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.

Between the surfacing of a Facebook patent for a cap with a foldable AR screen and the release of a Snapchat filter that’ll make you look like a Disney Pixar character, there were a couple of developments in the XR space this month. AI is, however, again dominating the emerging tech space with new creative endeavours like creating photo-realistic renders of landscapes from coloured in drawings and recreating lost fragments of Rembrandt’s paintings in the artist’s style. It’s also working on side-hustles like developing medication for the developing world’s deadliest diseases and has become head honcho when it comes to firing Amazon’s contract drivers.

XR Snapchat Pixar filter

Cartoon 3D Style filter lets you make your own

Pixar movies with your phone.

Free | lens.snapchat.com/bad1396b0f8d494d845b1d6438c115f2

Snapchat releases a new filter just about every week, but occasionally those filters manage to do something truly interesting. One of the more recent is the Cartoon 3D Style Lens that basically turns anyone in-shot into a custom character from a Disney Pixar movie. If the cartoon Mona Lisa wasn’t enough to convince you, then maybe Pixar Barack Obama or baby-face Vin Diesel will convert you to the power of this on-the-fly AI image processing.

XR Facebook AR Cap

Time to put on the networking hat.

$TBC | founderslegal.com/facebooks-latest-ar-patent-a-hat/ According to a patent filed in the US, Facebook is designing an AR-capable cap as an alternative to its AR glasses. The blueprint shows a peaked cap with a transparent screen that folds down out of the visor allowing you to store the screen when not in use. In addition to minimising contact, a brief of the unit suggests that the structure allows better thermal management and weight distribution for a more comfortable overall feel.

AI Nvidia AI Canvas

Create photorealistic landscapes from preschool level drawings.

Free | nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/

Nvidia released a free beta tool for anyone with an RTX GPU that leverages AI to turn basic sketches into photorealistic landscapes. The tool allows you to select different brushes for things like grass, mountains, rocks, sea sky and clouds to slop together a general outline of what the area might look like and the AI will fill in all the nitty gritty details to bring it to life. Once you have the general outline you can set the lighting conditions to give that setting the perfect mood.

AI AI Rembrandt recreation

Machine learning used to add original detail to The Night Watch

$NA | rijksmuseum.nl/

AI has been used to estimate what the outer edges of The Night Watch painting by the Dutch master Rembrandt might have looked like over 300 years ago before it was cropped to fit between doors in Amsterdam’s City Hall. A copy made within 13 years of the original by Rembrandt’s contemporary Gerrit Lundens provided the content of the cropped areas while AI trained on the master’s collection was used to recreate the likely brush strokes and colour you would have seen on the original.

AI Deep Mind AlphaFold curing deadly developing world diseases

Google’s pharmaceutical AI wunderkind tackles the biggest neglected diseases.

$NA | deepmind.com

Following the success of AlphaFold, the Deep Mind project to get AI to solve the problem of binding proteins for successful drug delivery is partnering with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative. The Geneva-based, not-forprofit focuses on developing pharmaceuticals for deadly diseases like sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, and Leishmaniasis, which are endemic in the developing world.

AI AI is being used to fire Amazon drivers

It’s cheaper for Amazon to fire the wrong person than hire more managers.

$NA | aws.amazon.com/ai/

Contract drivers are being fired automatically over email by AIs working for Amazon… even, at times, for no good reason. 63-year-old army veteran Stephen Normandin describes himself as “an old-school kind of guy… I give every job 110%”. So, naturally he was a little disgruntled when after four years delivering packages for Amazon he was told by AI that he was being fired for not completing jobs that were impossible due to factors beyond his control.

AI DJI rescue drones that pinpoint distress calls

Future search and rescue drones might be able to find people buried by earthquakes.

$NA | acoustics.org/1aspa5-savinglives-during-disasters-by-using-dronesmacarena-varela

Fraunhofer FKIE research lab in Germany is developing a search and rescue drone designed to locate people in distress by listening for them. We were a little skeptical considering how loud drone props are, but the microphone array should theoretically be capable of using software to cancel out the frequencies of any operating noise. The array will hopefully enable the device to locate individuals calling for help even when the calls are largely obscured by debris.