eBay has joined the ranks of retailers dipping their toes in the augmented and virtual reality waters, according to a Fortune report. The online marketplace announced that it is currently developing an AR kit in order to add AR features to its website later this year. One proposed feature will allow shoppers to see how an item would look or fit in its intended space–such as by overlaying the image of tires on a car–before making a bid or a purchase. Another feature will let sellers choose the proper box size when packaging merchandise by showing images of the different size options over the item
Brain-controlled video game to hit VR arcades this year
Boston-based startup Neurable will bring its brain-controlled VR video game Awakening, which the company claims is the first of its kind, to VR arcades around the world by the end of this year. This brain-computer interface (BCI) is made possible by the attachment of an HTC Vive VR headset to a brain-scanning headband equipped with electrodes that pick up neural activity by recording electroencephalography (EEG) signals. When the gamer focuses his gaze on an object in the game, Neurable’s machine learning software recognizes the resulting changes in the EEG signal and turns this into a game command, selecting that object for use. For this to
MIT-hosted tech accelerator opens for second batch of applications
Play Labs, LLC and the MIT Game Lab announced this week that they are open to applications from a new round of startups who wish to participate in their “playful technology” accelerator program. Successful applicants will receive mentoring, facilities, and funding (in cash or Bitcoin) in return for common stock. The incubator hopes to receive applicants from startups developing technologies for use across a broad spectrum of industries, including finance, healthcare and manufacturing. Examples of technologies the incubator hopes to see amongst startups span the realm of digital currency/blockchain, eSports/video games, VR/AR and machine learning/AI. The program will be ran by Rizwan Virk, an MIT
NVIDIA GPUs Power Facebook’s New Deep Learning Machine
NVIDIA today announced that Facebook will power its next-generation computing system with the NVIDIA® Tesla® Accelerated Computing Platform, enabling it to drive a broad range of machine learning applications. While training complex deep neural networks to conduct machine learning can take days or weeks on even the fastest computers, the Tesla platform can slash this by 10-20x. As a result, developers can innovate more quickly and train networks that are more sophisticated, delivering improved capabilities to consumers. Facebook is the first company to adopt NVIDIA Tesla M40 GPU accelerators, introduced last month, to train deep neural networks. They will play a key role in the