Bleeding edge: The best new VR, AR & AI stuff

TECHLIFE’S PRACTICAL MONTHLY ROUNDUP OF EMERGING TECH EXPERIENCES, INCLUDING ALL THE LATEST VIRTUAL AND AUGMENTED REALITY APPS, ALONGSIDE AI-DRIVEN BOTS AND OTHER USEFUL TOOLS.

AFTER A STRING of massive VR announcements last issue, the space has quietened down somewhat this month — although not without dropping the news of an ebook prequel for the highly anticipated VR game ARKTIKA.1, being developed by the creators of Metro: Last Light.

Augmented reality enthusiasm continues to bubble along, thanks to the new momentum generated by Apple’s ARKit, and in Australia, AR’s picked up some local vigor, with the announcement of Melbourne-based company Zero Latency opening an additional ‘VR arcade’ facility in Brisbane, which mixes together virtual worlds with a real-life environment.

Perhaps most intriguing this month, however, is the emerging debate between Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla’s Elon Musk about how AI should be regulated and pitched to the public. While the TechLife team’s opinion is split — some of us support Musk, who’s overseen the development of AI for mass-market self driving car production, while others stand behind Zuckerberg’s harnessing of machine-learning to achieve the perfect cat-whisker placement in selfie videos — there’s some logic behind both standpoints. Yes, Facebook’s uncanny ability to manipulate its 2 billion active, freethinking human users could significantly subdue its CEO’s perceived threat of undisciplined AI.

Yet, the standpoint that sentient computers will be malignant could certainly hurt the uptake of beneficial AI based technologies in the short term... and isn’t an ideal public opinion for diplomatic relations, if it ever comes to that.