Emerging Tech

TechLife’s practical monthly roundup with Joel Burgess of emerging tech experiences, including all the latest virtual and augmented reality apps, alongside AI apps and other useful tools.

While Zoom may have taken over the 2D remote meeting space, VR has its own novel online meeting platform that could be argued offers an even better meeting experience than the traditional ones you formerly dragged your meat puppet to. It’s also created the fertile environment for a classic flight sim developer MicroPose to begin work on a cooperative WW2 airoplane bomber game that has us genuinely excited. AR continues to throw up developments and Wallace and Gromit has a new interactive augmented smartphone experience. AI this month might be developing a solution to make plastic from extracted greenhouse gasses and Nvidia seems to have a machine learning algorithm that can write its own game code from watching videos.

XR MicroProse The Mighty Eighth

$TBC, microprose.com/games/the-mighty-eighth

If you were a gamer in the 90s you’d be familiar with MicroProse and its impressive collection of flight sim games… but even if you weren’t there’s a good chance you’ll love the game it’s about to make a comeback on. After being disbanded in the 2000s the company hadn’t done much until in May this year when it announced it’d be releasing a team-based VR combat simulator called The Mighty Eighth. The game supposedly has your team manning a WW2 bomber to victory in a unique new immersive game, and if it’s anywhere near as imaginative as its original flight sims, it’ll be a massive hit.

XR Survival VR

$TBC, vr.arvilab.com

Getting stranded on a deserted island is the classic test of your survival skills and while there have been some excellent survival games thus far, VR offers a much more visceral experience. Survival from ARVI VR Inc. isn’t, however, just a survival game it’s also a multiplayer virtual escape room experience. Much like the lockdownincompatible physical escape room experiences, you have to use your wits and knowledge to overcome obstacles to get out of a particularly hairy situation.

XR MeetinVR $57 per user per month, meetinvr.com

Companies like Zoom have been catapulted into the modern work day by the global Coronavirus lockdown, but there are perhaps even better ways to have virtual meetings these days. MeetinVR is the perfect app for it. Using a VR headset and hand controllers MeetinVR lets you sit with avatars of your colleagues in a virtual room so that you can shake hands or face the speaker for deeper engagement or draw on a white board to illustrate a point. You can even bring up presentations and hand out slides for members to look at. MeetinVR has so many accessible tools that it’s perhaps even better than real world meetings, especially if it saves lengthy travel times.

X Wallace and Gromit: The Big Fix Up

Free, thebigfixup.co.uk

Wallace and Gromit was a rite of passage for anyone born in the decade or so before the turn of the century, but a consortium of organisations called Fictioneers hopes to bring these adored characters to younger generations with a new XR app called The Big Fix Up. The new smartphone app has you helping W&G to update some of the older parts of the city of Bristol by completing a range of tasks from multiplayer AR to answering phone calls.

AI Researchers using AI to make plastic from greenhouse gases

$NA, nature.com/articles/s41586020-2242-8

Researchers at the University of Toronto are using AI to help them come up with recipes to make materials from carbon dioxide. The team partnered up with scientists from Carnegie Mellon to use AI to crystalise CO2 into the plasticprecursor ethylene. While the AI software already managed to identify a suitable structure for making it from the greenhouse gas, it is currently trying to fine-tune the equation with catalyst chemicals that would reduce the overall energy-cost to produce.

XR Lenovo Mirage VR S3

$TBC, techtoday.lenovo.com

A new VR headset from Lenovo and Pico Interactive that features 4K resolution (1920 x 2160 for each eye) and a 101-degree field of vision will be rolled out to enterprise customers in the third quarter of 2020. While we’re not sure what the maximum refresh rate on this high-resolution headset is just yet, whatever it is you’ll be needing a serious workstation or gaming GPU to even get simple graphics running properly.

AI Sony IMX500 AI image sensor $TBC, sony.net

Most new flagship phones these days will have chips that include a dedicated AI processing unit that can be used to quickly process visual information to help you take better photos, but Sony is only just releasing its first image sensor that includes on-board AI. The new IMX500 sensor will include memory and processing power that’ll allow it to use machine-learning-optimised visual tasks at the image-capture level, which could massively reduce the data requirements for things like security camera object recognition.