The Roundup #2— Next Big Thing Edition
Welcome to the second edition of the Jam3 link Roundup. Every week or so, we share random stuff that got us talking around the studio.
We like random.
This week’s theme: articles about stuff that might be the Next Big Thing. Hope you enjoy, and if you hear of any other new stuff we should know about, sharing is caring.
“Hey, we’re not saving lives here…”
Back in July, New York Times writer Allison Arieff complained in a column that society at large, but especially the tech world, seems to be spending too much time and effort solving the wrong problems. She’s got a point — we might want to work harder on global warming before we build another app that uses a drone to deliver…that drone you ordered.
That said, we wondered how Arieff might react to news of a forthcoming app that can detect heart arrhythmia with 95% accuracy using only your smart phone.
It’s too early to say how effective it might be, but if we can make detecting potential heart attack candidates as easy as catching Pidgeys, it sounds like something we should pursue. First step: somebody should give it a catchy name, ’cause “Atrial Fibrillation Detection App” isn’t really popping.
Silicon Valley has been making lots of big hairy bets on health tech. Despite the Valley’s well-documented excesses, you’d be pretty cynical not to be at least a little excited about what could come out of those big investments.
Read more here.
Better living through design
It goes without saying that design can make real, important differences in people’s lives.
The Design Museum has just released its nominees for the year’s top ideas. The shortlist includes more than 70 projects across 6 categories. It’s always a thought-provoking list.
Highlights this year include Better Shelter, a partnership between IKEA and UNHCR to create flat-pack shelters for refugee camps, and Precious Plastic, an open source project that lets people build their own ways to convert waste plastic into new and more useful things.
There are also lots of very cool (if less world-changing) entries worth checking out. You will want to buy some of them.
Check out Design Museum’s Beazley Designs of the Year here.
Did Virtual Reality Just Get Realer?
Remember Lytro, the camera that let you focus your pictures after you shot them? Maybe.
Do you actually know anyone that actually bought one? Ummm…
Lytro’s consumer play with the light field camera never really took off. Now the company seems to have secured some more investment and pivoted into the more specialized realm of VR with the launch of Immerge, a next-gen 360 video capture rig. Here’s how Sean O’Kane from the Verge explains it:
“Light field photography is different from traditional photography because the cameras can measure the geometry of the light that strikes the image sensor — instead of just capturing it straight on. With enough computing power, Lytro’s software can then reconstruct the scene that was captured in three dimensions.”
There’s a compelling argument that the Immerse rig’s ability to easily capture, in multiple directions and with depth information, could really change the face of VR.
Or it could be the next Lytro.
Check out the Verge’s take here.
Scary Movies
Our R&D team here at Jam3 has been experimenting with machine learning lately. Apparently, we’re not the only ones.
Fox, along with AI engine IBM Watson, has just released the first movie trailer created entirely by artificial intelligence.
According to The Next Web,
“(to) prepare the machine for the task at hand, IBM researchers fed Watson over 100 horror movie trailers cut into separate moments and scenes. The computer then performed a series of visual, sound and composition analyses to get an idea of the dynamics of a trailer.
When Watson finished processing Morgan, it isolated 10 scenes totalling six minutes of video. While a human editor still had to patch the scenes together to tell a coherent story, IBM’s AI shortened the process down to only 24 hours.”
The result is really scary. Especially, we imagine, for professional film editors.
Money, Baby!
Finally, check out the new polymer-based fiver from the Bank of Australia. Canadians will find them familiar — we’ve been using something similar for a few years, but these are pretty next-level. Paper money, your days are numbered.
Full video here.
Thanks for reading. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.
Special thanks to Candy Lee and Dirk van Ginkel for their excellent link contributions.
