Monthly Archives: February 2017

Ready for Your Phone to Become a 3D Scanner?

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Innovate LINK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94ik3LeqLv8

Interesting speculation from AppleInsider that seems to point to a 3D scanner being part of a future iPhone. Even if it is not in the iPhone 8, we will probably ee this sooner rather than later. If virtual/augmented reality and 3D printing are already here, your phones will need to keep up. Facial recognition is probably the first thing that comes to most people’s minds, but other uses could be for augmented reality and object scanning. While it may be cool to scan things around you, copyright laws will have to adjust quickly or else we can all just start scanning and printing things in stores instead of buying. I would also assume privacy would be an issue, both from what your phone collects about you through scanning your face as well as from those that would adjust their phones to scan people in public. It sounds very convenient to be able to open your phone with just your face, but the flip side to that is hackers would just need to walk up to you while they are hacking your accounts and scan your face while you walk down the street. Takes the idea of personal firewalls to a whole new level, huh? Innovations like this are ones we need to get ahead of instead of playing catch up after people misuse them. The video above is of a different project, but looks at a more hopeful view of what smartphone 3D scanning would be like (as well as displays a possible copyright violation by scanning R2-D2).

Virtual Reality Companies Continue the March Towards “Full Immersion”

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Innovate LINK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIin6K_iNSA

Those of us that are old enough remember how movies went through an initial round of “full immersion” experiences – paper 3-D glasses, moving seats, and smell-o-vision. Now that Virtual Reality is catching on (or maybe it isn’t?), we now have companies working on full immersion VR. Smells, hot/cool winds, and vibrations are all part of that. Feel Real is offering an interesting all in one device, with a mask that attaches to existing VR devices and a full immersion helmet (all previewed in the video above). The scents cost $5 each (ocean? sure; burning rubber? no thanks), the attachable mask will cost $250-300, and the helmet will cost $500-800. Read Ready Player One to see where this is all probably heading. The Feel Real Nirvana helmet has some SciFi coolness to it, but still looks pretty impractical. My guess is that someday you will see this with a merged reality application to help you walk around more safely, and maybe even an internal camera that will project your face on the outside so that it will have business meeting applications or whatever it may be. The “2001 me” really loves this, but the “2017 me” worries about what could happen to people that could cut themselves off from the real world even more. But like any tech we need to look at ways to keep the human side of ourselves front and center. One plus for Feel Real is that they do have the production tools (mostly free with purchase for now) to add their technology easily to existing VR experiences, putting users more in control.