Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 165
April 19, 2017
Disney wants to launch a ‘Star Wars’ starship luxury resort, and it looks like a fan’s dream
Disney is surveying guests about a possible Star Wars resort hotel experience at Walt Disney World, which would take place on an “actual” Star Wars Starship.
The survey is not being conducted by Disney, but rather by a contracted third party. The survey includes concept art and many details of what the experience would be like…
This all-inclusive, 2-night immersive resort experience at Walt Disney World would include:
The opportunity to experience a 2-day story set in the the Star Wars universe
Be surrounded in a continuous, story-driven entertainment experience as it unfolds over the course of the 2-night stay
Have personal interactions with Star Wars characters, live performers throughout the starship (experience the story or simply observe the action according to personal preference)
Engage in the story with programs such as flight training, ship exploration, lightsaber training, and personalized secret missions (both on the starship and throughout the Star Wars themed planet)
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While staying aboard an all-inclusive luxury “starship” at Walt Disney World, guests will stay in luxury accommodations offering:
All meals during your stay: buffet breakfasts, lunches, & signature evening dining
Featured entertainment & dinner shows
Exclusive park admission to the Star Wars themed land at the Walt Disney World Resort (a new land opening at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in 2019)
Star Wars starship amenities including pool area & water garden, fitness area, on-board cantina, and robotic droid Butlers
As of right now, the experience would be priced at roughly $900 to $1000 per guest.
So basically, in summary, the experience would include…
2 nights in an immersive luxury resort that looks and feels like a starwars space craft (set check-in and check-out dates so everyone is immersed on the same “story” timeline)
Room(s) that accommodate(s) up to 4 people, with an interactive “view” (galaxy or pool/atrium)
Every meal from checking-in on day 1 to check-out on day 3 (5 meals total, including 2 buffet breakfasts, 1 lunch, and 2 signature dinners with evening entertainment)
1 day of Walt Disney World theme park admission to Disney’s Hollywood Studios to visit Star Wars-themed land on day 2
Story-driven entertainment that unfolds over the course of your stay (including live character chance encounters, and the opportunity to watch or enage in the story through things like personalized secret missions, flight training, starship exploration, and lightsaber training)
While this is just a survey at this time, it is worth noting that the presence of concept art and the inclusion of the Star Wars themed land in these plans likely means that this is a pretty serious project at this point. Many of the experiences above also sound very similar to aspects of the the Star Wars land discussed in the panel at Star Wars Celebration Orlando.
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Walt Disney World News Today
These are 4 of the world’s hottest tourist destinations
Mexico, Iceland and Cyprus all experienced a surge in tourism spending in 2016, according to a new report from the World Travel & Tourism Council.
The group’s report also contained something of a surprise: Azerbaijan, which suffered from a currency crash, saw a boost in spending.
Here’s a look at four vacation spots on the upswing:
Mexico
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Foreign visitors spent 24% more pesos in Mexico last year, according to the WTTC.
The country’s tourism industry — the world’s 17th largest — benefited from a weaker peso, which made hotel rooms and travel packages cheaper for foreign visitors and especially Americans.
The currency’s decline against the dollar was driven by worries over President Trump’s supercharged rhetoric toward Mexico. He has pledged to build a new border wall separating Mexico and the U.S., as well as renegotiate a key free trade agreement called NAFTA.
But tourism in Mexico powered ahead, with spending by foreign tourists hitting 382 billion pesos ($20.1 billion) in 2016.
Beyond politics, Mexico is having a major moment in the sun.
Mexico City launched its first ever Day of the Dead moving parade in October after being inspired by the fictional parade in the James Bond film “Spectre.” The country is also welcoming chefs from the world-famous restaurant Noma, who are setting up a pop-up restaurant in Tulum in April and May.
Iceland
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The northern island nation of Iceland continued to expand its tourism base by leaps and bounds, welcoming visitors who were willing to bundle up against the cold, unpredictable weather. Tourism spending in the local currency surged by 27.5% last year, according to the WTTC.
This boosted the local economy, which grew by nearly 5% last year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Iceland has courted tourists through high-profile marketing campaigns and airline offers that encourage people to visit for short stop-over adventures.
The promise of seeing the Northern Lights is a huge attraction, helping the country bring in 373 billion krona ($3.4 billion) in tourism spending last year.
Cyprus
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Cyprus, situated in the eastern Mediterranean, saw tourist spending shoot up by 17% last year to nearly €2.6 billion ($2.8 billion).
Tourists flocked to the island nation because they consider it to be a relative safe haven compared to other European destinations that have experienced a slew of high-profile terrorist attacks.
Tourism spending in France, for example, declined by just over 7% last year following a string of attacks.
Azerbaijan
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Azerbaijan, a country of 10 million people sandwiched between Russia and Iran on the Caspian Sea, saw local currency spending by foreign tourists surge by nearly 71%. Like in Mexico, a much weaker currency has boosted the industry.
“The depreciation of the local currency in 2015 and 2016 have vastly improved the price competitiveness of Azerbaijan as a tourism destination,” said WTTC research director Rochelle Turner.
The country brought in nearly 4.6 billion manat ($2.7 billion) in foreign tourist spending, putting it roughly on par with Cypus.
Azerbaijan has prioritized tourism as it tries to reduce its dependence on oil. WTTC said this led the country to introduce new investments in infrastructure and improve its visitor visa system.
The country’s economy contracted by about 2.4% last year.
Source:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/20/pf/tourism-mexico-iceland-destination/
Google launches Areo, a food delivery & home services app for India
Google seems to have silently launched a new food delivery and home services aggregator called Areo for the India market. The app is available as a free download on the Google Play store and is currently operational in Bengaluru and Mumbai.
Areo aggregates food dishes and home services across various local service providers, allowing users to order food or schedule appointments with a local beautician, electrician, painter, cleaner and plumber among others. The app was first spotted by The Android Soul.
At the time of the writing this article, Areo has signed up partners like UrbanClap and Zimmber for home services and Freshmenu, Box8 & Faasos for food ordering.
Notably missing from the list however are prominent players like Zomato and Swiggy in food delivery and Amazon-backed Housejoy in home services.
One can either search for any specific dish or choose any specific partner to browse through dishes and schedule deliveries by paying online or use cash on delivery. Strangely, we noticed that Google has partnered with TimesofMoney’s DirecPay for online payments on Areo rather than using its own payment solution.
“We are constantly experimenting with ways to better serve our users in India. In this case, Areo makes everyday chores and ordering food easier by bringing together useful local services like ordering food or hiring a cleaner in one place.” a Google spokesperson told in a statement to ETtech.
A Google spokesperson said they are currently not charging partners for this service but they are yet to respond to our queries on how these partners were selected or do they plan to charge these partners in the future.
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Nook 4.7 adds quote sharing, voice search, and several other improvements
At 7.4 by 4.2 by 0.4 inches, the NOOK Tablet 7″ won’t easily fit in a front pocket, but it’s fine for a back pocket; just be careful to not sit on it. And at just a bit over half a pound, it’s about the weight of a paperback, and much more portable than a hardback.
The design is generic: a black plastic rectangle with rounded corners. Still, the many curves makes it comfortable to hold. The size contributes to this, as this is a computer that’s very easy to hold in one hand.
The NOOK Tablet 7″ is well constructed, but it does slightly flex when opposite corners are twisted. This certainly isn’t an excessive amount of flexing, but it’s a reminder that budget tablets like this one aren’t particularly rugged. Still, we’ve dropped our test unit a time or two onto a hardwood floor, and it’s showing no signs of damage, so it certainly isn’t fragile.
Screen
A typical problem of budget tablets is that they have terrible screens. Fortunately, that’s not the case with this Barnes & Noble model at all. It has a 7-inch display at a 1024 by 600 pixel resolution. That works out to be a pixel density of 171 ppi. These numbers translate to a better than adequate experience when reading books, and an acceptable one when watching video, playing games, etc.
Some people feel that a phone makes an adequate ereader, and don’t see the value in a 7-inch tablet. It’s worth noting that the screen area of the NOOK is a bit over 20 square inches, while the iPhone 7’s is just 9.4 sq. in. That’s a lot more reading area.
This is an IPS screen so it offers wide viewing angles. And the backlight is bright enough to make it easy to read out of doors, just not in direct sunlight. In fact, the backlight is so strong those who want to read in bed might consider getting a third-party application to further dim the screen.
The aspect ratio is 16:9, so it’s shaped more like an HDTV than a page of paper. When held horizontally this is ideal for reading two pages of a book, or watching a TV show.
Happily, the NOOK Tablet 7″ includes a microSD card slot, allowing the storage capacity of this device to be expanded. This isn’t really important for those who just want to hold ebooks on this device, as the built-in storage capacity is plenty for that, but those who want to install additional applications will want a microSD card. Even an inexpensive one will add quite a bit of capacity, and the Android OS makes this relatively simple.
A micro-USB port is located on the top of this computer, making it easier to use this device while it’s connected to its charger. But this port can do much more. We successfully tested it with a micro-USB flash drive, and then went so far as to connect it to a USB hub, allowing a keyboard, mouse, and flash drive to be used simultaneously.
The Power and Volume Up/Down buttons on this Barnes & Noble device are all arranged along the right edge. This makes them convenient whether the NOOK Tablet 7″ is being used in portrait or landscape orientation.
The rear-facing 2 MP camera of the NOOK Tablet 7″ is actually surprisingly good, within its limitations. The cameras in budget tablets are often dreadful, but the one Barnes & Noble used is capable of taking good pictures in well-lighted conditions. Even pics in somewhat dim lighting are usable. With no flash, this isn’t the camera for low light pics.
Selfies taken with the front-facing camera aren’t bad either, whether indoors or out.
There’s a single speaker on the back of the NOOK, which doesn’t put out very much volume. It’s usable to watch video or play games in a quiet environment, but anyplace more noisy will require a pair of headphones. Fortunately, a 3.5mm headset port is included.
NOOK Tablet 7″ Performance
The Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet 7″ has a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor at its heart, with 1 GB of RAM. This is a low-end configuration of the type one would expect from a sub-$50 device like this one.
What it means in real-world use is that the computer is just a bit slow. Not unusable slow by any means, but users shouldn’t look for the lightning fast response times offered by tablets that cost 10x as much. Instead, they should expect newly opening applications to take a second or two to be ready to go. Another good indication of performance is that the device takes about a minute to boot up after being completely shut down. A little slow, but acceptable.
The NOOK Tablet 7″ comes with 8 GB of built-in storage, but a large percentage of that permanently taken up by the operating system and bundled applications, leaving just 3.34 GB of storage available to users. As mentioned earlier, this is probably plenty for most people who are just looking for an ebook reader that can check email and do a bit of web access. People who want more should invest in a microSD card; even an $8 one would make this computer more useful.
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How artificial intelligence learns to be racist
Open up the photo app on your phone and search “dog,” and all the pictures you have of dogs will come up. This was no easy feat. Your phone knows what a dog “looks” like.
This and other modern-day marvels are the result of machine learning. These are programs that comb through millions of pieces of data and start making correlations and predictions about the world. The appeal of these programs is immense: These machines can use cold, hard data to make decisions that are sometimes more accurate than a human’s.
But know: Machine learning has a dark side. “Many people think machines are not biased,” Princeton computer scientist Aylin Caliskan says. “But machines are trained on human data. And humans are biased.”
Computers learn how to be racist, sexist, and prejudiced in a similar way that a child does, Caliskan explains: from their creators.
We think artificial intelligence is impartial. Often, it’s not.
Nearly all new consumer technologies use machine learning in some way. Like Google Translate: No person instructed the software to learn how to translate Greek to French and then to English. It combed through countless reams of text and learned on its own. In other cases, machine learning programs make predictions about which résumés are likely to yield successful job candidates, or how a patient will respond to a particular drug.
Machine learning is a program that sifts through billions of data points to solve problems (such as “can you identify the animal in the photo”), but it doesn’t always make clear how it has solved the problem. And it’s increasingly clear these programs can develop biases and stereotypes without us noticing.
Last May, ProPublica published an investigation on a machine learning program that courts use to predict who is likely to commit another crime after being booked systematically. The reporters found that the software rated black people at a higher risk than whites.
“Scores like this — known as risk assessments — are increasingly common in courtrooms across the nation,” ProPublica explained. “They are used to inform decisions about who can be set free at every stage of the criminal justice system, from assigning bond amounts … to even more fundamental decisions about defendants’ freedom.”
The program learned about who is most likely to end up in jail from real-world incarceration data. And historically, the real-world criminal justice system has been unfair to black Americans.
This story reveals a deep irony about machine learning. The appeal of these systems is they can make impartial decisions, free of human bias. “If computers could accurately predict which defendants were likely to commit new crimes, the criminal justice system could be fairer and more selective about who is incarcerated and for how long,” ProPublica wrote.
But what happened was that machine learning programs perpetuated our biases on a large scale. So instead of a judge being prejudiced against African Americans, it was a robot.
It’s stories like the ProPublica investigation that led Caliskan to research this problem. As a female computer scientist who was routinely the only woman in her graduate school classes, she’s sensitive to this subject.
Caliskan has seen bias creep into machine learning in often subtle ways — for instance, in Google Translate.
Turkish, one of her native languages, has no gender pronouns. But when she uses Google Translate on Turkish phrases, it “always ends up as ‘he’s a doctor’ in a gendered language.” The Turkish sentence didn’t say whether the doctor was male or female. The computer just assumed if you’re talking about a doctor, it’s a man.
How robots learn implicit bias
Recently, Caliskan and colleagues published a paper in Science, that finds as a computer teaches itself English, it becomes prejudiced against black Americans and women.
Basically, they used a common machine learning program to crawl through the internet, look at 840 billion words, and teach itself the definitions of those words. The program accomplishes this by looking for how often certain words appear in the same sentence. Take the word “bottle.” The computer begins to understand what the word means by noticing it occurs more frequently alongside the word “container,” and also near words that connote liquids like “water” or “milk.”
This idea to teach robots English actually comes from cognitive science and its understanding of how children learn language. How frequently two words appear together is the first clue we get to deciphering their meaning.
Once the computer amassed its vocabulary, Caliskan ran it through a version of the implicit association test.
In humans, the IAT is meant to undercover subtle biases in the brain by seeing how long it takes people to associate words. A person might quickly connect the words “male” and “engineer.” But if a person lags on associating “woman” and “engineer,” it’s a demonstration that those two terms are not closely associated in the mind, implying bias. (There are some reliability issues with the IAT in humans, which you can read about here.)
Here, instead at looking at the lag time, Caliskan looked at how closely the computer thought two terms were related. She found that African-American names in the program were less associated with the word “pleasant” than white names. And female names were more associated with words relating to family than male names. (In a weird way, the IAT might be better suited for use on computer programs than for humans, because humans answer its questions inconsistently, while a computer will yield the same answer every single time.)
Like a child, a computer builds its vocabulary through how often terms appear together. On the internet, African-American names are more likely to be surrounded by words that connote unpleasantness. That’s not because African Americans are unpleasant. It’s because people on the internet say awful things. And it leaves an impression on our young AI.
This is as much as a problem as you think.
The consequences of racist, sexist AI
Increasingly, Caliskan says, job recruiters are relying on machine learning programs to take a first pass at résumés. And if left unchecked, the programs can learn and act upon gender stereotypes in their decision-making.
“Let’s say a man is applying for a nurse position; he might be found less fit for that position if the machine is just making its own decisions,” she says. “And this might be the same for a women applying for a software developer or programmer position. … Almost all of these programs are not open source, and we’re not able to see what’s exactly going on. So we have a big responsibility about trying to uncover if they are being unfair or biased.”
And that will be a challenge in the future. Already AI is making its way into the health care system, helping doctors find the right course of treatment for their patients. (There’s early research on whether it can help predict mental health crises.)
But health data, too, is filled with historical bias. It’s long been known that women get surgery at lower rates than men. (One reason is that women, as primary caregivers, have fewer people to take care of them post-surgery.)
Might AI then recommend surgery at a lower rate for women? It’s something to watch out for.
So are these programs useless?
Inevitably, machine learning programs are going to encounter historical patterns that reflect racial or gender bias. And it can be hard to draw the line between what is bias and what is just a fact about the world.
Machine learning programs will pick up on the fact that most nurses throughout history have been women. They’ll realize most computer programmers are male. “We’re not suggesting you should remove this information,” Caliskan says. It might actually break the software completely.
Caliskan thinks there need to be more safeguards. Humans using these programs need to constantly ask, “Why am I getting these results?” and check the output of these programs for bias. They need to think hard on whether the data they are combing is reflective of historical prejudices. Caliskan admits the best practices of how to combat bias in AI is still being worked out. “It requires a long-term research agenda for computer scientists, ethicist, sociologists, and psychologists,” she says.
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April 18, 2017
PewDiePie Deals Major Blow to YouTube After Moving to Twitch
Felix “PewDiePie” Kjelberg has dealt a major blow to YouTube, revealing that he will now start a weekly gaming show on the site’s streaming rival Twitch.
PewDiePie, the owner of YouTube’s most popular channel by a considerable margin with over 53 million subscribers, has branched out to Twitch for the first time in his video-making career amid YouTube’s ongoing advertising issues. With major brands such as PepsiCo and McDonald’s having withdrawn their ads from the site, many of the site’s most prominent users have revealed that their earnings have significantly decreased, leading to widespread panic in the process.
In the wake of this hysteria, PewDiePie has launched his first ever show on YouTube rival Twitch, with his new channel NetGlow producing a weekly gaming show titled ‘Best Club.’ He previously made the announcement in a video titled ‘YOUTUBEISOVERPARTY,’ in which he discussed the effect the so-called YouTube “Adpocalypse” is having on the site’s creators. He said: “Also, I’m going to Twitch now… I decided this before [YouTube’s issues with advertising], so don’t read it the wrong way, but I wanted to start doing streams on Twitch.”
Also: YouTube Advertiser Claims the Site’s Blacklisting “Provocative” Channels and Destroying Their Revenue
While PewDiePie has stated that NetGlow’s creation wasn’t inspired by YouTube’s advertising problems, the timing of its launch could not be better for the site’s content creators. With many YouTubers growing increasingly frustrated by YouTube and its parent company Google, PewDiePie staging a weekly show on Twitch will inevitably draw more eyes to the site, and will likely inspire more video makers to follow suit. Though Twitch is a completely different format, many creators are now looking to diversify their revenue as full-time careers on YouTube are becoming increasingly uncertain, and PewDiePie’s success in bringing a new audience to the streaming site could open up doors for many of his contemporaries.
In a video discussing the ongoing saga surrounding advertisers moving away from YouTube, PewDiePie called the reasoning behind advertisers’ mass exodus “massively overblown.” With ad companies pulling out of the site as a result of their products being advertised on racist videos, he said that it “doesn’t make sense” that all YouTubers should be affected “because of five racist dudes.”
“The reason people love YouTube is that it’s free, it’s open and you can say what you want. It’s not like television,” he said. “But it seems like YouTube is being forced to turn into television at this point. That’s going to be bad for everyone.”
While PewDiePie will still remain on YouTube, him moving to Twitch will be a troubling development for the company, with him having previously created videos exclusively for the Google-owned site. However, a number of high-profile issues with the popular YouTuber has soured their relationship, with the controversy surrounding his anti-Semitic jokes leading to YouTube pulling the second series of his reality show, Scare PewDiePie.
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/design/1245979-pewdiepie-deals-major-blow-youtube-moving-twitch#WMFcx1ZTj72dlGwb.99
Norway has opened a doomsday vault to house the world’s most precious books
At this moment, there is a collection of every known crop on the planet embedded nearly 1,000 feet underground, shrouded in the icy arms of Norway’s Svalbard mountain.
This stockpile is known as the Global Seed Vault, and it just got a new neighbor.
A Norwegian company called Piql (pronounced “pickle”) recently announced it’s building the World Arctic Archive. The collection is like the Global Seed Vault, only it preserves digital data — primarily historical and cultural documents — instead of food.
Millions of pages of records, books, letters, and manuscripts will find their way into the doomsday library archives, which officially opened on March 27.
Piql founder Rune Bjerkestrand says the company is storing all that data on special film reels, which effectively turn the letters into ones and zeroes that can be represented in gigantic QR codes. These codes are invulnerable to hacking, as they’re effectively “carved in stone,” Bjerkestrand told LiveScience.
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Clients who wish to use the archives can put in a request to Piql to store their documents. Once the data gets housed, the client can only retrieve it by asking Piql staff to manually unearth it, before uploading it online.
Piql believes its technology can preserve film for at least 1,000 years — although, technically the idea is it can last forever. The archive will live in a mineshaft inside Svalbard, where permafrost keeps the temperatures right around freezing.
Bjerkestrand says a cold and dry climate is ideal for preserving film.
One other perk: The mountain is located on a demilitarized zone. Even if the apocalypse happens and global war threatens the future of humanity, at least Piql’s reels (and the neighboring food stores) will be safe.
Not that anyone would be around to read (or eat) them.
Source:
http://www.businessinsider.com/norway-doomsday-vault-most-precious-books-2017-4
Bryan Johnson (entrepreneur)
Bryan Johnson (born August 22, 1977) is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is founder and CEO of Kernel, a company developing a neuroprosthetic device to improve brain function, and the OS Fund, a $100 million fund that invests in science and technology startups that promise to radically improve quality of life.[5]
He was also founder, chairman and CEO of Braintree, an online payment system. Braintree was acquired by eBay for $800 million in 2013.
Johnson lives in Los Angeles.
Johnson, who has been described as a “serial tech entrepreneur,” launched three startups, whilst at university, between 1999 and 2003. The first, which sold cell phones, helped pay his way through Brigham Young University. In that business, Johnson hired other college students to sell service plans along with cell phones; Johnson earned about a $300 commission on each sale.
The next two businesses he started weren’t as successful. Inquist, a VOIP company Johnson co-founded with three other partners, combined features of Vonage and Skype. It collapsed in 2001. Johnson has attributed the failure to an inability to secure funding following 9/11 as well as errors made by him and his co-founders.
Following that failure, Johnson joined his brother and another partner on a $70 million real estate project later in 2001. The project struggled to achieve sales goals and required additional capital. Johnson and his two co-founders moved on.
Johnson formed the idea for Braintree while he was working at a part-time job selling credit card processing services to businesses, work that he took to help pay his bills while the real estate venture foundered. Johnson became the top salesperson out of 400 nationwide, breaking previous sales records.
When Johnson moved from Utah to Chicago to attend graduate school at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, he continued working for the same card-processing company. Nine months after accepting a management position at Sears, Johnson formed Braintree and approached some of his old customers to solicit their business.
Johnson has said his goal was to improve customers’ payment experiences—something he saw lacking—and to build an “exceptional” company that both his team and their customers would love.
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Braintree’s rapid growth was spurred by clients in the technology industry including OpenTable, Uber, Shopify, Airbnb, and others. The company was 47th on Inc. magazine’s 2011 list of the 500 fastest-growing companies and 415th in 2012. That year, Braintree purchased Venmo, a startup that lets users send and receive money from each other electronically, for $26.2 million.
While Johnson received $25,000 to start the company after winning a business plan competition from the University of Chicago in 2007, he otherwise bootstrapped the company before raising venture capital — $34 million in a Series A investment from Accel Partners — in June 2011. At the time, Braintree was processing about $3 billion in credit card payments annually and generating $10 million in revenue.
By September 2013, the company announced it was processing $12 billion in payments annually, with $4 billion of that on mobile. Shortly afterward, on Sept. 26, 2013, the company was acquired by eBay for $800 million.
Johnson started Kernel in 2016, making a personal investment of $100 million. The company’s goal is to build an implantable device to improve brain function in humans, such as memory, while interfacing with artificial intelligence (AI). Initially, the company is focusing on applications for patients with neurodegeneration such as memory loss.
Patients with epilepsy are among the first to test the technology, which relies on algorithms that mimic the brain’s natural electrical signals to improve communication between brain cells. Kernel refers to itself as a “human intelligence (HI) company”; Johnson, who has written that the combination of HI and AI will prove to be of great importance for the future of humanity, says his longterm objective is to improve both intelligence and quality of life as human lifespans grow longer.
Facebook launches a camera platform for developers to push augmented reality forward
Facebook today announced a platform for developers to build new experiences into its in-app cameras, saying it would bring augmented reality into the mainstream and position Facebook to reap the majority of the benefits. Speaking on stage at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that AR would be the next major platform for computing. A closed beta that opens today will let developers begin experimenting with photo and video filters, games, art projects, and more.
In a demonstration, Zuckerberg showed a variety of dazzling camera effects. Swiping to the stories camera that Facebook introduced last month, users will soon find thousands of augmented reality effects, he said. These go beyond the art frames and face filters of today to include three-dimensional text and images. In one demo, giant puffy words reading “It’s feeding time” rose out of a breakfast table, where a series of sharks swam around a cereal bowl.
In another demo, Facebook’s camera turned a two-dimensional photo into a 3D A mundane picture of an office with chairs transformed in several ways: appearing to fill up with water, or bouncy balls, and even Skittles. “Because the future is delicious,” Zuckerberg said. (Hello advertisers!) The camera platform will launch with just six platforms, Zuckerberg told Recode.
Facebook’s camera will use object recognition to suggest effects based on the object. Tap on a coffee cup, for example, and you’ll be able to add steam. Or tap a wine bottle and add a card showing the vintage, and presumably, a link to buy it yourself. “Some of these effects are going to be fun,” Zuckerberg said. “Others are going to be useful.”
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The addition of face filters and 3D effects into camera apps was pioneered by Snapchat, which Facebook has spent the past year disassembling and integrating into its suite of apps. Just today, Snapchat introduced world lenses, which project similar 3D images into the world around you.
Zuckerberg acknowledged Facebook had been somewhat late to the AR party. But he said the company’s object recognition and machine learning technology would give it an advantage over its rivals. “Even though we were a little slow to add cameras to all our apps, I’m confident that now we’re going to push this augmented reality camera forward,” he said.
Source:
http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/18/15343008/facebook-camera-platform-augmented-reality-ar
Ahead of Elon Musk, this self-made millionaire already launched a company to merge your brain with computers
Silicon Valley titan Elon Musk has announced that he will be launching yet another company, Neuralink, which will focus on connecting the human brain to computers.
With his deep pockets and bold ambitions, Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, attracts attention whatever he tries. But Musk is not the first to experiment with neural prosthetics. In August, self-made millionaire Bryan Johnson launched a company that seeks to connect the brain with computer intelligence.
Johnson’s company, Kernel, a Los Angeles start-up with 20 employees, is working to make “chips” to insert in the human brain. These chips, which are actually neurotechological hardware designed to read and write neural code, will be used at first for individuals with diseases or deficiencies to restore normal brain function.
In the future, Johnson expects the technology to progress so that even healthy humans can get chips implanted in their brains — and become, in effect, superhuman.
Long Neuralink piece coming out on @waitbutwhy in about a week. Difficult to dedicate the time, but existential risk is too high not to.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 28, 2017
Implanting computing power in the brain could help humans have near-perfect memory, read books instantaneously and communicate with other implanted humans telepathically, or without speaking, explains Johnson.
For the first generation of implantable neural prosthetics, a neurologist will have to surgically implant the computer chip into a person’s brain. The goal for the future, however, is to be able to implant chips into human brains laparoscopically and using other less invasive methods.
Johnson believes that our generation will be defined by the way we wrestle with the prospect of merging humans with machine technology.
“A generation’s time and place is defined by the debates they have. So, for example, we have civil rights and human rights and marriage rights and abortion rights. I think the coming discussion for our society will be evolution rights,” Johnson tells CNBC.
As a society, humans will have to decide whether it is acceptable to opt for genetic or neurological enhancement once the technology becomes available. Also, we will have to debate how those rights are managed and how technology is distributed. What will be legal? Who can access the new technology first?
Johnson expects the conversation to break on national borders. Some countries will allow genetic enhancements and others will not.
“There’s a general reluctance for humans to adopt certain forms of enhancement,” says Johnson. For example, when plastic surgery first became technically possible, it was largely feared and relegated to the fringes. Now, however, cosmetic surgery is commonplace, says Johnson. “I think we will see the same thing happen as we gain more powerful forms of enhancements in genetics and neurological enhancement and physical augmentation.”
HOW JOHNSON MADE HIS FORTUNE
To launch Kernel, Johnson, now 39, contributed $100 million of his own money. That’s not money he was born with. In his early 20s, Johnson struggled.
“I was broke. And I had two kids at home and I couldn’t pay my bills. I was up to my eyeballs in debt and I couldn’t find a job. I applied for 60 jobs. Nobody would hire me. Nobody would even give me an interview,” he says.
At the time, Johnson emailed 50 wealthy individuals introducing himself, saying that he was a hard worker, smart and hungry for a chance. He got no responses.
Finally, Johnson found a job selling credit-card processing door-to-door. He was paid on commission. He pounded the pavement and broke all previous selling records, he says. He also came up with an idea for a business.
“I just found this broken industry in payments and I thought there’s this amazing opportunity to build an exceptional company,” he says. Johnson went on to found and launch Braintree, a credit-card processing company, which he grew and sold to eBay in 2013 for $800 million.
Financially liberated, Johnson was driven by his desire to make an impact on the world. He decided that unlocking the brain was the most noble and challenging goal.
“THERE’S THIS HUGE POTENTIAL TO CO-EVOLVE WITH OUR TECHNOLOGY.”-Bryan Johnson, founder and CEO of Kernel
“I arrived at the conclusion that human intelligence was the most consequential technological advancement ever — that everything we are, everything we seek to become, everything we create is a result of our brain,” says Johnson. And our brains are fundamentally the same as they were a couple thousand years ago, he says. “On the other hand, we have this form of intelligence we have given birth to in artificial intelligence, which is improving very rapidly.
“And there’s this huge potential to co-evolve with our technology.”
TAPPING INTO A MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR MARKET
While it may take people a while to get used to the idea of implanting chips in the brain, Johnson expects that when the idea normalizes, the demand will be enormous.
“The market for implantable neural prosthetics including cognitive enhancement and treatment of neurological dysfunction will likely be one of, if not the largest, industrial sectors in history,” says Johnson, in a Medium post he wrote announcing his own investment in the company. He expects Kernel to raise $1 billion from private and public sources.
And while Kernel is not making any money yet, Johnson says if even one product goes on the market, it could mean billions of dollars in sales.
In the past two decades, Johnson has gone from broke and unable to land an interview to working in the same space as Elon Musk, arguably one of the world’s most influential inventors.
As for competing with Musk, though, Johnson isn’t worried. “I couldn’t be more excited that Neuralink will join Kernel in this extremely challenging and promising pursuit,” says Johnson. “The neurotech industry will be one of the largest to ever emerge. I’m happy others will be pushing the field forward as well.”
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