2018 TECH TRENDS REPORT— from the Future Today Institute Emerging technology trends that will influence business, government, education, media and society in the coming year.
Description:
The Future Today Institute’s 11th annual Tech Trends Report identifies 235 tantalizing advancements in emerging technologies—artificial intelligence, biotech, autonomous robots, green energy and space travel—that will begin to enter the mainstream and fundamentally disrupt business, geopolitics and everyday life around the world. Our annual report has garnered more than six million cumulative views, and this edition is our largest to date.
Helping organizations see change early and calculate the impact of new trends is why we publish our annual Emerging Tech Trends Report, which focuses on mid- to late-stage emerging technologies that are on a growth trajectory.
a calendar of events that will shape technology this year
detailed near-future scenarios for several of the technologies
a new framework to help organizations decide when to take action on trends
an interactive table of contents, which will allow you to more easily navigate the report from the bookmarks bar in your PDF reader
01 How does this trend impact our industry and all of its parts?
02 How might global events — politics, climate change, economic shifts – impact this trend, and as a result, our organization?
03 What are the second, third, fourth, and fifth-order implications of this trend as it evolves, both in our organization and our industry?
04 What are the consequences if our organization fails to take action on this trend?
05 Does this trend signal emerging disruption to our traditional business practices and cherished beliefs?
06 Does this trend indicate a future disruption to the established roles and responsibilities within our organization? If so, how do we reverse-engineer that disruption and deal with it in the present day?
07 How are the organizations in adjacent spaces addressing this trend? What can we learn from their failures and best practices?
08 How will the wants, needs and expectations of our consumers/ constituents change as a result of this trend?
09 Where does this trend create potential new partners or collaborators for us?
10 How does this trend inspire us to think about the future of our organization?
Dueling neural networks. Artificial embryos. AI in the cloud. Welcome to our annual list of the 10 technology advances we think will shape the way we work and live now and for years to come.
Every year since 2001 we’ve picked what we call the 10 Breakthrough Technologies. People often ask, what exactly do you mean by “breakthrough”? It’s a reasonable question—some of our picks haven’t yet reached widespread use, while others may be on the cusp of becoming commercially available. What we’re really looking for is a technology, or perhaps even a collection of technologies, that will have a profound effect on our lives.
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3-D Metal Printing
Artificial Embryos
Sensing City
AI for Everybody
Dueling Neural Networks
Babel-Fish Earbuds
In the cult sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you slide a yellow Babel fish into your ear to get translations in an instant. In the real world, Google has come up with an interim solution: a $159 pair of earbuds, called Pixel Buds. These work with its Pixel smartphones and Google Translate app to produce practically real-time translation. One person wears the earbuds, while the other holds a phone. The earbud wearer speaks in his or her language—English is the default—and the app translates the talking and plays it aloud on the phone. The person holding the phone responds; this response is translated and played through the earbuds.
5 benefits of using Augmented & Virtual Reality Technologies in eLearning — from elearningindustry.com by Christoper Pappas Are you looking for ways to make your eLearning course stand out from the crowd? What if I told you there is technology that can help you achieve not only that but also increase online learner engagement and motivation? In this article, I’ll share the most notable benefits of using Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies in your eLearning course.
Excerpt:
Although their full implications are yet to be explored, alternate reality technologies make eLearning more engaging and productive. They are here to stay, and who knows what benefits they will bring to future learners. As the technology evolves, so too will the applications in eLearning. Which is why it’s essential for eLearning pros to keep up with cutting-edge tech and think of new and innovative uses for AR and VR tools.
Augmented reality (AR) technologies that blend computer-generated images and data from MRI and CT scans with real-world views are making it possible for doctors to “see under the skin” of their patients to visualize bones, muscles, and internal organs without having to cut open a body.
Experts say AR will transform medical care by improving precision during operations, reducing medical errors, and giving doctors and patients alike a better understanding of complex medical problems.
Healthcare VR innovations are healing patients — from cio.com by Peter Nichol Virtual reality is healing patients with augmented technologies. The patient experience has been transformed. Welcome to the era of engaged recovery — the new world of healing.
Excerpt:
Three emerging realities will change the hospital experience with unparalleled possibilities:
Virtual reality (VR): full immersion, a simulated reality.
Mixed reality: partial immersion, virtual objects in a real world.
Augmented reality (AR): information overlay, simulated information on top of the real world.
Today, we’ll explore how advances in virtual reality are creating worlds that heal.
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The next generation of clinical education
The list of possibilities for VR is endless. Augmented and virtual reality medical solutions are removing distractions, improving the quality of critical thinking, and maturing learning solutions, saving time and money while supercharging the learning experience. Explosive developments in 3D virtual and augmented reality have taken clinical education and hands-on learning to the next level.
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Innovation is ever present in the virtual reality space for healthcare.
Mindmaze has developed a breakthrough platform to build intuitive human-machine interfaces combining virtual reality, computer graphics, brain imaging and neuroscience.
MindMotionPRO is a healthcare product offering immersive virtual reality solutions for early motor rehabilitation in stroke patients.
Live 360 uses consumer-level virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift.
Medical Realities offers systems designed to reduce the cost of training.
ImmersiveTouch is a surgical virtual reality technology that offers a realistic surgical touch and feel. It also brings patient images to life with AR and VR imaging.
BioFlight VR offers a broad range of medical VR and AR services, including VR training and simulations, AR training, behavior modification and 360-degree video.
Zspace is an immersive medical learning platform, virtualizing anatomical representations into complete procedural planning. zSpace brings a new dimension to medical learning and visualization across three spaces: gross anatomy VR lab (13,000 plus anatomical objects), teaching presentation view (share the teaching experience with the class via HD TV) and DICOM Viewer (volumetrically render 2D DICOM slices).
Digital reality is generally defined as the wide spectrum of technologies and capabilities that inhere in AR, VR, MR, 360° video, and the immersive experience, enabling simulation of reality in various ways (see figure 1).
Key players in digital reality
In terms of key players, the digital reality space can be divided into areas of activity:
Tools/content—platforms, apps, capture tools, etc.
Application content—information from industry, analytics, social, etc.
Infrastructure—hardware, data systems, HMDs, etc.
Increasing investment in infrastructure may drive the growth of software and content, leading to new practical applications and, possibly, an infusion of digital reality software development talent.
This All-Female Founders Pitch Event Was Held in VR — from vrscout.com by Malia Probst Hailing from 26 countries across the world, people came together in virtual reality to cheer on these top female founders in the XR industry.
Enterprise leading consumer tech adoption Concerning the need for a VR/AR eco system Max referred to the challenge of technology adoption: people need to be able to try different use cases and be convinced about the potential of AR ,VR and MR. In order to become available (and affordable) for consumers, the technology would have to be adapted by businesses first as the story of 3D printing shows as one example.
He also highlighted the importance of the right training for users to reduce the general learning curve for immersive technology. Poor instructions in the first instance can lead to bad user experiences and cause doubt and even a dismissall of ‘new’ technologies.
We see this firsthand at Kazendi when users try out Microsoft HoloLens for the first time. Max commented that: ‘When people try to make the basic hand gestures and fail they often take the device off and say it’s broken.’
We do have a robust entry demo process to combat this but at the consumer level, and this is as true for VR as much as it is for MR and AR, there is little room for error when learning curves are concerned.
The VR / AR / MR Breakdown
This year will see growth in a variety of virtual technologies and uses. There are differences and similarities between virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies. The technology is constantly evolving and even the terminology around it changes quickly, so you may hear variations on these terms.
Augmented reality is what was behind the Pokémon Go craze. Players could see game characters on their devices superimposed over images of their physical surroundings. Virtual features seemed to exist in the real world.
Mixed reality combines virtual features and real-life objects. So, in this way it includes AR but it also includes environments where real features seem to exist in a virtual world.
The folks over at Recode explain mixed reality this way:
In theory, mixed reality lets the user see the real world (like AR) while also seeing believable, virtual objects (like VR). And then it anchors those virtual objects to a point in real space, making it possible to treat them as “real,” at least from the perspective of the person who can see the MR experience.
And, virtual reality uses immersive technology to seemingly place a user into a simulated lifelike environment.
… Where You’ll Find These New Realities Education and research fields are at the forefront of VR and AR technologies, where an increasing number of students have access to tools. But higher education isn’t the only place you see this trend. The number of VR companies grew 250 percent between 2012 and 2017. Even the latest iPhones include augmented reality capabilities. Aside from the classroom and your pocket, here are some others places you’re likely to see VR and AR pop up in 2018.
VR/AR for Impact experiences shown this week at WEF 2018 include:
OrthoVR aims to increase the availability of well-fitting prosthetics in low-income countries by using Virtual Reality and 3D rapid prototyping tools to increase the capacity of clinical staff without reducing quality. VR allows current prosthetists and orthosists to leverage their hands-on and embodied skills within a digital environment.
The Extraordinary Honey Bee is designed to help deepen our understanding of the honey bee’s struggle and learn what is at stake for humanity due to the dying global population of the honey bee. Told from a bee’s perspective, The Extraordinary Honey Bee harnesses VR to inspire change in the next generation of honey bee conservationists.
The Blank Canvas: Hacking Nature is an episodic exploration of the frontiers of bioengineering as taught by the leading researchers within the field. Using advanced scientific visualization techniques, the Blank Canvas will demystify the cellular and molecular mechanisms that are being exploited to drive substantial leaps such as gene therapy.
LIFE (Life-saving Instruction For Emergencies) is a new mobile and VR platform developed by the University of Oxford that enables all types of health worker to manage medical emergencies. Through the use of personalized simulation training and advanced learning analytics, the LIFE platform offers the potential to dramatically extend access to life-saving knowledge in low-income countries.
Tree is a critically acclaimed virtual reality experience to immerse viewers in the tragic fate that befalls a rainforest tree. The experience brings to light the harrowing realities of deforestation, one of the largest contributors to global warming.
For the Amazonian Yawanawa, ‘medicine’ has the power to travel you in a vision to a place you have never been. Hushuhu, the first woman shaman of the Yawanawa, uses VR like medicine to open a portal to another way of knowing. AWAVENAis a collaboration between a community and an artist, melding technology and transcendent experience so that a vision can be shared, and a story told of a people ascending from the edge of extinction.
Types of Virtual Reality Technology
We can segregate the type of Virtual Reality Technology according to their user experience
Non-Immersive Non-immersive simulations are the least immersion implementation of Virtual Reality Technology.
In this kind of simulation, only a subset of the user’s senses is replicated, allowing for marginal awareness of the reality outside the VR simulation. A user enters into 3D virtual environments through a portal or window by utilizing standard HD monitors typically found on conventional desktop workstations.
Semi Immersive In this simulation, users experience a more rich immersion, where a user partly, not fully involved in a virtual environment. Semi immersive simulations are based on high-performance graphical computing, which is often coupled with large screen projector systems or multiple TV projections to properly simulate the user’s visuals.
Fully immersive Offers the full immersive experience to the user of Virtual Reality Technology, in this phase of VR head-mounted displays and motion sensing devices are used to simulate all of the user senses. In this situation, a user can experience the realistic virtual environment, where a user can experience a wide view field, high resolutions, increased refresh rates and a high quality of visualization through HMD.
These workers already routinely use technology such as tablets to access plans and data on site, but going from 2D to 3D at scale brings that to a whole new level. “Superimposing the digital model on the physical environment provides a clear understanding of the relations between the 3D design model and the actual work on a jobsite,” explained Olivier Pellegrin, BIM manager, GA Smart Building.
The application they are using is called Trimble Connect. It turns data into 3D holograms, which are then mapped out to scale onto the real-world environment. This gives workers an instant sense of where and how various elements will fit and exposes mistakes early on in the process.
Also see:
Trimble Connect for HoloLens is a mixed reality solution that improves building coordination by combining models from multiple stakeholders such as structural, mechanical and electrical trade partners. The solution provides for precise alignment of holographic data on a 1:1 scale on the job site, to review models in the context of the physical environment. Predefined views from Trimble Connect further simplify in-field use with quick and easy access to immersive visualizations of 3D data. Users can leverage mixed reality for training purposes and to compare plans against work completed. Advanced visualization further enables users to view assigned tasks and capture data with onsite measurement tools. Trimble Connect for HoloLens is available now through the Microsoft Windows App Store. A free trial option is available enabling integration with HoloLens. Paid subscriptions support premium functionality allowing for precise on-site alignment and collaboration. Trimble’s Hard Hat Solution for Microsoft HoloLens extends the benefits of HoloLens mixed reality into areas where increased safety requirements are mandated, such as construction sites, offshore facilities, and mining projects. The solution, which is ANSI-approved, integrates the HoloLens holographic computer with an industry-standard hard hat. Trimble’s Hard Hat Solution for HoloLens is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2018. To learn more, visit mixedreality.trimble.com.
From DSC:
Combining voice recognition / Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Mixed Reality should provide some excellent, powerful user experiences. Doing so could also provide some real-time understanding as well as highlight potential issues in current designs. It will be interesting to watch this space develop. If there were an issue, wouldn’t it be great to remotely ask someone to update the design and then see the updated design in real-time? (Or might there be a way to make edits via one’s voice and/or with gestures?)
I could see where these types of technologies could come in handy when designing / enhancing learning spaces.
There’s been a lot of cool stuff happening lately around Augmented Reality (AR), and since I love exploring and having fun with new technologies, I thought I would see what I could do with AR and the Web?—?and it turns out I was able to do quite a lot!
Most AR demos are with static objects, like showing how you can display a cool model on a table, but AR really begins to shine when you start adding in animations!
With animated AR, your models come to life, and you can then start telling a story with them.
If you’re in the market for some art in your house or apartment, Art.com will now let you use AR to put digital artwork up on your wall.
The company’s ArtView feature is one of the few augmented reality features that actually adds a lot to the app it’s put in. With the ARKit-enabled tech, the artwork is accurately sized so you can get a perfect idea of how your next purchase could fit on your wall. The feature can be used for the two million pieces of art on the site and can be customized with different framing types.
Bailenson’s newest book, Experience on Demand, builds on that earlier work while focusing more clearly — even bluntly — on what we do and don’t know about how VR affects humans.
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“The best way to use it responsibly is to be educated about what it is capable of, and to know how to use it — as a developer or a user — responsibly,” Bailenson wrote in the book.
Among the questions raised:
“How educationally effective are field trips in VR? What are the design principles that should guide these types of experiences?”
How many individuals are not meeting their potential because they lack the access to good instruction and learning tools?”
“When we consider that the subjects were made uncomfortable by the idea of administering fake electric shocks, what can we expect people will feel when they are engaging all sorts of fantasy violence and mayhem in virtual reality?”
“What is the effect of replacing social contact with virtual social contact over long periods of time?”
“How do we walk the line and leverage what is amazing about VR, without falling prey to the bad parts?”
8 ways augmented and virtual reality are changing medicine — from israel21c.org by Abigail Klein Leichman Israeli companies are using futuristic technologies to simplify complex surgery, manage rehab, relieve pain, soothe autistic kids and much more.
The top sectors offering such work are health care, computer/IT, education/training, sales, customer service, finance and travel/hospitality of the 19 industries represented on the list. Five of the fastest-growing remote career categories are therapy, virtual administration, client services, tutoring, and state and local government. The 20 most common telecommuting job titles include teacher, writer, developer, analyst, sales representative, nurse, accountant and program manager. Five companies are fully remote, and 30 are newcomers to the list.
Though the Next Big Thing won’t appear for a while, we know pretty much what it will look like: a lightweight, always-on wearable that obliterates the divide between the stuff we see on screens and the stuff we see when we look up from our screens.
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Not every company working on post-reality glasses shares an identical vision; some have differing views of how immersive it should be. But all have quietly adopted the implicit assumption that a persistent, wearable artificial reality is the next big thing. The pressure of the competition has forced them to begin releasing interim products, now.
And he added that “these glasses will offer AR, VR, and everything in between, and we’ll wear them all day and we’ll use them in every aspect of our lives.”
Concerned with the decay of African heritage sites, The Zamani Project, based at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, is seeking to immortalize historic spots in three-dimensional, virtual reality-ready models.
Professor Heinz Ruther steers the project. He ventures up and down the continent — visiting Ghana, Tanzania, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya and elsewhere — recording in remarkable detail the structure and condition of tombs, churches and other buildings.
“I’ve seen how sites are deteriorating visibly,” Ruther told CNN.
The project’s aim is to build a database of complex, lifelike 3-D models. Presently, they’ve mapped around 16 sites including Lalibela in Ethiopia, Timbuktu in Mali and Kilwa in Tanzania.
Education has been a recurring theme throughout the many programs of the NYC Media Lab, a public-private partnership where I serve as an Executive Director. How will virtual and augmented reality change the classroom? How can teachers use immersive media to educate citizens and keep our communities vibrant? In what ways can enterprises leverage innovation to better train employees and streamline workflows?
These are just a few of the top-of-mind questions that NYC Media Lab’s consortium is thinking about as we enter the next wave of media transformation.
Researchers and professionals at work across the VR/AR community in New York City are excited for what comes next. At NYC Media Lab’s recent Exploring Future Reality conference, long-time educators including Agnieszka Roginska of New York University and Columbia University’s Steven Feiner pointed to emerging media as a way to improve multi-modal learning for students and train computer systems to understand the world around us.
NYC Media Lab merges engineering and design research happening at the city’s universities with resources and opportunities from the media and technology industry—to produce new prototypes, launch new companies and advocate for the latest thinking.
In the past year, the Lab has completed dozens of rapid prototyping projects; exhibited hundreds of demos from the corporate, university and entrepreneurship communities; helped new startups make their mark; and hosted three major events, all to explore emerging media technologies and their evolving impact.
While it’s all too easy to lose ourselves in the countless VR worlds at our fingertips, sometimes we just need to access the desktop and get things done in Windows. Thanks to a few innovative apps, this is possible without removing your headset.
The Innovation Group rounds up a preview of what’s in store at CES.
Next week, the electronics industry will descend on Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, the country’s top showcase for technology and innovation. Vendors will show off everything from new gadgets (drones, TVs) to the future of cities and transportation (smart robots, self-driving cars).
What can attendees expect from this year’s CES? And what trends will rise to the top this year? Below, the Innovation Group rounds up our top picks.
This year, expect to see more enhanced voice and image recognition technology, allowing seamless interactions between consumer, lifestyle and retail.
The 10 Most Exciting Digital Health Stories of 2017 — from medicalfuturist.com by Dr. Bertalan Mesko Gene-edited human embryo. Self-driving trucks. Practical quantum computers. 2017 has been an exciting year for science, technology – and digital health! It’s that time of the year again when it’s worth looking back at the past months; and list the inventions, methods and milestone events in healthcare to get a clearer picture what will shape medicine for the years to come.
Excerpt:
Medical chatbots and health assistants on the rise Chatbots, A.I. supported messaging apps or voice controlled bots are forecasted to replace simple messaging apps soon. In healthcare, they could help solve easily diagnosable health concerns or support patient management, e.g. general organizational issues. In the last months, several signs have pointed to the direction that a more widespread use is forthcoming.
The educational technology sector grew substantially in 2017 and all signs point to even greater growth in 2018. Over the past year, the sector was buoyed by several key factors, including a growing recognition that as big data restructures work at an unprecedented pace, there is an urgent need to rethink how education is delivered. In fact, there is now growing evidence that colleges and universities, especially if they continue to operate as they have in the past, will simply not be able to produce the workers needed to fill tomorrow’s jobs. Ed tech, with its capacity to make education more affordable, flexible, and relevant, is increasingly being embraced as the answer to the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s growing talent pipeline challenges.
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K-12 virtual schools will become a preferred choice
Voice-activation will transform the Learning Management System (LMS) sector
Data will drive learning
Higher ed will increase online course and program offerings
No one can predict how the future will shake out, but we can make some educated guesses.
Global design and strategy firm frog has shared with Business Insider its forecasts for the technologies that will define the upcoming year. Last year, the firm correctly predicted that buildings would harness the power of nature and that businesses would continue using artificially-intelligent bots to run efficiently.
Get ready to step into the future.
Artificial intelligence will inspire how products are designed
Other companies will join Google in the ‘Algorithm Hall of Fame’
Virtual and augmented reality will become communal experiences
Democracy will cozy up to the blockchain
Augmented reality will invite questions about intellectual property
Consumer tech will feel even friendlier
Tech will become inclusive for all
Anonymous data will make life smarter but still private
Ultra-tiny robots will replace medicine for certain patients
The way we get around will fundamentally transform
Businesses will use data and machine learning to cater to customers
Social media will take on more corporate responsibility
This three-part lab can be experienced all at once or separately. At the beginning of each part, Beatriz’s brain acts as an omniscient narrator, helping learners understand how changes to the brain affect daily life and interactions.
Pre and post assessments, along with a facilitation guide, allow learners and instructors to see progression towards outcomes that are addressed through the story and content in the three parts, including:
1) increased knowledge of Alzheimer’s disease and the brain
2) enhanced confidence to care for people with Alzheimer’s disease
3) improvement in care practice
Why a lab about Alzheimer’s Disease?
The Beatriz Lab is very important to us at Embodied Labs. It is the experience that inspired the start of our company. We believe VR is more than a way to evoke feelings of empathy; rather, it is a powerful behavior change tool. By taking the perspective of Beatriz, healthcare professionals and trainees are empowered to better care for people with Alzheimer’s disease, leading to more effective care practices and better quality of life. Through embodying Beatriz, you will gain insight into life with Alzheimer’s and be able to better connect with and care for your loved ones, patients, clients, or others in this communities who live with the disease every day. In our embodied VR experience, we hope to portray both the difficult and joyful moments — the disease surely is a mix of both.
As part of the experience, you will take a 360 degree trip into Beatriz’s brain,
and visit a neuron “forest” that is being affected by amyloid beta plaques and tau proteins.
From DSC: I love the work that Carrie Shaw and @embodiedLabs are doing! Thanks Carrie & Company!
As VR continues to grow and improve, the experiences will feel more real. But for now, here are the best business conference applications in virtual reality.
A sign of how Apple is supporting VR in parts of its ecosystem, Final Cut Pro X (along with Motion and Compressor), now has a complete toolset that lets you import, edit, and deliver 360° video in both monoscopic and stereoscopic formats.
Final Cut Pro X 10.4 comes with a handful of slick new features that we tested, such as advanced color grading and support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) workflows. All useful features for creators, not just VR editors, especially since Final Cut Pro is used so heavily in industries like video editing and production. But up until today, VR post-production options have been minimal, with no support from major VR headsets. We’ve had options with Adobe Premiere plus plugins, but not everyone wants to be pigeon-holed into a single software option. And Final Cut Pro X runs butter smooth on the new iMac, so there’s that.
Now with the ability to create immersive 360° films right in Final Cut Pro, an entirely new group of creators have the ability to dive into the world of 360 VR video. Its simple and intuitive, something we expect from an Apple product. The 360 VR toolset just works.
HWAM’s first exhibition is a unique collection of Star Wars production pieces, including the very first drawings made for the film franchise and never-before-seen production art from the original trilogy by Lucasfilm alum Joe Johnston, Ralph McQuarrie, Phil Tippett, Drew Struzan, Colin Cantwell, and more.
Will virtual reality help you learn a language more quickly? Or will it simply replace your memory?
VR is the ultimate medium for delivering what is known as “experiential learning.” This education theory is based on the idea that we learn and remember things much better when doing something ourselves than by merely watching someone else do it or being told about it.
The immersive nature of VR means users remember content they interact with in virtual scenarios much more vividly than with any other medium. (According to experiments carried out by professor Ann Schlosser at the University of Washington, VR even has the capacity to prompt the development of false memories.)
What will that future be? When it comes to jobs, the tea leaves are indecipherable as analysts grapple with emerging technologies, new fields of work, and skills that have yet to be conceived. The only certainty is
that jobs will change. Consider the conflicting predictions put forth by the analyst community:
According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, only 5-10% of labor would be displaced by intelligent automation, and new job creation will offset losses. (Inserted comment from DSC: Hmmm. ONLY 5-10%!? What?! That’s huge! And don’t count on the majority of those people becoming experts in robotics, algorithms, big data, AI, etc.)
The World Economic Forum27 said in 2016 that 60% of children entering school today will work in jobs that do not yet exist.
47% of all American job functions could be automated within 20 years, according to the Oxford Martin School on Economics in a 2013 report.
In 2016, a KPMG study estimated that 100 million global knowledge workers could be affected by robotic process automation by 2025.
Despite the conflicting views, most analysts agree on one thing: big change is coming. Venture Capitalist David Vandergrift has some words of advice: “Anyone not planning to retire in the next 20 years should be paying pretty close attention to what’s going on in the realm of AI. The supplanting (of jobs) will not happen overnight: the trend over the next couple of decades is going to be towards more and more automation.”30
While analysts may not agree on the timing of AI’s development in the economy, many companies are already seeing its impact on key areas of talent and business strategy. AI is replacing jobs, changing traditional roles, applying pressure on knowledge workers, creating new fields of work, and raising the demand for certain skills.
The emphasis on learning is a key change from previous decades and rounds of automation. Advanced AI is, or will soon be, capable of displacing a very wide range of labor, far beyond the repetitive, low-skill functions traditionally thought to be at risk from automation. In many cases, the pressure on knowledge workers has already begun.
Regardless of industry, however, AI is a real challenge to today’s way of thinking about work, value, and talent scarcity. AI will expand and eventually force many human knowledge workers to reinvent their roles to address issues that machines cannot process. At the same time, AI will create a new demand for skills to guide its growth and development. These emerging areas of expertise will likely be technical or knowledge-intensive fields. In the near term, the competition for workers in these areas may change how companies focus their talent strategies.
The same techniques that generate images of smoke, clouds and fantastic beasts in movies can render neurons and brain structures in fine-grained detail.
Two projects presented yesterday at the 2017 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C., gave attendees a sampling of what these powerful technologies can do.
“These are the same rendering techniques that are used to make graphics for ‘Harry Potter’ movies,” says Tyler Ard, a neuroscientist in Arthur Toga’s lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Ard presented the results of applying these techniques to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.
The methods can turn massive amounts of data into images, making them ideally suited to generate brain scans. Ard and his colleagues develop code that enables them to easily enter data into the software. They plan to make the code freely available to other researchers.
After several cycles of development, it became clear that getting our process into VR as early as possible was essential. This was difficult to do within the landscape of VR tooling. So, at the beginning of 2017, we began developing features for early-stage VR prototyping in a tool named “Expo.”
… Start Prototyping in VR Now We developed Expo because the tools for collaborative prototyping did not exist at the start of this year. Since then, the landscape has dramatically improved and there are many tools providing prototyping workflows with no requirement to do your own development:
It’s no secret that one of the biggest issues holding back virtual and augmented reality is the lack of content.
Even as bigger studios and companies are sinking more and more money into VR and AR development, it’s still difficult for smaller, independent, developers to get started. A big part of the problem is that AR and VR apps require developers to create a ton of 3D objects, often an overwhelming and time-consuming process.
Google is hoping to fix that, though, with its new service called Poly, an online library of 3D objects developers can use in their own apps.
The model is a bit like Flickr, but for VR and AR developers rather than photographers. Anyone can upload their own 3D creations to the service and make them available to others via a Creative Commons license, and any developer can search and download objects for their own apps and games.
From DSC: Reading the item below prompted me to return to a thought/question that I’ve had several times now…in the future, will students be able to choose “where” they want to study? One of our daughters would probably be able to focus better if she were able to be transported to a place of her choosing — perhaps by a stream of running water.
Anyway, it’s an interesting thought/question to consider. It would certainly provide:
For example, the idea of being able to teleport their employees to worlds outside of the office – including on a beach on an island a thousand miles away – may help boost employees’ productivity while reducing their stress level.
Mure VR, an Icelandic company, has found a way to integrate virtual reality with your work with the introduction of Breakroom. According to their website, “Breakroom is the way to turn your virtual reality headset into a multi-monitor system. You open a relaxing virtual environment and open your regular Windows applications as a floating 2D monitor within the virtual world. You are no longer limited by the physical computer monitor and can surround yourself with applications.”
Breakroom allows employees to escape workplaces by creating a workspace – such as on the beach, or in a park – that is stress-reducing, while tailored specifically to their needs. Becoming immersed in your work and blocking out the distractions that come with now-popular open office environments is a practical way that Mure VR is bringing virtual reality into the workplace.
Also here’s another application of virtual reality:
“We are Alfred” is a pioneering virtual reality program where students don a headset to experience first-hand what it is like to be an older adult living with these common conditions.
Students at the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine in Maine – the state with the oldest population in the country – are among the first in the world to use this program as a means to learn empathy for their patients.
“We’re trying to get our students to understand the person-to-person approach of caring for people and working with people,” said Dr. Marilyn R. Gugliucci, professor and director of geriatrics education and research at the college. “We don’t want to just teach in a classroom. They’ve got to know people to help heal people.”
We see seven themes emerging from new VR and AR apps for health: (1) training (2) education (3) visualization (4) psychology (5) Telehealth and telesurgery (6) screen consolidation and (7) physical training, health, and fitness. This article will focus exclusively on the applications of Virtual Reality – fully replacing the world with a realistic digital simulation of patient-specific anatomy and pathology.
