Born Immersive

We’re proud to announce that our Waters of Change VR experience for Project Maji is an Honoree in the 28th Annual Webby Awards!

“Honorees like Born are setting the standard for innovation and creativity on the Internet,” said Claire Graves, President of The Webby Awards. “It is an incredible achievement to be selected among the best from the 13,000 projects we reviewed this year.”

Waters of Change shows the transformative journey of Dagbe, a 13-year-old Ghanaian girl, as she witnesses the positive changes brought about by sustainable water access made possible by Project MAJI.

Find out more about Project Maji at linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7163177476226039808

Honda unveiled the XR Mobility Experience this week at SXSW 2024.

The experience combines the UNI-ONE powered-wheelchair with virtual reality goggles, so users can move through virtual worlds. The XR experience will be an exploration of the potential uses of the wheelchair for virtual reality and extended reality entertainment.

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Born Beyond Issue 69 Honda's VR wheelchair, Google introduces Genie, and more tech news.

Check out our latest white paper, "Eye Tracking in VR: A Case Study".

We share what we learnt about eye tracking while creating our VR experience, ‘Missing’, plus best practices for design, art, and technical approaches.

‘Missing’ is a missing person thriller with a mental health message at its core. Using cutting-edge eye tracking technology, the environment responds to your gaze and you begin to piece together a thought-provoking picture.

Download your free copy at born.net/eye-tracking-in-vr

In a bid to transform and revolutionise the in-flight experience, startup premium airline Beond will offer Apple Vision Pro headsets to its passengers on flights to the Maldives.

The VR headset will have the airline’s content and immersive experiences showcasing the best of Maldives.

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A driverless Waymo car collided with a cyclist in San Francisco, causing minor injuries and setting off a regulatory review.

The incident is being reviewed by the state's auto regulator, the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The accident also feeds into the ongoing discussion about the safety of autonomous vehicles, as their presence on streets continues to grow.

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US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took to the social media platform X and warned that human drivers must pay attention at all times. He made the comments after videos emerged of Tesla drivers wearing what appeared to be Apple’s recently released Vision Pro headset while driving.

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Ahead of a major congressional hearing about children’s online safety, Meta has announced a collaboration with the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit dedicated to transparency in academic research.

As part of this pilot program, Meta says it will share “privacy-preserving social media data” with select academic researchers who study wellbeing.

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Imagine having the ability to interact with your digital environment without having to take your smartphone out of your pocket, with just a blink or a look, from reading messages to real-time assistance for complex tasks.

Conceived by a collaborative effort among entrepreneurs, ophthalmologists, and engineers, Blink Energy has unveiled an impressive milestone in ocular communications technology with the BlinkIT signalling contact lens.

The company has stated that it aspires to make contact lenses and ocular technology more “efficient and user-friendly than ever before”.

Blink Energy's BlinkIT lenses are connected to your phone and powered by your eyelid. But it isn’t just a lens: it’s a battery-powered device with communication plugged into your smartphone.

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Last November, four lawmakers urged U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate, as they'd found that monkeys with the implants suffered from a range of severe side effects, including paralysis, seizures, and even brain swelling.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved the company's ambitious plan to bring this futuristic technology to human trials. This approval marked a significant leap forward for the startup, aiming to revolutionise how we tackle paralysis and various neurological conditions.

By September, Neuralink announced the go-ahead to start recruiting for these landmark human trials. At the heart of this study is a robot, meticulously designed to implant a brain-computer interface directly into a part of the brain responsible for movement intentions.

Neuralink's vision is to empower individuals to control digital cursors and keyboards through thought alone, opening up new horizons for human-computer interaction.

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Health tech brand Oura is rolling out a new feature called Resilience that will create an assessment of a person’s ability to handle “physiological stress”.

The tool is coming to the Oura Ring and can be accessed on the official app, where it will be located underneath the sleep monitoring readout with an on-screen rating.

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Researchers from Meta's Codec Avatars Lab and Nanyang Technological University present URHand in a new research paper. The name combines "Universal Relightable Hands" and "Your Hand".

URHand is a hand model that can be adapted to a user's individual hands and allows for realistic illumination. The hand model can be adapted to the user's hands using a series of smartphone pictures, so that one day it may be possible to bring your own hands into virtual reality.

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Disney has created HoloTile: hundreds of small, round “tiles” about the size of a coin, each serving as a mini, omnidirectional treadmill.

Working together, their only task is to stop the walker from leaving the pad, and we might expect to see it launched as part of a Disney Parks VR experience.
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Born Beyond Issue 64 Disney's HoloTile VR movement pad, 3D Teams meetings and more.

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects 20% of the population, making it challenging for children and adults to read, write, and spell.

And before Dysolve, it was a learning disability that was thought to be lifelong.

The new AI program can correct dyslexia, a task beyond even the most qualified of human specialists, using an AI platform that generates interactive verbal games customised to each student.

While Dysolve uses gamification techniques, it is not an entertainment platform. The students’ responses generate new evaluative and corrective game content. Through daily correction, the AI system resolves students’ underlying processing difficulties.

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In a lab in Rome, Marco Evangelos Biancolini and his team are investigating aneurysms and the effectiveness of different surgical procedures on patients.

But rather than poking and prodding actual people, it’s their digital double projected on a computer screen, each reflecting the person’s individual biochemical makeup.

These digitally twinned patients could open the door to the next frontier of personalised healthcare. By testing methods and drugs on digital twins, medical staff can determine the best courses of treatment for the patients themselves.

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In an unannounced update to its usage policy, OpenAI has opened the door to military applications of its technologies. The policy previously prohibited the use of its products for “military and warfare” purposes.

In an additional statement, OpenAI has confirmed that the language was changed to accommodate military customers and projects that the company approves. ‘Our policy does not allow our tools to be used to harm people, develop weapons, for communications surveillance, or to injure others or destroy property. There are, however, national security use cases that align with our mission.’

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Tesla's Elon Musk has shared a new video of the Optimus Humanoid robot folding clothes.

Milan Kovac, one of the lead engineers on the project, commented saying that the robot is going to be able to handle increasingly complex tasks.

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Chinese startup Betavolt has unveiled a new battery that it claims can generate electricity for 50 years, without the need for charging or maintenance.

The Beijing-based company says its nuclear battery is the first in the world to realise the miniaturisation of atomic energy, placing 63 nuclear isotopes into a module smaller than a coin.

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Robots from around the world are sharing data on object manipulation to help work towards a general-purpose robotic brain.

The labs at Google and the University of California have joined up with 32 other robotics laboratories across North America, Europe and Asia as part of the RT-X project.

The shared goal is to make general-purpose robots a reality, as well as assembling data, resources and code.

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deadmau5, Slash and 𝐄𝐕𝐀𝐍𝐄𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄 are partnering with Soundscape to create immersive VR concert experiences in Unreal Engine Users can explore an "interactive audiovisual environment" with a virtual music festival featuring VR performances.

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Born Beyond Issue 62 Lawsuits targeting OpenAI, Apple's in-store Vision Pro demos and more.

U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command recently renewed its partnership with
Microsoft to develop a virtual and mixed-reality training environment for Space Force missions.

According to the tech giant, the one-year contract covers work on an augmented-reality space simulation tool called the Integrated, Immersive, Intelligent Environment - a follow-on to the Immersive Digital Facility (IDF) prototype successfully developed earlier this year.

The system uses Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets, Azure cloud platform, and a mesh framework for sharing AR experiences, letting users see and manipulate interactive models of space with accurately scaled orbital objects.

Read more in our newsletter at born.net/insight/born-beyond-issue-62 – link in bio.

HTC has launched a Full-Face Tracker accessory that they say can capture facial expressions and mouth movement with precision.

Designed for the Vive XR Elite, it attaches magnetically and adds two cameras for eye-tracking and one for mouth-tracking.

Developers can read intentions and emotions in real-time, to bring a new dimension to human interactions across educational, medical, and creative applications. HTC is calling it a VR gamechanger – what do you think?

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OpenAI and Microsoft are facing several lawsuits accusing them of using other people's copyrighted works without permission to train large language models (LLMs).

It would be "impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials," OpenAI wrote in its written evidence for the committee's inquiry into LLMs.

This could mean more lawsuits against the companies in the future, but also more transparency when it comes to knowing how LLMs are trained, and which creators' materials are used.

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LG’s new transparent OLED TV is the world’s first wireless transparent TV, and was unveiled at CES 2024.

The LG SIGNATURE OLED TV is a tech marvel, combining a transparent 4K OLED screen and LG’s wireless video and audio transmission technology - and we think it's set to transform screen experiences forever.

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Layered Reality brings back the icon in Elvis Evolution. It's an immersive experience that combines augmented reality (AR), sensory effects, and projection technology to resurrect the king himself for an unforgettable concert.

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A 17-year-old underwent augmented reality-assisted brain tumour removal, in a significant step for tech in surgery.

Dr. Thomas C. Steineke, a neurosurgeon at Hackensack Meridian Health, used AR to create a 3D tumour model for precise surgery planning. AR surgery is safer, less invasive and more precise.

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