Apple: Augmented Reality Will Be an Everyday Experience

An article in Macworld cites what Apple’s CEO Tim Cook stated recently during a panel at a conference in Utah. According to Cook, it will take some before the technology challenges associated with AR will be solved, but once that happens, AR experiences will be an integral part of our daily lives.

Cook also believes that VR is not going to become as big as AR. And here Cook might be on the right track since there are forecasts saying that by 2020, the size of the AR market will be three times larger than the size of the VR market.

Earlier, in an Apple earnings call in July, Cook said that Apple is high on AR for the long run, and that the company thinks there is great things for customers and a great commercial opportunity in AR.

Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016 by the World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum published back in June 2016 a list of top ten emerging technologies for 2016. The list highlights technological advances that the members of the Forum’s Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies believe have the power to improve lives, transform industries and safeguard our planet.

The top ten technologies are:

1. Nanosensors and the Internet of Nanothings – for example nanosensors capable of circulating in the human body or being embedded in construction materials
2. Next generation batteries, including recent advances in energy storage using sodium, aluminium and zinc based batteries
3. The blockchain, which has potential to fundamentally change the way markets and governments work
4. 2D materials such as graphene
5. Autonomous vehicles
6. Organs-on-chips – miniature models of human organs could revolutionize medical research and drug discovery
7. Perovskite solar cells, which is a new photovoltaic material offering improvements over classic silicon solar cell
8. Open AI ecosystem – shared advances in NLP and social awareness combined with unprecedented availability of data
9. Optogenetics – the use of light and color to record the activity of neurons in the brain
10. Systems metabolic engineering – a discipline that tweaks the biochemistry of microbes so that more of their energy and resources go into synthesizing useful chemical products

Cloudify and Orange Labs Will Demonstrate Lifecycle Management and Orchestration of OPNFV Deployments

Cloudify and Orange Labs will be demonstrating lifecycle management and orchestration of OPNFV deployments on OpenStack at the next OpenStack Summit. Orange Labs is using Cloudify as an orchestrator for a project focusing on functional testing of a virtual IMS VNF throughout its lifecycle. The virtual IMS system is based on Metaswitch’s Clearwater. Orange Labs uses Cloudify and Jenkins for lifecycle orchestration and management tasks such as monitoring, healing, scaling, and software upgrade.

Cloudify claims to be the only open source NFV MANO leveraging TOSCA’s native multi-VIM interoperability capabilities. Cloudify’s Telecom Edition is based on the telecom-friendly TOSCA standard and is delivered with the ARIA TOSCA orchestration engine at its core. Cloudify has built-in support and blueprints for OpenStack and the VMware stack.

TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) is a standard language to describe the topology of cloud-based web services, their components, relationships, and the processes that manage them.

ARIA (Agile Reference Implementation of Automation) is an implementation of the OASIS TOSCA specification. It offers a command line interface to develop and execute TOSCA templates, and an SDK for building TOSCA-enabled software. ARIA has IaaS plugins for OpenStack, VMware, AWS and Azure, Container plugins for Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos, SDN plugins for Tail-f, OpenDaylight and ONOS, and configuration management plugins for Puppet, Chef, Ansible and SaltStack.

IBM Invests $200 Million in New Global Headquarters for Watson IoT

IBM unveiled a $200 million investment in a new global headquarters for its Watson IoT business in Munich, a city which IBM calls the heart of the Industry 4.0 initiative.  The investment is part of IBM’s total global investment of $3 billion whose goal is to bring cognitive computing to IoT. As part of the announcement, IBM revealed that it has 6000 clients globally who are tapping Watson IoT solutions and services. The figure is up from 4000 eight months ago.

The headquarters will host 1000 researchers, engineers, developers, and business experts. It will focus on the automotive, electronics, manufacturing, healthcare, and insurance industries.

IBM also announced new IoT capabilities in blockchain and security, and new clients using Watson IoT.

In IDC’s recent Global IoT Decision Maker Survey, IBM was identified as a major player in many aspects of the IoT market with clear leadership for its IoT platform, software and systems integration.

Cut the VR Cord - High-End Untethered VR Headsets Are Around the Corner

One problem with the current high-end VR headsets such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive is that they need to be tethered to a PC by cables that can get in the way of the action. The cord-free alternatives to these headsets available in the market today are lightweight mobile VR headsets such as Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. However, such mobile phone powered headsets do not offer the same kind of immersive experience as the PC VR headsets.

Recently, a few promising cord-free high-end VR headsets have been announced:

• Qualcomm’s VR reference platform, the Qualcomm Snapdragon VR820 , which, according to Qualcomm, enables OEMs to develop standalone VR headsets optimized for VR content and applications while meeting the processing and performance demands of an all-in-one, dedicated VR headset. The VR820 includes integrated eye tracking with two cameras, dual front facing cameras for six degrees of freedom, see-through applications (mixed reality), four microphones, and gyro, accelerometer, and magnetometer sensors
• Intel’s Project Alloy, which Intel will offer as an open platform in 2017, is another untethered design. Also in the case of Project Alloy, the computing power is located in the headset itself. This allows a free range of motion with six degrees of freedom across a large space combined with collision detection and avoidance. Project Alloy relies on Intel’s RealSense cameras attached to the headset and is thus not dependent on setting up any external sensors or cameras around the room in contrast to the Rift and Vive.
• Google’s Daydream, which relies on a smartphone for display and processing power. Unlike Project Alloy and VR 820, Daydream cannot track the position of the user’s head. Thus, the user cannot move around in the virtual space. Daydream will provide better performance than the likes of Samsung Gear VR, but will probably not be able to match the performance of VR820 and Project Alloy headsets. According to Google, Daydream-ready phones, which are powered by Android 7.0 Nougat, will have high-resolution displays, ultra-smooth graphics and high-fidelity sensors for precise head tracking. Android N’s VR mode promises to allow a motion-to-photon latency of under 20ms.

Qualcomm and Intel will not be manufacturing or selling VR headsets by themselves. Rather, they will open the hardware design and APIs to other companies and developers as an effort to jumpstart the VR ecosystem. In a similar manner, Google will rely on smartphone manufacturers to produce Daydream-ready smartphones.

High-end VR headsets have not really gone mainstream yet. But perhaps this will happen with the coming cord-free high-end headsets.

Nokia Believes VR and AR Will Require A Highly Distributed Network

Nokia’s CTO Marcus Weldon believes that future networks will need to be highly distributed to enable high bandwidth and low latency for emerging applications such as AR and VR.

The use case Weldon apparently has in mind is for instance streaming of VR content from the edge of the network. In VR, to avoid simulator sickness, the lag time between a user wearing a VR headset turning his head and the motion being reflected on the graphics or video playing on the headset needs to be as low as a few milliseconds. To achieve this, the VR application needs to be running as close to the user as possible, at the edge of the network.

Weldon says that what is needed is a distributed access architecture combined with highly scalable cloud computing. This will push the network infrastructure closer to the user. He believes that local (in contrast to running everything in centralized cloud infrastructure) is going to become more important, which would naturally be good news to the cable industry and mobile network operators.

Microsoft Will Infuse AI into Everything They Deliver

Microsoft announced that it has created a "Microsoft AI and Research Group", which brings together Microsoft’s research organization with over 5000 computer scientists and engineers who are focused on Microsoft’s AI product efforts. The announcement builds on Microsoft’s deep focus on AI and seeks to accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to customers in the areas of apps, agents, services, and infrastructure. The new organization will include AI product engineering, basic and applied research labs, and Microsoft’s New Experiences and Technologies (NExT) group.

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella stated that Microsoft is infusing AI into everything they deliver across their computing platforms and experiences.

According to Harry Shum, the EVP of the new Microsoft AI and Research Group, the move will bring research and engineering even closer together and will accelerate the company’s ability to deliver more personal and intelligent computing experiences to people and organizations.

Microsoft says its AI efforts are based on the following approaches:

• Agents: changing human and computer interactions through agents such as Cortana
• Applications: infuse every application (e.g., Skype and Office 365) with AI
• Services: make cognitive capabilities such as vision, speech, and machine analytics available to every application developer in the world
• Infrastructure: build the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer with Azure and make it available to anyone