Author Archives: Syamant

Industrial Smart Glasses and Spatial Reality Displays

Sony Spatial Reality Display

I first saw the video in October last year, and it has been a part of emerging technology discussions.

You are not wearing any headset or glasses and perhaps will open up a new way of working on 3D or maybe spatial experiences in creative new ways. An example of that is Tate McRae‘s Immersive New 3D Music Video.

Simply moving around—up or down, side to side—makes you feel like you’re interacting with the content right in front of you.

Makes me want to create real-time immersive experiences on Unity with the Sony SDK if it ever becomes available in India. It works with the Unreal Engine as well.

Industrial Smart Glasses

Some scenarios
– Remote assistance enabling ‘See-What-I-See’ (SWIS) video-conferencing capabilities that allow everyone in the call to see what the smart glasses wearer is seeing
– Pick-by-Vision – Hands-free barcode scanning combined with voice commands
– Step by Step guidance for tasks via the heads-up display. Helps in the execution of complex workflows

Interesting pilot in the Airfreight industry

Situational Awareness and Augmented Reality Headsets

In Feb, the Indian Army ordered an augmented reality head-mounted display system (ARHMD) that would improve situation awareness and response with the help of radar and thermal overlays. The selected vendors will develop prototypes for further evaluation. US Army, meanwhile, is investing in the Hololens and cloud-based Integrated Visual Augmentation System.

In addition to security applications, these headsets have a significant role in emergency response situations. It could be in the form of realistic training for trauma-related injuries, respiratory distress and more.

Augmented reality can form the basis of off-site quick medical and rescue response. It may help teams locate power and gas lines, geospatial features, or the people whereabouts that may not be visible from the ground.

Chai time with NFT: A moment in history like no other?

Imagine the greatest speeches of our time. Imagine the things that moved us as people, inspired nations and great sporting moments. Then imagine the artworks in galleries or museums in countries that you could never visit or ever own.

Imagine you made something or said something that no one responded to. Then imagine your favourite creation that you put heart and soul and countless hours creating, took it out to the art gallery or the cinema or the speaking circuit, but nothing happened!

Now add NFT to the mix.

Wait, what? Nonfungible tokens! Why?

Some believe that the decentralised and crypto future will deliver untold wealth to the creative person. Further, they are the great hope of the creative and art world, or at least that is what the proponents would want you to believe! So, if you are an artist, gallery, content creator or anyone else in the creative space, you should be following the NFT debate. However, don’t rush headlong into it, and look at regulatory limitations before transferring your hard-earned money.

An artist sold their NFT work for $ 69 million, and the first tweet of the Twitter platform by it’s CEO was sold for about $ 2.5 million. The first one is a bit difficult for me to comprehend but let’s start with the seemingly easier one. The CEO runs two companies and has a reasonably large following of about 4.5 million followers, and the value of the tweet was roughly half the number of followers he has. I will not extend this simplistic analysis to the artist, but it did get me thinking if I had said anything that might be worth an NFT? Doubtful, and let’s leave it at that.

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Spy-Pixels – Should they be able to track without consent?

Formatted emails with links look good and track a lot! To stop the tracking, set your email client to not download remote images/content or select the email client in text mode. It will change your reading experience, though.

Email marketing relies on “spy-pixels”, and modern email-based customer journey orchestration is built on these GIF or PNG files as small as 1×1 pixels and placed somewhere in the email. You literally won’t be able to see or even get to click on them.

It has been an accepted, if somewhat not fully understood, practice. Data protection regulations focus on consent, or lack of it is beginning to get noticed even in this practice.

As a sender, you have the option of requesting read/delivery receipts from the recipient. But they have the opportunity to deny it. This is where HTML, with its formatting options, helps remove this option or consent. Embedding images and stylesheets into the email becomes possible. They are downloaded when the user reads an email. Open rates, devices and even rough physical location is possible to be deduced and if the email has links then interest profiles are deduced as well.

So the question of consent comes into focus. Should the service provider ask for permission? Some are approaching it from a perspective of policy/compliance and while others are thinking about privacy-protecting experiences.