Emerging tech
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.
VR ALWAYS PROMISED that it would take you to places you’ve never seen before, we just didn’t realise at the time that these places would be quite as obscure as a female duck’s private parts. Mozilla has also unleashed its mixed reality internet browser, which will make using the web in VR manageable, and SpaceX announced it’ll livestream its 2021 lunar mission in VR. If you’re here for AR, Magic Leap One finally announced its first fully fledged game, Angry Birds FPS: First Person Slingshot, and there’s a new travel tool that’ll keep your carry on in-check. Apart from this, AI pretty much makes up the rest of the emerging tech this month including everything from self driving motorbikes to global famine finding algorithms.
Flesh Mesh DEEPFAKE YOUR FRIENDS’ FACES. Free with IAP | panchononchalant.com/flesh_mesh.html
While there’s plenty of funny pranks we can imagine doing to friends with this new app, it doesn’t change just how creepy it is to be able to jump into one of your friends faces and use your own expressions to control what they do using nothing but your smartphone. Flesh Mesh, as this creepy app was creepily dubbed by its creator Pancho Nonchalant, uses the true depth camera on the iPhone X to map the 3D geometry of faces and transpose a photographic skin over your face to allow you to transfer expressions to it.
BMW self-driving bike BORN TO BE W’AI’LD. $TBC | www.bmw.com.au
The German automobile and motorcycle company BMW showed a video of one of its bikes using a machine learning algorithm to accelerate, coast, break and then throw down its kickstand to stop in September, all without the help of a rider. Automated riding has been slower to develop than cars — since an automatic brake assist on a bike is as likely to throw a rider off as it is to prevent a crash — but BMW hopes there’ll be some safety features to be found in AI.
Google Drive Priority NEW BETA TOOL FOR EVEN QUICKER ACCESS TO YOUR ‘MOST IMPORTANT’ FILES. Free | drive.google.com
Google says its current machine learning powered Quick Access feature for Drive is reported to save users around 50% of their total search time. Priority, which has been in development since Quick Access was launched, does much more. The new system uses data from your entire G Suite (and even from others in your organisation) to better prioritise the documents you might need, and will even use Calendar to amend this if things are due depending on the time of day.
AI gliders use drafts to fly like birds GLIDERS FLY HIGH WITH AI. $NA | www.universityofcalifornia.edu
We generally associate the flapping of wings as the cause of flight, but birds actually rely a lot on winds and thermal updrafts to carry them high into the sky with minimal effort. While fixed winged planes have never had the flexibility to harness this natural resource, scientists from the University of California are using AI controlled gliders to learn how to use these updrafts to gain altitude. The Gliders currently last up to 45 minutes, but the team believes they’ll be able to use thermal drafts for much longer flights in the future.