As the world grows crazier by the day, Augmented Reality provides some much-needed comic relief.

AR is the “Rising Star” medium of our age, claims Liat Sade-Sternberg, CEO of fuse.it. And it’s hard to argue with that while watching a demo of a guy dancing gangnam style along with disturbingly agile avatars of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. We definitely live in strange times.

Augmented reality is the “Rising Star” medium of our age
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You can argue about whether or not that’s a good thing, but in this age of fake news and memes, the fact that this content doesn’t look too polished takes a back seat to whether you can do something fun and creative with it – and share it with one tap.

You can insert yourself into memes and news clips with media personalities
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And that’s just the sort of use case that Sade-Sternberg is selling. Fuse.it is an AR app that lets you sync up multiple audio sources with video at the same time as interacting with a range of 3D animated characters including Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton.

We will we see more apps that mix creative animated environments with the real world
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You can insert yourself into memes and news clips, having “conversations” with media personalities, singing and dancing with your favourite (or least favourite) politician, and basically blend, colour, manipulate and mash up any video source to create viral clips ready to share.

Interact with a range of 3D animated characters including Barack Obama and Donald Trump
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Using the app (which has just been released on iOS) is a matter of selecting a character or video you want to interact with, choose a camera position and begin recording. With a tap you can bring those characters to life, and record yourself interacting with them in your own surroundings, sharing the end results with friends. Fuse.it promises to keep adding the app’s content database to reflect the latest trending pop culture and news stories.

“It allows people to become content creators, with users easily able to make viral videos from fake news clips to memes,” says Sade-Sternberg. “We were looking for a new way to easily integrate people into videos and turn their media consumption from passive to active by letting them embed themselves into their favorite pop culture moments such as news, memes, movies, tv, music videos and more to let them be part of the story.”

She explains the original inspiration for the app came from trying to close the gap between official media and user generated content, providing a one-click solution to let users create blended content instantly. They decided to focus on video because it is as Sade-Sternberg puts, it, “king of content.”

“Online videos will account for more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2020. Every day Over 8 billion videos or 100 millions hours of videos are watched on Facebook, 10 billion videos on SnapChat and 500 million hours of videos are watched on Youtube.”

The Israeli start-up – which was founded in Tel-Aviv but is currently headquartered in LA – also claims to have secured partnerships with several large music labels, but say they cannot yet disclose which.

Users are easily able to make viral videos from fake news clips to memes
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As mentioned above, the quality of the demos is far from polished, but it is enough to have fun with, and to hint at what will become possible in the near future as the technology continues to gain momentum and become more pervasive. And this is certainly what Sade-Sternberg is betting on:

“As we see Augmented Reality become more mainstream, so too will we see more apps that mix creative animated worlds with the real world. AR is already accessible to every person in the world. Google, Apple and Amazon all are investing big time in the technology so I think we’re going to see lots of improvement in this field in the upcoming months. We are in an exciting time, when we will define the behavior of how people will use AR apps.”

Originally published on VRScout

This App Creates Crazy AR Videos with One Tap via @alicebonasio https://t.co/ZjjfLvHTf9 pic.twitter.com/cec6cY4wbm

— VRScout (@VRScout) December 11, 2017

If you would like to find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your project or enterprise, Tech Trends offers Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Making Up Fake News with AR appeared first on Tech Trends.

As Donald Trump pulls out of the Paris climate change agreement, China seizes the opportunities of Renewable Energy Technology

Donald Trump pulling out of the Paris agreement might turn out to be good news for the planet
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There’s are strict etiquette rules around gift giving in China. Traditionally it’s during Chinese New Year when one exchanges generous and often extravagant gifts. It’s not uncommon for people to get large quantities of cash, for example – usually presented in red envelopes for good luck. Choosing the wrong colour gift-wrap or giving “unlucky number” money amounts can cause serious offence.

Cultural sensitivity has never been Donald Trump’s forte, however, so it’s hardly surprising he overlooked the fact that these celebrations happen in January/February (depending on the Lunar calendar). Yet considering the size of the red envelope that America just handed President Xi Jinping they’ll probably let that slide.

By pulling out of the Paris agreement Donald Trump has gifted China with the opportunity of a lifetime
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By pulling out of the Paris agreement, the US President has gifted China with the opportunity of a lifetime: To save the planet from climate change, while making lots and lots of money in the process. And the strangest twist of all isn’t that Trump has done this at the expense of the US economy, but the fact this bizarre turn of events might not turn out to be such bad news for the planet after all.

China might not be the hero Gotham expected, but it’s the hero it needs right now. Because the country which four years ago was burning almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined is now the country which has just overtaken Germany to become the world’s biggest producer of solar energy. If anybody can show us how to meet ultra-ambitious targets and pull off projects on a massive scale, they’re probably it.

By pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, US president Donald Trump has gifted China with the opportunity of a lifetime: to save the planet from climate change—and make lots and lots of money in the process. This bizarre turn of events might not turn out to be such bad news for the planet after all.

China might not be the hero Gotham expected, but it’s the hero it needs right now
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The fact that you need to invest in order to get a return is a cornerstone of successful business thinking—and therefore also a concept that Trump should both understand and embrace. Instead, the golden economic opportunity that green energy presents will likely be lost, or at least severely diminished, for America. In the new world order, leaders that don’t understand this will become as much of a fossil as the fuels they so stubbornly peddle.

Trump seems to build his policies on the premise that doing the right thing is diametrically opposed to economic growth. This may have been true in the very early days of green technology, where it was prohibitively expensive and relatively inefficient. But to make that same choice nowadays is a bit like refusing to buy a smartphone now because you once used a Motorola MicroTAC in the early ‘90s and it didn’t really do it for you. We’ve moved on since then.

Achieving true global-warming reduction goals requires significant commitment and investment, both of which China has in spades. And if any country can show us how to meet ultra-ambitious targets and pull off projects on a massive scale, it’d be China. Four years ago, China was burning almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined. But in 2017, it also overtook Germany to become the world’s biggest producer of solar energy. As Simon Chadwick of Salford University in Manchester explains, “China likes to be omnipotent and successful in everything it does”—and that attitude gets results.

Job creators, money makers

Trump dedicated a significant chunk of his Paris-agreement-leaving speech to demonizing developing countries such as China and India for their “unfair advantage” in being allowed to burn coal to their heart’s content while spending the crippling subsidies paid for by industrialized nations. It is ironic, then, that pulling out of the Paris agreement deals such a fatal blow to the very thing his supporters trusted him to safeguard: American jobs.

 The golden economic opportunity that green energy presents will likely be lost, or at least severely diminished, for America. In the US, green energy creates jobs 12 times faster than the overall economy, and these are exactly the sort of well-paying, blue-collar construction and manufacturing jobs that those voting for Trump were hoping to “get back.” The president’s decision will likely mean that green-sector jobs that could have been created in the United States may instead go to Chinese workers. Of the 8.1 million renewable-energy jobs that exist globally, 3.5 million are in China, compared to less than 1 million in the US. This latest investment by the Chinese government is expected to create a further 13 million jobs.

Evidence shows that when green-energy initiatives are well-planned and properly supported, they also do well financially
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There’s nothing soft and fuzzy about China’s green-energy strategy; like in everything they do, they mean business. With the cost of building large-scale solar plants dropping by as much as 40% since 2010, it makes economic sense for it to phase out coal burning and increase solar production capacity fivefold, adding another 1,000 major solar-power plants to its infrastructure. This is part of a broader program to invest $360 billion in renewable power by 2020.

Steven Han from securities firm Shenyin Wanguo says that as those costs continue to go down, China may actually exceed those targets. The country is looking on pace to over-deliver on the 2020 carbon-intensity commitments it set out in its last five-year economic plan, and all this without compromising their economic growth—quite the opposite, in fact.

There’s nothing soft and fuzzy about China’s green-energy strategy; like in everything they do, they mean business
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Evidence shows that when green-energy initiatives are well-planned and properly supported, they also do well financially. Take, for example, the bike scheme started back in 2008 in the city of Hangzhou in southern China. In less than a decade, the number of daily hires in the city grew from 5,000 to 315,000. That’s a cumulative 774 million rides, 96% of which were entirely free. By the end of 2010 the scheme was already breaking even, with advertising revenue coming from the posters on the bikes paying not only for the running costs, but also funding expansion. The scheme, which was awarded the Ashden Award for Sustainable Travel, became a blueprint for many of the other 400 cities across China running similar initiatives.

“The Chinese economy is already transitioning from a reliance on manufacturing to prioritizing innovation. This timing means that China can seize opportunities available in spaces like green technology,” says Samantha Deave, corporate services manager at Asia House, an independent center for commercial policy expertise based in London.

A report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that China is cementing its dominance in renewables, rapidly accelerating its foreign investment in renewable energy, and supporting technologies. In 2016, there was a 60% rise in large-scale (over $1 billion) Chinese foreign investments in the sector for a combined total of $32 billion. These projects were spread across the globe and included buying power from wind and solar farms in Australia, spending $1.6 billion on a waste-to-energy development in Germany, and buying a 25% stake (worth $2.5 billion) in a Chilean lithium miner and processor, which will ensure supply of the lithium essential for electric-car batteries, for example. Tim Buckley, director of energy-finance studies at the IEEFA, says US isolationism provides China with the perfect opportunity to establish a long-term political, economic, and strategic leadership globally.

Article originally published in Quartz

Trump just helped make China great againhttps://t.co/7ZYjIh1EJO

— Quartz (@qz) June 28, 2017

For companies looking to gain a competitive edge through technology, Tech Trends offers strategic Virtual Reality and Digital Transformation Consultancy services tailored to your brand.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post China Leading the World in Green Tech appeared first on Tech Trends.

VR comes to the rescue for those, like myself, who couldn’t make it to New York to experience the Presidential Pop-up Twitter library 

As the Daily Show’s Host Trevor Noah said, we live in extraordinary times, but even by today’s crazy standards, the installation that materialised in the heart of Manhattan last weekend was something else. Here we had a sitting US President’s social media diarrhoea, prominently displayed for all to see.

The President's social media diarrhoea was prominently displayed for our enjoyment
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As someone who has argued for the growing importance of Twitter this struck a chord, and was gutted to be stuck on the other side of the Atlantic for the short-lived event. So I was delighted when I found out there was a 3D tour for those who couldn’t be there in person.

The Daily Show has kindly made the pop-up exhibition into a 3D tour also available in VR
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Powered by Matterport, users have the option to either navigate around a 3D tour – which works on normal desktop and mobile devices – or if you’ve got a Google Cardboard or Samsung Gear VR headset handy, you can go for the 360 VR option, which I did.

Side rant: If we’re ever going to get consumers to embrace VR experiences en masse, they still have a long way to go to make the flow intuitive and easy. I do this a lot, and still had to spend about 15 minutes fiddling with downloading the app, then enabling Google VR services. My Samsung phone then didn’t remember my Oculus account, and when I finally opened the Matterport app, it didn’t take me straight to the experience, but rather a home page where you couldn’t search their library for content. I got there eventually, but can see how most people would just give up. But back to the experience:

Many interesting projects have already started cropping up around the popular culture phenomenon that these tweets represent, yet I somehow found the effect of this exhibition to be particularly shocking. Maybe it was the fact that it was housed just across the road from one of Trump’s towers, or perhaps it was the sheer quantity of – excuse the language – crap on display. Even in this heavily curated and pared down collection, I still found many tweets I’d never seen before, each more bewildering than the last. It was one heck of a rabbit hole.

Got to love the #MAGA-NETIC Wall
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The Comedy Central team also did a really good job of breaking up the exhibition with some interactive fun stuff, such as a wall (something we all know the President is fond of) with giant magnets where you could play around with popular buzzwords tweeted by Trump, appropriately named the #MAGA-NETIC Wall.

You can now experience what it's like to be Commander-in-Tweet
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By far my favourite, however, was the tiny desk which allowed you to become the “Commander-in-Tweet.” Basically you’re presented with a short video where one of your aides gives you a piece of news, and you (as the President) are tasked with crafting an appropriate response – on Twitter of course.

It's one heck of a rabbit hole, even if you're used to Trump's tweets
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It’s multiple choice, and I rather liked how my pseudo-presidential tweet turned out. Why not have a go and share your own? It’s as good a thing to do over the weekend as shouting at the TV that the world is a bloody insane place and can we PLEASE  just wake up now? #SAD

You can access the Donald Trump Presidential Twitter Library 3D and 360 VR tour here

From the Trump Nickname Collection. The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library. Take the 3D virtual tour: https://t.co/36RjBeNgnS pic.twitter.com/csh1iAotfI

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 22, 2017

For companies looking to gain a competitive edge through technology, Tech Trends offers strategic Virtual Reality and Digital Transformation Consultancy services tailored specifically to your brand.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Taking a Virtual Tour of Donald Trump’s Twitter Library appeared first on Tech Trends.

As an avid Twitter user, I have been worried to see it struggle to conform to the expectations of its investors and shareholders.

In this Quartz article I set out the case for why those expectations are not only shortsighted but actually dangerous. Twitter is about much more than making a quick advertising buck, and if we – its community – don’t scramble to safeguard it, we could lose it.

Commercial pressure on Twitter may cause its community to lose what has become a vital service
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2016 has been a year of surprises and painful lessons that have taught us we must proactively defend what we value or face losing it in spectacular fashion. In 2017, Twitter’s future might matter more than you might think—and it hinges on keeping it in the hands (or, should we say, thumbs) of the public.

Twitter’s absence from US president-elect Donald Trump Dec 16’s meeting with top tech executives raised quite a few eyebrows. Despite using the social-media platform to regular and devastating effect throughout his campaign, Trump’s choice to not have Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sitting at the table with the tech big kids draws the importance of the company into question. The Trump team defended their decision to exclude them by saying the platform—which claims 317 million monthly active users, though that figure is not entirely clear-cut—was “too small.” (There’s also a rumor Trump froze Twitter out in retribution over rejecting a custom emoji he wanted to run during the campaign.)

Sure enough, judging by criteria such as market cap ($13 billion compared to Amazon’s $363 or Apple’s $618), number of employees (a workforce less than a hundredth of the size of IBM’s), and revenue (they’re still operating at a net loss), Twitter seems to come up short compared to the other tech giants. But it holds some serious soft economic power: Recently, Trump wiped out billions of dollars in Lockheed Martin’s stock value with a single tweet.

Regardless of how much money the company does or doesn’t make, there are still millions of people who use and need Twitter
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Twitter might yet find ways of making money from its substantial user base and the huge amount of content and data it generates. But the network’s true calling arguably resides in giving people a voice who would otherwise have been ignored. In that context, it makes a lot more sense to think of Twitter as a public service rather than a dividends cash cow. Yet the constant pressure it’s under to monetize leaves it vulnerable to a takeover, which could question its future integrity and neutrality.

 It makes a lot more sense to think of Twitter as a public service rather than a dividends cash cow. Twitter’s potential suitors—which include Disney, Salesforce, Alphabet, and Microsoft—continually frame the company in terms of commercial viability (or lack thereof) instead of its reach and influence as a media platform. For example, News Corp has been touted as a potential buyer, although they’ve officially denied it so far. If that did turn out to be true, what are the implications of its founder and executive chairman, Rupert Murdoch, openly endorsing Trump? In fact, there’s nothing to really stop Trump’s own company putting in their own bid, should they wish to.

Twitter is a unique platform in a very unique position
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Regardless of how much money the company does or doesn’t make, there are still millions of people who use and need Twitter. But if not through cash, how do we assign value to a platform through which the Pope (@Pontifex) chooses to ponder the rapidly declining state of our planet, and which allows little girls in Syria to reach JK Rowling? What price should we put on a tool that journalists, both professional and citizen, have come to rely on to source and disseminate news? If Twitter’s neutrality was to be jeopardized by a third-party purchase, we’d lose all that and so much more.

Over the past ten years, Twitter has become an essential service in global society—and as such, its future should be protected. But how?

Twitter might yet find ways of making money from user base and the huge amount of content and data it generates, but its true calling is arguably giving people a voice who would otherwise have been ignored.
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There are interesting precedents for sponsoring media organizations and information platforms through various forms of public ownership, and these solutions could very well be adapted to Twitter. Here are three possible alternatives:

Shareholder cooperatives

What if Twitter’s users were to mobilize and take matters into their own hands? After all, Twitter is a publicly traded company, and since its 2013 IPO, anybody can buy shares. While there is a group of key stakeholders who own large portions of the platform, if enough individuals decided to invest and collectively organize, it could make a big difference to its future direction.

Nathan Schneider from the University of Colorado Boulder set out how that might work in a recent Guardian article, making the case that, much like the Green Bay Packers NFL team, Twitter should be run by (and for) its fans. There is now an (appropriately hashtagged) #wearetwitter campaign and petition urging Twitter to work with users to find a way for them to buy it and turn it into a cooperatively owned platform.

“Another suggestion comes from Tom McDonough,” Schneider writes, “a blogger with a history in capital markets, who proposes that less than 1% of users—no small number, at three million—could each buy $2,300 worth of shares and vote as a bloc for a transition to cooperative ownership. They’d then be paid back through the transition process, partly through a membership fee that could average to $10 each year. Rather than giving the company a blank check to sell your data, would you pay a co-ownership fee?”

Contribution-based model

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and campaigns for policy change, has managed to finance its operations through an extremely effective contribution-based model where users are asked to make regular donations. It also receives larger gifts like the $1 million contribution made earlier this year by Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark. Twitter could also follow this path.

Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, explains how this contribution model helps to build trust with the community and ensures the credibility of the information posted on the platform. “Nobody owns Wikipedia, so everybody owns it,” she says. “We’ve got these very strict guidelines and criteria that articles have to meet, but users take a collective responsibility for making sure it all works. Anybody can use, it, anybody can contribute, but it is all done in a very transparent way.”

The most important aspect of what Wikipedia does is not that its information is perfect, but that it is transparent. You can check the provenance of any piece of information by looking at every single edit ever made to a page. Snowden argued that a similar feature should be implemented on Twitter, allowing people to edit their tweets, but making it so that the edits were flagged, visible, and traceable, much like they are on Wikipedia. That transparency then empowers users to make informed decisions about the information they choose to trust, perhaps helping us to avoid the potentially disastrous dissemination of fake news we’ve seen with Facebook.

Since neutrality could not be ensured, there seems little point (and frankly very little hope of success) in governments attempting to start new Twitter-like platforms from scratch
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Public ownership

It might seem counter-intuitive to suggest that some form of state funding might work for Twitter, especially considering that this would make it entangled in a very complex relationship with the next president. There are, however, many examples of publicly funded media platforms, such as NPR in the US and the BBC in the UK, that manage not only to thrive commercially but also to stand up to government forces and maintain their independence.

Some politicians have even argued for the creation of alternative nationalized platforms. For example, in his Digital Democracy Manifesto, the leader of the opposition in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn set out the need for a “Massive Multi-Person On-line Deliberation” platform to organize online meetings for individuals and communities to deliberate about pressing political issues and participate in devising new legislation.

As the New Statesman’s Amelia Tait pointed out, that “is Twitter. It’s just Twitter.”

But as neutrality could not be ensured, there seems little point (and frankly very little hope of success) in governments attempting to start new Twitter-like platforms from scratch. Instead, their financial support conceivably could be managed through 3rd-party collective organizations that transcend borders or the jurisdiction of any one government, much in the way that institutions such as NATO and the UN operate.

Twitter is a unique platform in a very unique position. Like Facebook, it isn’t a media company in the traditional sense, yet events such as Brexit and the US election leave no doubt as to its power and influence. We now need to figure out how to manage that power sustainably for the benefit of its users. That’s because Twitter’s unique problems are also a huge opportunity to bring the broader community into the conversation and give them a chance to have a say in the future of the company.

Twitter is failing as a public company, but there are other ways to keep this bird aloft https://t.co/AtfvWoCorM

— Quartz (@qz) December 21, 2016

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Why Twitter Needs to Go Public. Again appeared first on Tech Trends.

Engaging young people in the democratic process is a big challenge. Voter apathy is rampant in many countries, where youngsters don’t feel a connection to politicians and therefore choose not to vote.

Engaging young people in the democratic process is a big challenge
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Even when people do vote, however, the lack of informed debate around the issues can present a real problem. There was much evidence of this in the recent Brexit referendum in the UK, where it emerged that many who had voted to leave the European Union did not actually realise what that would entail, and later came to regret their decision in the chaotic aftermath that ensued. That was painfully illustrated in the fact that Google revealed a sharp spike in searches just after voting had closed where people queried such terms as “What is the EU?”

The greatest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter - Winston Churchill
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Some would look at this type of situation and agree with Sir Winston Churchill’s assessment that “The greatest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter,” yet perhaps we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

Things would be improved if kids were encouraged to participate in the political process from an early age
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Things would surely be improved if, from an early age, children were encouraged to participate in, and question, the political process. And perhaps technology can be a useful tool in achieving this. At least that is what Voki are betting on.

As the US presidential election approaches, the platform – which is already used by millions of teachers to create talking characters and avatars for use in lessons – is now offering Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump avatars which teachers can freely download to help encourage current affairs discussion to the classroom.

Voki is offering Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump avatars to encourage classroom debate around current affairs
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The avatars offer a way for students to indirectly engage with issues verbally, as they can literally “put words in their mouth”. This offers a safe environment for debate and often makes for a more lively and interesting classroom activity. “For some students this indirect way to verbally engage opens the door for interaction they would otherwise find difficult,” explains Voki CEO Gil Sideman.

“In an election year, there’s a special opportunity to engage students with the workings of our democracy – and using presidential candidate avatars is a fun way to do so. Introducing the Trump and Hillary avatars seemed like a natural way to help bring current events into the classroom, ” he concludes.

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Avatars Teach Kids About Democracy appeared first on Tech Trends.