Bleeding edge: the best of emerging tech

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

Apart from a VR controlled robot and Panasonic’s new steampunk HDR VR-goggles, the entire ET segment is dominated again by AI. It’s for good reason when you consider that AI is helping researchers discover illegal logging roads in the Amazon, and Google built a large language model four times faster than its current AI algorithm. Sadly there’s more negative AI development than ever this month with the instatement of a puppet AI oversight authority in the US, racially discriminatory facial recognition tech developed by Huawei and a news article condenser that means Facebook users don’t have to read more than bullet points anymore.

XR Quest 2 120Hz patch

Oculus is going to see how it goes.

Free | developer.oculus.com

Facebook’s AR and VR VP Andrew Bosworth confirmed with PC Gamer that the company had a 120Hz patch for its Quest 2 in the pipeline, with a tentative release date of March. With most headsets only offering 90Hz refresh rates this software bump would give the Quest 2 a bigger competitive edge, bringing it in line with the speeds on Sony’s PSVR. Compatibility will depend on individual app support and you’ll probably need the power of a PC through Oculus Link.

XR Mars VR

Experience Mars ... or Utah in VR.

US$25 | igg.me/at/marsvr/x#/

As the next most likely candidate for extraterrestrial colonisation, it makes sense that many people want to explore Mars in VR. In order to placate this initially, the Mars Society ran a 2018 Kickstarter campaign to scan a square mile of the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah and upload it to a sim. Needing another $100,000 to turn it into a downloadable

Steam VR game they launched another campaign on Indiegogo recently, which managed to hit it’s funding goal in March 2021.

AI Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience

VR art is on the agenda.

US$40 | vangoghexpo.com

While it shares a very similar name to it, this particular exhibition isn’t the Immersive Van Gogh experience that featured on the Netflix show Emily In Paris, but unlike its competitor Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience does offer a full VR journey that takes you through an average day for the artist. Hopefully once the exhibition ends the experience will become available on the internet for anyone that can’t make it to the handful of cities it’s currently exhibiting at.

AI China’s Sharp Eyes Program

AI and cameras key to China’s drive for 100% surveillance of public places.

$NA | cset.georgetown.edu

Various regions in China have been aggressively adding cameras to public spaces across the country since 2013 under its “Xueliang” or Sharp Eyes Program, which meant that it had over 200 million public and private security cameras installed by 2018 - four times as many as the US, according to a report by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology published in January. While some of these in the West of the country use AI to track Uighur Muslim populations others are fed through government-provided set top boxes to the general public for community oversight.

AI Deep Nostalgia

Bring your nonna’s nonna portraits to life with AI.

Free | myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia

Harry Potter fans will be familiar with the concept of animated portraits, but for the rest of the world the ancestry website MyHeritage’s AI tool that animates old pictures was revelatory. Whether it was Einstein’s pokingtongue-out photograph or implied expressions from the Mona Lisa, the tool can animate anything it recognises as a face uploaded to the website. While animations of historical figures like Tutankhamun are hard to falter, you do get some comically bad renditions of actors like Nicholas Cage.

AI Raspberry Pi Pico 4ML

This silicon pie gets machine learning processor update.

US$11.95 | sparkfun.com/products/17720

The Pico from Raspberry Pi has already sold 250,000 units with another 750,000 on backorder, but at the tinyML Summit 2021 in March, co-founder Eben Upton talked about the road map for the integration of third party machine learning attachments. The SparkFun MicroMod RP2040, Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect and the ArduCam Pico4ML are three machine learning hardware plug-ins that will be available to the Pico in the near future.

AI GPT-3 is better than you at writing essays

Well at least if you’re the average university student in the US.

$NA | eduref.net/features/what-gradescan-ai-get-in-college/

We know that the large language model known as GPT-3 is pretty adept at writing articles, but the American educational information site eduref.net decided to see just how good this AI was at writing college essays. The company hired a panel of professors to write an essay prompt and grade responses of 12 recent grads working as freelance writers and GPT-3 anonymously. The result was that while the algorithm wasn’t the best, in everything but creative writing it landed somewhere in the middle of the pack.