Emerging Tech

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

Lockdown is the perfect time for experimenting with virtual reality spaces and though we’ve seen developments slow a little this month, there are some neat developments from Facebook including the Oculus Quest 2 and an AR headset prototype that gives you super hearing capabilities. The empty streets are encouraging the machines to drive, with new AI tools beating the world’s best drivers in Gran Turismo Sport driving sims and illegally speeding sleeping passengers across Canada. It’s also preaching a new gospel, helping improve IVF success rates and keeping an eye on how drunk you are. Let’s just hope AI doesn’t wander too far down the fire and brimstone path.

XR Fundamental Surgery VR

$NA, fundamentalvr.com

While you are probably more used to using VR to hone your skills at hitting beats with a lightsaber, the more productive among us are using it to teach surgical procedures to new doctors. Fundamental Surgery utilises VR and a proprietary HapticVR engine to simulate the resistance felt during real surgeries. In addition to better preparing students for their first surgeries it’s a useful tool to reduce virus transmission amongst health workers.

XR Oculus Quest 2

From $479, oculus.com

While Facebook announced it would be discontinuing the Rift S headset it also unveiled the Oculus Quest 2, which should go some way to appease disgruntled PC VR enthusiasts with a new and improved resolution and better PC connectivity. While the screens have gone from OLED to LCD, the resolution has been bumped to 1832 by 1920 pixels per eye and the refresh rate is now 90Hz (up from 72Hz). You can also now plug it into your PC via a separately purchased $129 USB Type-C fibre optic cable to fun full-fat VR experiences.

XR Facebook Daredevil AR headset

$TBC, about.fb.com

Facebook Reality Labs is working on a new AR audio headset that will discern what you’re listening to and reduce any distracting background noise. Current active noise cancellation tech can do a similar thing with voice passthrough, however the new AR headset seems to be able to do this for multiple types of sounds and will also isolate and amplify what you are listening to, making it easier to hear others in a restaurant or music in a crowded street.

AI IBM Watson Hurricane prediction

$NA, www.jpl.nasa.gov

While meteorologists are pretty good at predicting the movement of hurricanes, one area that is still complex enough to be a mystery is the exact conditions required for system intensification. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have run years of meteorological data through a machine learning algorithm designed to identify and predict hurricane intensification in the hope of changing this. Through an analysis of the software’s predictions the scientists found three strong indicators of intensification: heavy rainfall, ice concentration, and air temperature in the storm’s eye.

AI Sony AI Gran Turismo

$NA, youtu.be/Zeyv1bN9v4A

Researchers from the University of Zurich and Sony’s Swiss AI team designed an autonomous machine learning algorithm that can beat professional drivers on the popular driving simulator Gran Turismo Sport. With physics that accounts for everything from tire temperature to fuel load, this hyper realistic simulation is about as close as you can get to real world conditions and is even used by professional driving teams to pick drivers. The AI driver can reliably beat all human runs on various tracks.

AI AI IVF tool

$NA | doi.org/10.7554/eLife.55301

The success rate of IVF pregnancies still sits at around 30%, so anything that might help shift the dial is a welcome advance. AI may have some of the answers here, being able to predict the best embryos nine times out of 10 using imagery. The algorithm was also able to assess the implantation potential of 97 cases with an accuracy of 75.26%, outperforming 15 trained embryologists who averaged a 67.35% success rate.

AI AI Jesus has some new verses it wants us to listen to

Free, github.com/GeorgeDavila/ AI_Jesus

After training an AI on verses from the King James Bible, security developer George Davila Durendal tested the virtual prophet’s ability to spout divine wisdom on topics like the plague (AKA the coronavirus). While most of the answers created by the bot are indecipherable, to many it’ll feel only marginally more nonsensical than the real thing. Durendal has actually gone a step further and has deepfaked some famous portraits of Jesus to give animated readings of the text AI Jesus wrote.