and throw them a bone.

  • Cautionary Words from Magic Leap

    In a recent article posted on Gamasutra, “only safe way forward,” the CEO from Magic Leap, Rony Abovitz, tries to spin fear into the developers of AR/VR devices. In a nutshell, he says that AR/VR system where the eye looks at a monitor just centimeters away from the eye, may cause a neurological change. I’m not not sure what it meant by “neurological change.” He goes on to say that Magic Leap’s technology of creating tiny projectors to shine light into the eyes of the user is the only safe way to go.

    The full context of the information can be found in the Reddit, “Ask Me Anything” column. The exchange is quite lengthy and I honestly have not had an opportunity to explore it thoroughly.

    However, I am concerned, not only by the “ask Me anything” column but by the meaning of the gamasutra post.  Rony Abovitz charges right out of the gates spinning a web of fear and discrediting other technologies in favor of his own. It is true Magic Leap is shrowded in a veil of mystery. No one knows if there is any research data to support his claims. Similarly, he is making claims based on a product which does not exist yet and may not available yet for some time. This concerns me not only as a developer but as an investor and consumer myself.

    I am wise to the ploys of marketing fear. We live in a fear based society. 9/11, fabricated or not, has done nothing but install the seed of fear into American’s minds. News agencies pray on this. Smart businesses exploit this fear based atmosphere and promote their product as a solution to the un-yet discovered Jabberwocky.

    Magic Leap may have a stellar product on its hands. However, by initially exploiting fear into the public, I am immediately turned off. Immersive AR/VR, storyworlds and experiences are an amaizing new media that will challenge, in a good way, the definition of being human. Exploiting fear based environments tells me there is only concern of a mediocre product and the only method to safe face is bring everyone down with them.

    Not me, thank you.