Google harnesses the power of photos and street view to deliver simplified VR development for teachers and students.

The benefits of using immersive technologies as teaching tools have been widely documented and extensively discussed, specially in recent years with the rapid development of Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed reality hardware and applications.

The benefits of using immersive technologies as teaching tools have been widely documented and extensively discussed
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Yet the biggest obstacle that often keeps teachers from adopting these technologies in the classroom is not necessarily cost – there are, after all, many entry-level budget ways of experiencing Virtual Reality which use fairly pervasive and accessible mobile technology such as the Google Cardboard – but the lack of relevant content with which educators and learners alike can identify beyond the level of an amusing novelty.

Many educators and academics do believe that this technology will eventually become as commonplace as computers and mobile phones are today:

Speaking at the Global Education and Skills Forum in March, Jakki Bailey – a researcher from The University of Texas at Austin who focuses on the psychological and social experiences of Virtual Reality – said that as the technology becomes more affordable, it will seamlessly intersect with the physical world. Whereas now we tend to refer to the physical and digital worlds as separate entities, we are inexorably moving towards a blending of the two. This is the new reality that educators need to prepare themselves to proactively use it rather than reactively adapt to it.

Technology companies are also recognizing the need to better enable the creation of content that will empower teachers to leverage the benefits of the technology in a coherent pedagogical context. At its annual I/O Developer Conference in Mountain View, California Google announced the launch of Tour Creator, a new tool that easily allows anyone to create interactive content in Virtual Reality.

Much as the Internet facilitated broader access to knowledge, Immersive technologies could enable broader access to experience
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Educators and academics believe that Immersive technology will become as commonplace as computers and mobile phones today
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This follows from the company’s introduction three years ago of Google’s initial foray in educational VR – Google Expeditions – which first introduced the idea of taking students on virtual reality field trips using basic equipment such as Google Cardboard. Since 2015, Google Expeditions has brought students to places like the Burj Khalifa, Antarctica, and Machu Picchu with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

Tour Creator builds upon this success – over three million students used the service so far – by allowing people to create and customize their own experiential content. As Jen Zurawski, an educator with Wisconsin’s West De Pere School District, puts it: “With Expeditions, our students had access to a wide range of tours outside our geographical area, but we wanted to create tours here in our own community.”

Using simplified web-based interfaces, Tour Creator is meant to be an accessible tool for everyone, regardless of their experience or technical background. Users simply search across Google Street View for their desired locations – or upload their own 360-degree photos – and easily stitch that content together to form “scenes” to which they can add various interactive elements such as buttons that activate additional information at certain points within the scene, and embed the whole experience onto the school’s website, for instance.

“Being able to work with Tour Creator has been an awesome experience,” says Jennifer Newton, a school media coordinator in Georgia. “It has allowed our students from a small town in Georgia to tell our story to the world.”

“As the technology progresses it will become more affordable and more integrated into our everyday lives. Just as most people here are carrying some sort of smartphone, the next step will be some sort of augmented reality device, so that will filter down into classrooms as well,” adds Dr Dimitri Amiras, a consultant at Imperial College who has been working on clinical and training applications of Microsoft’s HoloLens Mixed Reality technology who also participated in the discussion at GESF examining the future of immersive technologies in learning environments.

Much in the same way as the widespread adoption of the Internet facilitated broader access to knowledge, Immersive technologies could enable broader and more egalitarian access to experience. However, this potential can only be realized once both content and hardware becomes universally accessible, and initiatives such as these by Google help teachers advance towards that goal

“The technology gets out of the way and enables students to focus on crafting fantastic visual stories,” explains Charlie Reisinger, a Pennsylvania educator. And that, in fact, is the ultimate goal of any transformative technology. For as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it in his keynote at Microsoft Build in Seattle this week (quoting the father of ubiquitous computing Mark Weiser) “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of our daily lives.”

This article was originally published on IDG Connect

Empowering educators to create immersive learning experiences, by @alicebonasio from @CIOonline https://t.co/HRC0SuUFOv

— IDG Contributor Network (@IDGCN) May 11, 2018

For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance and support on how best to incorporate these into 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 on Twitter.

The post Creating Immersive Learning Experiences appeared first on Tech Trends.

Live from Seattle, Tech Trends scoops up all the tastiest bites from the #MSBuild2018 developer’s conference.

“We need to ask ourselves not only what computers can do, but what they should do,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in his opening keynote at Build.

The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon us
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Addressing an audience of over five thousand developers in Seattle’s Washington Convention Center, Nadella struck a soberly optimistic note; on the one hand insisting on the message he delivered last year about the great transformative power of technology, but also highlighting the monumental challenges that come with its rapid development.

“These advancements create incredible developer opportunity and also come with a responsibility to ensure the technology we build is trusted and benefits all.”

With customers in control, privacy is preserved
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It was clear that the Facebook scandal was top of mind here, even if (unsurprisingly) it wasn’t directly referenced as Nadella advocated for the need to put customers in control and safeguard privacy, or said that “GDPR is good, solid regulation and we’re working hard to build the compliance infrastructure.” He stressed, however, that it was just the beginning, as the work was never going to be done: “we’re going to continuously work to preserve privacy, this is just the starting point.”

As cloud based applications scale and power AI experiences, we have come to a place where you need data at planet scale and performance
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Ethical AI

By 2020, the average person will generate 1.5GB of data a day, a smart home 50GB and a smart city, a whopping 250 petabytes of data per day. This data – as the Cambridge Analytica debacle proved all too painfully – gives developers a tremendous amount of power, and responsibility.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of our daily lives
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Microsoft sees the “intelligent cloud” as the backbone of this revolution. In the next 10 years, billions of everyday devices will become “smart” – being able to see, listen, reason, predict and more, without a 24/7 dependence on the cloud. This is what they call the “intelligent edge” – the interface between computers and the real world. Within that vision, Azure is being built as “the world’s computer,” a ubiquitous computing fabric that would allow Microsoft to meet the digital sovereignty and regulatory needs of their customers while delivering the benefits of innovation.

“Artificial intelligence has truly replaced Windows as Microsoft’s key platform for developers,” says Nick McQuire, VP of Enterprise Research at CCS Insight. “The majority of developer focus will shift from operating systems to artificial intelligence platforms as they increasingly look to intelligence services that span all devices including Internet of things. Its intelligent cloud and intelligent edge strategy is a much more compelling proposition for developers which will continue to define its corporate strategy for the next several years.”

McQuire points to the fact that this follows similar moves made by Amazon Web Services over the past 12 months, and sees it as a clear statement of intent at gaining developer mindshare against Google ahead of its own developer event, Google I/O which also happens this week.

It’s all about putting people – rather than devices – at the centre
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Kinect gets a Second Life

The Kinect was the first commercial device to integrated speech, gaze and vision, and since its launch a broad range of industrial applications – from security to manufacturing and healthcare – have been developed for it, and the technology has also been incorporated in devices such as the HoloLens.

Microsoft want to enable developers to reach customers in a multi-sense, multi-device way
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Sensor technology has come a long way since then, however, and Microsoft now wants to combine those capabilities with Azure AI services such as Machine Learning, Cognitive Services, and IoT Edge. Project Kinect for Azure will be a package of sensors – with extra wide field of view – capable of inputting fully articulated hand tracking and high-fidelity special mapping. It will include a next-generation depth camera, with onboard compute designed for AI on the Edge, what Microsoft calls “ambient intelligence,” meaning the device’s ability to scan and make sense of its surroundings by contextualizing cloud and spatially scanned datain real-time. Which is all incredibly exciting, but as a Mixed Reality fan, they frankly had me at “Extra wide Field of View”.

Microsoft had me at ‘extra wide FOV’
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Lorraine Bardeen, GM Studio Manager, also introduced two new Mixed Reality Products during the keynote: Microsoft Remote Assist – which allows customers to better collaborate remotely with heads-up, hands-free video calling, image sharing, and mixed-reality annotations – and Microsoft Layout, which lets you import 3-D models to create room layouts in real-world scale, experience designs as high-quality holograms in physical space or in virtual reality. With a potential market of 2 billion first-line workers, this is a huge opportunity, Bardeen told developers.

Alexa+Cortana = BFFs

Microsoft was keen to show how it’s been fostering collaborations across the board in an effort to make its platform play nicely with pretty much anyone. It announced that the open-sourcing the Azure IoT Edge to allow developers to develop more easily for it, and then went on to treat us to a very well-choreographed demo introduced by Nadella, who said they’d been working with “their friends across the lake” to bring Alexa and Cortana together.

The whole world is becoming a computer
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Tom Taylor – SVP of Amazon Alexa, then came on stage together with his Microsoft counterpart to show how Cortana and Alexa could be “intelligent friends,” helping their users with different sorts of tasks and collaborating seamlessly with each other as well as their humans. As always you have to wonder how consistently and smoothly these things would work day-to-day, but it did make the audience giggle and in a divided world, all this talk of friendship and collaboration gives you a warm fuzzy feeling…

We’re ready and comfortable for the #msbuild2018 keynote from @satyanadella pic.twitter.com/x7fVQi2Hoo

— TechTrends (@techtrends_tech) May 7, 2018

Main #Build2018 announcements

• Following last year’s announcement of AI for Earth – a program to apply artificial intelligence towards unlocking solutions to climate, water, agriculture, and biodiversity issues facing the planet – Microsoft is now expanding that model with a new $25 million 5-year program called AI for Accessibility, aimed at accelerating development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions to benefit over one billion people around the world who live with disabilities.
• The world’s biggest drone company, DJI announced a commercial partnership with Microsoft to co-develop solutions leveraging Azure IoT Edge and Microsoft’s AI services across new scenarios such as agriculture, construction and public safety. They will create a new SDK for Windows 10 PCs to bring full flight control and real-time data transfer capabilities to nearly 700M Windows 10 connected devices globally.
• A joint effort with Qualcomm to create a vision AI developer kit running Azure IoT Edge which makes available the key hardware and software required to develop camera-based IoT solutions. The camera can also power advanced Azure services, such as machine learning, stream analytics and cognitive services that can be downloaded from the cloud to run locally on the edge.
• Speech Devices SDK delivering audio processing from multichannel sources for more accurate speech recognition, including noise cancellation and far-field voice. With this, developers can build a variety of voice-enabled scenarios like drive-thru ordering systems, in-car or in-home assistants, smart speakers, and other digital assistants.
• A preview of Project Brainwave – an architecture for deep neural net processing – is now available on Azure and on the edge, and makes it the fastest cloud to run real-time AI.
• Azure Cognitive Services updates include a unified Speech service with improved speech recognition and text-to-speech, which support customized voice models and translation.
• New updates to Bot Framework and Cognitive Services will power the next generation of conversational bots enabling richer dialogs, and full personality and voice customization to match the company’s brand identity.
• Azure Search with Cognitive Services integration – combining AI with indexing technologies so it’s possible to quickly find information via text or images.
• Partnership with GitHub that brings the power of Azure DevOps services to GitHub customers, including integration with Visual Studio App Center.
• The Microsoft Azure Blockchain Workbench makes it easier to develop blockchain applications by stitching together an Azure-supported blockchain network with cloud services.
• Power BI Visualizations makes it possible for developers to extend the custom visuals created for Power BI to Excel.

• A new way to connect your phone to your PC with Windows 10 that enables instant access to text messages, photos and notifications – imagine being able to quickly drag and drop your phone’s photos into a document on your PC in one swift movement — without having to take your phone out of your pocket.
• Microsoft 365 currently has 135M commercial monthly active users and nearly 700M Windows 10 connected devices. The suite of new features announced at Build are aimed at better blending between web and application environments for end users and developers and enabling developers to create experiences

Technology can be a force multiplier is unlocking solutions for some of the biggest challenges facing society
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Remember you can find out more about Build and watch the live keynotes here and play the Microsoft Build announcements bingo with the card below!

The world is a computer, filled with an incredible amount of data
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For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance and support on how best to incorporate these into 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 on Twitter.

The post Power and Responsibility: Highlights from Microsoft Build appeared first on Tech Trends.