Google ARCore: Augmented Reality for the Masses

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality has yet to capture the attention of the average consumer. Last year, the augmented reality market was valued at $2.39 billion, and it’s expected to reach $61.39 billion by 2023. Such a high growth-rate will only be possible if augmented reality comes to the masses, and Google has just announced a new software development kit for augmented reality that might do just that.

ARCore, as Google calls its rich set of tools, frameworks, and APIs, is built on the fundamental technologies that power Tango, the company’s original augmented reality computing platform, but it differs in one crucial way: it doesn’t need any additional hardware to function.

Takes More Than Two to Tango

Google released Tango in 2014, enabling certain smartphones to detect their position relative to the world around them without using GPS or other external signals. Right from the get-go, developers we able to create apps for the platform that integrated motion-tracking, area learning, and depth perception using Tango’s C and Java APIs to access this data in real time.

The main reason why we don’t hear about Tango just a few years after its launch is the terribly low number of smartphones that support it. On Tango’s official website, Google currently (September 2017) lists only two devices: the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and the Asus ZenFone AR. The former is huge, and the latter doesn’t support FDD-LTE band 12. So, not exactly a great selection.

In the day and age of affordable Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Meizu, and Huawei releasing affordable smartphones with amazing specifications on a steady basis, the average consumer simply has too many other interesting options to even consider buying a specific smartphone just to try augmented reality. In 2017, augmented reality is still just an intriguing toy, not a major selling-point.

“We’ve been developing the fundamental technologies that power mobile AR over the last three years with Tango, and ARCore is built on that work. But, it works without any additional hardware, which means it can scale across the Android ecosystem,” said Dave Burke, Google’s vice-president for Android, in the release statement.

“ARCore will run on millions of devices, starting today with the Pixel and Samsung’s S8, running 7.0 Nougat and above. We’re targeting 100 million devices at the end of the preview. We’re working with manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, LG, ASUS, and others to make this possible with a consistent bar for quality and high performance,” Burke added.

The goal here is to create a generic augmented reality platform that individual manufacturers can support as much or as little as they want. So far, the only known requirement is a minimum SDK version of Android 7.0 (Nougat). It’s possible that ARCore will, at least to some degree, run even on older versions of Android, but that’s something that still needs to be tested. From the point of view of Android developers, ARCode will be yet another functionality they can use to enrich their apps.

ARCore Versus Other Augmented Reality Platforms

Google is slightly late to the augmented reality party. Apple introduced its augmented reality platform, ARKit, back in June, and third-party developers have already used it to produce a host of clever experiments that anyone with an Apple device with either the A9 or the A10 (or newer) processor can try.

In April, at this year’s F8 keynote, Facebook introduced the company’s augmented reality platform, which focuses on artificial intelligence-powered cameras. “We’re making the camera the first augmented reality platform,” said Zuckerberg.

With so much competition and such high stakes, ARCore needs to give developers exceptional tools and flawless performance to avoid the fate of Tango. On this front, Google focuses on three things: motion tracking, environmental understanding, and light estimation.

Using the combination of Java/OpenGL, Unity, and Unreal, developers can use ARCore to determine both the position and orientation of the phone as it moves to keep virtual objects accurately placed in the real environment. The same points that ARCore uses for motion tracking are also used to keep objects accurately placed on horizontal surfaces, such as a floor or a table. Finally, “ARCore observes the ambient light in the environment and makes it possible for developers to light virtual objects in ways that match their surroundings, making their appearance even more realistic,” explains Burke.

To further support augmented reality development, Google developed Blocks and Tilt Brush. Blocks is a simple 3D modeling tool designed to make creating 3D models as accessible as possible. Artists can share their creations with others and easily use them for their own projects. Tilt Brush is a virtual reality painting application with an intuitive interface. Together with Blocks, Tilt Brush gives developers everything they need to create beautiful assets in a natural and fun way.

“We think the Web will be a critical component of the future of AR, so we’re also releasing prototype browsers for web developers so they can start experimenting with AR, too. These custom browsers allow developers to create AR-enhanced websites and run them on both Android/ARCore and iOS/ARKit,” said Burke.

Search is one area where augmented reality could prove to be tremendously useful, which is a big deal considering that Google is essentially synonymous with search in general. With the help of artificial intelligence, Google could one day be able to overlay assembly instructions on Ikea products, take recipes to a whole new level, or shatter language barriers.

ARCore success now depends on how well the technology will work in practice. Unlike with the company’s previous augmented reality platform or Apple’s ARKit, most Android users will experience ARCore through budget and mid-range devices, with lower resolution cameras and weaker CPUs. Unless ARCore works acceptably well outside the high-end smartphone category, most Android users won’t be interested in new augmented reality apps, and developers thus won’t be interested in making them.

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications and IOTA

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, IoT

Humans are not the only users of the Internet. Billions of machines need to deliver and process information in real time, and the Internet allows them to do just that. In 2011, the machine-to-machine (M2M) market was worth $200 billion, and the latest Machina Research report predicts that it will grow to $1.2 trillion by 2022. The question is what’s behind this growth and how does the future of machine-to-machine communications look like.

Machine-to-Machine Communications in the IoT Era

Originally, the term machine-to-machine communication referred to two machines exchanging data without human interaction. Examples of such machines include industrial sensors, power switches, and various interconnected pieces of our modern infrastructure.

Over time, machines have gained the ability to communicate wirelessly and become exponentially more capable. They’ve also taken on new roles and moved from warehouses and manufacturing facilities into our homes and offices. This shift is most notably reflected in the emergence of the term Internet of Things, or IoT.

The terms M2M and IoT are very similar to each other in their meaning, but IoT conjures up the image of Internet-enabled smart devices, such as light bulbs and thermostats, accessible via smartphone apps and producing heaps of data transmitted to the cloud for analysis. Most importantly, IoT devices are user-oriented, whereas many machines participating in machine-to-machine communication are often meant to interact only with one another.

The Rise of Machine Economy

As the number and the complexity of Internet-connected devices increases, a fascinating vision of a future where machines not only communicate with one another over the Internet but also trade resources emerges.

In this new machine economy, a security system could autonomously purchase cloud computational capacity or storage space as needed, and an electric smart car could automatically charge from the grid without ever bothering the owner with low-battery alerts.

“Imagine you’re on the tennis court and your smart racket notices that your tennis balls have lost inflation. The racket, which has been tracking your swing performance and sending the data to your smart devices, decides to order and pay for three more balls from the auto-roving ball dispenser. Your device also determines that the auto-rover is using your favorite open source code, so it makes a small extra donation to the rover to help support future development via smart contract,” imagines how machine economy could look like in practice Russell Moore, an innovation director at TSYS and an advisor for the Technology Association of Georgia.

IOTA as the Currency of Machine Economy

All this communication and transactions exchanges between machines will need to happen in real-time, with zero fees, and in a secure fashion. That’s where IOTA, a new cryptocurrency that focused on M2M transactions, comes in.

IOTA offers an infinitely scalable distributed ledger, called Tangle, that enables zero-cost transactions in real-time and even when offline. Machines can connect to this ledger to “trade exact amounts of resources on-demand, as well as store data from sensors and data loggers securely and verified on the ledger,” IOTA developers explain on the official website.

“While the whole world has adopted the ‘sharing economy’ in areas like driving and accommodation, IOTA enables a whole new realm where anything with a chip in it can be leased in real time. Most of our belongings stay idle for the vast majority of time that we possess ownership of it, but through IOTA a lot of these things like appliances, tools, drones, e-bikes, etc. and resources such as computer storage, computational power, Wi-Fi bandwidth, etc. can be turned into leasing-services effortlessly.”

Whether IOTA’s vision of the future is exciting or frightening is up to every individual to decide, but the fact is that it’s coming faster than many experts would imagine just a few years ago. In fact, the infrastructure is already here and working. Now it’s up to developers and the manufacturers of smart devices to build on it.

Wearable Trends at IFA 2017

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, IoT, Technology trends

IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin) is one of the oldest industrial exhibitions in Germany and the biggest tech show in Europe. This year’s IFA hosted 1,805 exhibitors, who occupied over 1.7M square feet of the sold-out show floor. From ground-breaking innovations to highly anticipated product launches, IFA’s visitors had the opportunity to get a glimpse into the near future of digital lifestyle products in one place, and tech companies were able to demonstrate which trends they see as important.

“Fitness wearables have become the norm in the shortest space of time, providing a perfect example of how quickly technologies can transform our lives,” said Alexander Zeeh, Samsung’s director of home appliances. “This is exactly what our motto for this year’s IFA expresses: ‘the new normal’ … Samsung has been actively working to shape this trend for five years now with new innovations such as our Samsung Gear smartwatches.”

Judging by the large number of product launches of wearable devices at IFA 2017, Samsung isn’t the only company that sees things this way. In fact, the wearables market is predicted to be worth $25 Billion by 2019 by the industry analyst firm CCS Insight. As we go over the most important wearable devices that were launched at IFA 2017, notice that all of them fit into the lifestyle product category, with a clear orientation toward sports and health.

Samsung Gear Fit Pro 2

The Samsung Gear Fit Pro 2 is a relatively thin and narrow smart band with a vibrant, 1.5-inch AMOLED display. The target audience of this product are swimmers, who, along with clumsy individuals, are likely the only people who will benefit from the band’s 5 ATM water resistance, which allows the Gear Fit Pro 2 to withstand depths of up to 50 meters. The band can even automatically detect when it’s underwater and switch to Water Lock Mode to prevent water bubbles from interacting with the touch display.

Of course, Samsung didn’t forget about terrestrial athletes when designing the Gear Fit Pro 2. The built-in GPS sensor provides accurate location tracking, and the heart rate monitor on the back of the band offers continuous heart rate monitoring throughout the day and when exercising or playing sports.

The Gear Fit Pro 2 has a speedy dual-core CPU clocked at 1 GHz, 512 MB of memory, and 4 GB of storage space. It runs on Samsung’s open source operating system based on the Linux kernel, Tizen, and supports Spotify offline playlists. The 200 mAh battery lasts several days in standby mode and one or two days when used moderately often.

The Samsung Gear Fit Pro 2 band is now available for pre-order for $200.

Samsung Gear Sport

While the Samsung Gear Fit Pro 2 will appeal mostly to fitness enthusiasts and people who train every day, the Samsung Gear Sport is Samsung’s latest attempt to capture the smartwatch market as a whole. The design of this smartwatch is a well-executed mix of a timeless, semi-round, metal watch face with a durable and water resistant 20 mm nylon band, which suggests that the Gear Sport isn’t afraid of water. In fact, the smartwatch can survive up to 50 meters deep under water, under the ISO standard 22810:2010.

The Gear Sport helps users make the most out of every opportunity to exercise and reach various fitness goals. “When you’re on an airplane, Gear Sport adjusts accordingly, suggesting stretches that you can do from your seat. When you’re driving, it’s also smart enough to know that you’re focused on the road, not just inactive, so won’t ask you to stretch your muscles,” Samsung explains on its website. Like any good personal trainer, the Gear Sport lets users choose from dozens of workouts, measuring progress with the built-in heart rate sensor.

The Gear Sport also features NFC-based Samsung Pay compatibility for contactless credit and debit card payments. Additional functionality is available in the form of third-party apps, such as Endomondo, MyFitnessPal, and MapMyRun.

The Samsung Gear Sport smartwatch is expected to arrive in October, but its price has yet to be announced.

Fitbit Ionic

When Fitbit acquired Pebble, the Kickstarter-funded smartwatch manufacturer, for $23 million last year, everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before Fitbit released a spiritual successor to Pebble smartwatches. That smartwatch is now here and its name is Fitbit Ionic.

The Ionic smartwatch runs on Fitbit OS, offering full support for third-party applications. Developers can easily create new apps for the Ionic using JavaScript and SVG web standards. Fitbit gives developers access to all sensors the Ionic has, so the possibilities to create interesting apps are virtually limitless.

The Ionic has a built-in GPS and a heart rate sensor, is water resistant, supports contactless payments, and has plenty of storage space for offline music. The smartwatch features a slightly curved touchscreen display with up to 1000 nits of brightness and Corning Gorilla Glass 3 for protection.

Clearly, The Ionic is a premium product, and the steep price of $299.95 makes it the most expensive Fitbit device yet. What’s more, it also makes it more expensive than the Apple Watch Series 1, which could turn out to be a huge problem for Fitbit, a company with a great reputation for its relatively simple activity trackers that start at less than $100.

Invoxia Roadie Tracker

The Invoxia Roadie is an elegant GPS tracking device that doesn’t require a SIM card and has a battery life of up to 8 months. Invoxia sells the Roadie tracker for $99, and the price includes a 3-year network subscription.

What sets the Roadie apart from other compact GPS tracking devices is its ability to combine GPS technology with local wireless networks for maximum precision. This comes in handy, for example, when the Roadie is used to track a piece of luggage as it travels from airport to airport. The Roadie can be easily configured through the official mobile app, supporting location-based notification updates as well as real-time tracking.

Bang & Olufsen Beoplay E8

At IFA 2017, it was apparent that headphones and earbuds are becoming as wireless as they possibly can be. The EarPods from Apple are no longer the only elegant fully wireless earbuds on the market. The Bang & Olufsen Beoplay E8 are smaller than the EarPods, and they promise better sound quality and a comparable battery life.

The Beoplay E8 are controlled by touch, allowing users to change tracks or take phone calls with a simple tap on the earbud. The aluminum construction should offer excellent durability, and the provided leather charging case is just one of many ways how Bang & Olufsen hope to justify the $299 price tag.

Samsung’s Gear IconX

The Gear IconX from Samsung look like ordinary wireless fitness earbuds, but they are actually one foot in the fitness tracker territory. Inside the Gear IconX are a heart rate monitor, an accelerometer, and 4 GB of storage space. Thanks to all this technology, the Gear IconX can, more or less, replace a smart fitness band while also being great at playing music. The internal memory can hold up to 1,000 songs, so no smartphone is needed apart from synchronization.

The Gear IconX have a layer of P2i nano coating for extra water resistance, and they ship with a compact charging case with a 315 mAh battery.

Sony WF-1000X

Bang & Olufsen is betting on premium sound quality, Samsung on fitness tracking features, and Sony on noise cancellation. The WF-1000X feature 6 mm drivers and Adaptive Sound Control to achieve the best possible sound quality with the least amount of background sound. Users can choose between two noise canceling modes: Normal and Voice. The former mode lets through all essential background sounds, which comes in handy when biking or jogging outside, while the latter mode only lets through the sound of human voice.

The Sony WF-1000X earbuds show that wearable devices don’t have to come with revolutionary features to be attractive. Miniaturization of existing technologies can give us wearables that solve already solve problems in a better and more elegant way.

Conclusion

It seems that wearable devices and the fitness world are a match made in heaven. The smartphone is perhaps the main reason why we don’t see more products aimed at people who don’t wear neon running shoes, hi-viz jackets, and yoga pants. If you have large pockets for a smartphone, why would you spend hundreds of dollars on a device that offers only a handful of useful extra features?

Still, smartphones leave plenty of room for single-purpose, low-cost wearables like the Invoxia Roadie Tracker. We just have to wait for the technology to become more affordable, which may take a few more years. For the time being, we will likely continue to see similar products being launched as those at IFA 2017.

Lean Manufacturing with 4D Printing

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Technology trends

Several leading additive manufacturing research facilities, including MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, 3D printing manufacturer Stratasys, and 3D software company Autodesk, are taking 3D manufacturing to the next level by creating objects that can change their shape over time in response to various external stimuli.

The new process, called 4D printing, relies mostly on shape-memory polymers, which can form complex structures when exposed to heat, moisture, light, or, for example, kinetic energy. While still in it’s infancy, 4D printing has already been demonstrated by several universities.

Zhen Ding at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and his colleagues are using standard commercial 3D printers to rapidly print rigid 4D objects which change shape when heated to 45°C. Inspired by natural structures like plants, team of scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University unveiled 4D-printed hydrogel composite structures that change shape when immersed in water.

Skylar Tibbits, a co-director and founder of the Self-Assembly Lab housed at MIT’s International Design Center, “sees all kinds of future applications for 4D printing. They range from sneakers that change how they fit on your feet based on what activities you are doing to how clothing changes composition based on the weather,” reports All3DP.

It will still take some time before the technology moves past the stage of research and development, and it will take even longer before consumers will be able to walk into a store and buy a 4D printer, but the wide range of examples how the technology could be used in the future shows just how much potential it has to transform fields like manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and others.

Edge Computing: The Future of The Internet of Things

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in IoT, Technology trends

During 2017, Gartner expects the total number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to grow by 31 percent. Currently, most of these devices are connected to the cloud, but that may change soon as enterprises will find it increasingly difficult to meet the computing demands of modern IoT devices and connected applications.

The cloud, the technology that has made it possible to move processing for large in-house data centers and individual devices to infinitely scalable infrastructures owned by third-party companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, isn’t without its limits.

Privacy conscientious enterprises don’t like sending all their data outside their premises with no control over what exactly they send and what they keep to themselves or delete altogether. Developers of data-driven intelligent applications require nearly real-time data processing with a single-digit latency—something that the cloud and the current wireless technologies can’t easily provide.

A new enterprise infrastructure is emerging, and industry experts expect that it will become the most preferred architecture for IoT solutions. “The next big thing for enterprise IT comes in the form of edge computing—a paradigm where compute moves closer to the source of data,” writes Janakiram MSV, an analyst, advisor and an architect at Janakiram & Associates.

“Edge computing is a new paradigm in which substantial computing and storage resources—variously referred to as cloudlets, micro datacenters, or fog nodes—are placed at the Internet’s edge in close proximity to mobile devices or sensors,” explains The Emergence of Edge Computing paper by Mahadev Satyanarayanan from Carnegie Mellon University.

The edge is an exciting place full of sensors, modules, actuators, including GPS receivers, valves, motors, temperature and light sensors, and others. These devices receive instructions from applications running in the cloud, and they, in turn, gather various data, creating a complete feedback loop.

With edge computing, the data gathered by edge devices is sorted into two broad categories: hot and cold. Hot data are critical and should be processed as soon as possible. On the other hand, cold data can be processed with a substantial delay because they contribute only to long-term analytics based on historical trends moves.

Because hot data should be processed instantaneously, it makes sense to leverage the computational power of the edge itself, instead of sending them to a public cloud. The processing could be performed by a smart car, a smartphone, or a home automation system. It will be up to complex event processing engines to decide whether to process data locally or let the cloud infrastructure handle it.

Benefits of Edge Computing

Enterprises currently face many problems when running data-centric workloads in the cloud. Even with a direct fiber optics connection, latency is limited by the speed of light. For systems where a few milliseconds could mean the difference between life and death, such as self-driving cars, edge computing is the obvious way how to minimize latency as much as possible.

When the bulk of data generated by edge devices is processed locally, at the edge, the overall bandwidth demand into the cloud is considerably lower. Security video cameras tend to be extremely bandwidth-demanding even though the video footage they capture is usually stored only for a few hours and rarely seen by a human being. This video footage could be stored and analyzed locally, with only metadata being sent to the cloud.

Because edge computing allows enterprises to retain sensitive data on-premises for as long as they want, it addresses growing concerns over data privacy arising from IoT system centralization. It would be up to each enterprise to set privacy policies that govern the release of the data to the cloud.

Finally, the ability of the edge to function independently of the cloud makes it much more resilient to network outages and malicious denial-of-service attacks. As more cities around the world become smarter than ever, they will have to make security one of their priorities to ensure safety and privacy of their residents.

Conclusion

The benefits of edge computing are numerous, but so are the technical challenges. The current edge comprises of countless devices with distinct roles, and managing them in a centralized way seems almost impossible. More realistically, a new generation of connected devices will emerge and make the old generation obsolete.

This presents us with the classic chicken and egg problem: How to convince companies to develop solutions for an infrastructure that’s not here yet. Just like with the web, the technology itself will have to be sufficiently appealing on its own to attract enough early adopters to reach a certain critical mass.