By Laura Kobylecky

At this 2021 online edition of CES, AMD won an Award and the CEO gave a keynote speech. It’s a big year for the company.

AMD’s “Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processors” won one of this year’s CES “Best of Innovation” Awards. The Innovation Awards are part of an annual competition “honoring outstanding design and engineering in consumer technology products.” The processor is “built on cutting edge ‘Zen 3’ technology, providing unmatched compute power and exceptional performance-per-watt thanks to its ground-breaking 7nm architecture,” according to their CES Innovation Award Profile.

2020 was perhaps one of the most productive years for AMD
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Dr. Lisa Su, President and Chief Executive Officer of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), showed up to give the keynote speech. She spoke about how technology has been changed by the pandemic, as well as AMD’s newest projects and some of their collaborations with other companies.

Dr. Lisa Su’s presentation started with the standard “Dramatic Tech Video” of a diverse group of people using AMD technology for work and play.

Zoom users are approaching three and a half trillion minutes of meetings per year
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Her intro touches base with the current state of the world. She says that “2020 was perhaps one of our most productive years.” The increased dependence on technology in a socially-distant world accelerated “the pace of our digital transformation.” We have “transitioned to the new normal.”

One example she presents is the rise in video collaboration. She explains that “Zoom users are approaching three and a half trillion minutes of meetings per year. Cisco Webex meeting participants recently hit 600 million per month and Microsoft Teams is now supporting 115 million daily users.” This is only one example of many, but it showcases how “the pandemic has elevated technology to become an essential part of how we live, work, play and communicate.”

Naturally, this transformation has placed “significantly higher demands on our digital infrastructure.” She explains that “at the center of all this technology is high-performance computing”

Microsoft and Gaming

She brings up a live video of Panos Panay, chief product officer of Microsoft. She mentions that they have been collaborating over Microsoft Teams and so he seems very familiar to her, despite having not met in “real life” during this time. Panay talks about how he has been “learning to work differently” in a world where a meeting might include the sound of his dogs “barking in the background.”

He believes that “PC is becoming more essential.” It has expanded beyond “a productivity tool” into something that is used “to connect with other humans and people in general.” He aspires to “help tech disappear into the background,” as they move forward and “continue to push the boundaries.”

Cisco Webex meeting participants recently hit 600 million per month and Microsoft Teams is now supporting 115 million daily users
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The increased dependence on technology in a socially-distant world accelerated the pace of digital transformation as we have transitioned to the new normal
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They also discuss Microsoft’s gaming partnership with AMD. Panay states that “AMD’s momentum right now is incredible” and he describes their partnership as “two teams coming together.” AMD has created “high-performace CPUS and GPUs for the x box series x and series S.”

Another AMD innovation that will be helpful to gaming is the “AMD ryzen 5000 series mobile processors powered by our new zen 3 core.” AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 “increases our lead in overall performance and energy efficiency and also delivers the best single threaded performance,” according to Su. This should lead to more powerful laptop gaming or any other creative uses.

AMD expects “more than 150 ultrathin gaming and professional notebooks powered by Ryzen 5000 series to launch this year.” The first are anticipated to go on sale in February. As a result, AMD will have “ultrathin notebooks all the way up to super computers” with extremely high levels of performance.

Lucasfilm and AMD

The next guest to appear on a video screen is Francois Chardavoine, VP of Technology at Lucasfilm. Su explains that that Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucasfilm and AMD have worked together “for more than a decade” and that they were “an early adopter of AMD EPYC ThreadRipper.”

Chardavoine says that, recently, demand has been on the rise for video entertainment so “content creation is through the roof.” They have “built an entirely new studio from scratch in Sydney, Australia.” One very important part of the facility is “the render farm.” The render farm is where they have the computing “firepower that creates all of the images that you see on screen.”

The pandemic has elevated technology to become an essential part of how we live, work, play and communicate
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Software is being designed to take full advantage of processing “firepower in a way that software never has before
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The Sydney, facility will be exclusively AMD. Chardavoine explains that they chose AMD because “we just need as much firepower as possible” and “the amount of threads and cores that you have available is unprecedented and this really helps us deliver the content that we have.” He explains that current software is being designed to take full advantage of that “firepower” “in a way that software never has before.” The artists can make changes and see immediate results leading to a more “intuitive sense of what they are working on.

Overall, there’s a lot happening for this company. People are increasingly dependent on their home computer setup and that benefits companies like this. Their Innovation Award and partnerships may be good signs for their immediate future. It seems like they have an interesting year coming up and it should be exciting to see how that works out for them and what they bring to the table next year.

Tech Trends’ Digital Consultancy services offer support for companies looking to enhance brand strategy with immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality

Laura Kobylecky is a contributing writer to Tech Trends. She is particularly interested in new and emerging technology and culture. Connect with her on LinkedIn 

The post AMD Keynote at #CES2021 appeared first on Tech Trends.

How immersive technologies like Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality bring real-world benefits to us all.

Companies big and small are using Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality solutions to solve pain points, save money, connect people and make workflows more collaborative
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I love VR and I love gaming, but I have now got to the point where the mention of the two things in the same sentence – specially when people seem to imply they’re the same thing – makes me roll my eyes and sigh.

Part of it is due to the fact I’m yet to get really hooked into a VR game. Most of them just make me feel queasy, so I’m limited to short experiences that showcase the potential of the medium, for sure, but in no way prompt me to sell my console and screen setup just yet.

I’m yet to get hooked into a VR game. Most of them make me feel queasy
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What I have seen, however, are plenty of solid examples of how immersive technology is being applied in industry sectors as diverse as education, retail, filmmaking, or medicine, with significant and measureable ROI.

There’s a wealth of evidence out there about how adding immersive tech to a company’s existing workflow can instantly boost efficiency and collaboration. One of my favourite examples of that is how global construction giant Trimble uses Mixed Reality to help its architects and other professionals on the ground to visualize plans and spot problems at concept stage, when they are infinitely easier and cheaper to address than after building work takes place.

There’s a wealth of evidence on how adding immersive tech to a company’s workflow can instantly boost efficiency and collaboration
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I have seen plenty of solid examples of how immersive technology is being applied in industry sectors as diverse as education, retail, filmmaking, or medicine, with significant and measureable ROI
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Another more recent example of that I came across was PIXO VR partnering with HP to provide virtual reality training to enterprise, and interestingly the company was keen to highlight the fact that they provided “AAA-game quality VR training experiences and behavior-changing narratives.”

Headsets like The HoloLens or Daqri will never sell as many units as the Xbox 360, but that doesn’t mean they’re not game-changing technology adding real value to businesses
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These are important cases to highlight not only because they are interesting (at least to enthusiasts of the technology such as myself) but also because if we attempt to measure the success or otherwise of VR/AR/MR by the yardstick of gaming, we’re likely to get it wrong. Headsets like The HoloLens or Daqri will never sell as many units as the Xbox 360, but that doesn’t mean they’re not game-changing technology adding real value to businesses.

So, while I do enjoy gaming as much as the next gal, what’s most exciting to me is seeing how companies big and small are using Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality solutions to solve pain points, save money, connect people, make workflows more collaborative, and generally make our real world a better – and more efficient – place.

This post originally appeared on The Next Web

How VR is more than a game https://t.co/bji6fXdDEc

— TNW Contributors (@TNWcontributors) August 27, 2018

For companies looking to leverage Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR Tech Trends offers a comprehensive range of Virtual Reality Consultancy Services.

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 Moving Beyond VR Games appeared first on Tech Trends.

Mixed Reality adds a new dimension to tabletop gaming, but there’s more to this tank show-down than first meets the eye.

Yes, tabletop gaming is very much still a thing. But just because it’s been around forever doesn’t mean it’s not keeping up with the latest tech. This is what video game giant Wargaming are hoping to prove when they start demoing their latest offering at Gamescom in Germany this week. WoT AR Spectate is a Mixed Reality take on their popular title “World of Tanks” (WoT) which boasts over 140 million players worldwide.

Yes, tabletop gaming is very much still a thing
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Nobody we’re aware of us achieving 60fps PC GPU settings in super stable AR
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It’s really a proof of concept at this stage according to Wargaming Special Project Lead Matt Daly, who says there are no immediate plans for a formal launch. Yet it’s a very nice-looking PoC that opens up all sorts of intriguing possibilities for future use.

“Nobody we’re aware of us achieving 60fps PC GPU settings in super stable AR,” says Daly, who explains that although his team has been only been working on this project for the past six months, it wasn’t the first time they dabbled in Mixed Reality.

Their first MR project used Google Tango and the Microsoft HoloLens to bring a rare digital tank from their game to a real-life exhibit at the Tank Museum at Bovington, UK. They then took the learnings from that process to try and make something that was – at least in principle – scalable and accessible to the general public.

Their first MR project used Google Tango and the Microsoft HoloLens to bring a rare digital tank from their game to a real-life exhibit at the Tank Museum at Bovington
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In a nutshell, the way WoT AR Spectate currently works is that an iPad is connected to PC functions like a 3D mouse. The PC does all rendering and sends that data back to iPad as video. Using ARKit for iOS, iPad sends its constant position/orientation to the PC while an in-game camera in WoT matches that iPad’s position/orientation, and sends what it sees back to iPad as video.

We were attempting to do something pretty exotic, with tech not necessarily designed for this purpose
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Predictably, however, there were some serious technical challenges in getting that complex architecture working:

“We were attempting to do something pretty exotic, with tech not necessarily designed for this purpose. Since we’re offloading all GPU & viewer/player control processes to the PC, there was an inherent delay in that process which caused noticeable difference between reality and a sort of perceivably delayed set of AR objects & content, which was disorienting. Besides tons of local network and packet transfer optimization, we then also artificially delayed the iPads RGB camera to have the same (40-70ms) delay as the in-game feed appearing on the iPad screen. The end result is an experience is extremely stable, amazingly polished, and both sides of reality are dancing together instead of fighting each other,” says Daly.

The resulting full-blown 3D battle can unfold right onto your coffee table, but as fun as that sounds, the more exciting aspects of the technology are its applications beyond gaming. From eSports match observation to historical digital recreation (Wargaming just signed a deal with the History Channel to produce some of those) having an interactive second screen anywhere is a proposition that could potentially catch on as a consumer product. There is a clear opportunity here for whoever gets this sort of offering right – and brings it to market at the right price.

“Content creators are going to go nuts with this stuff,” Daly predicts. Visual believability is such a massively important part of allowing your brain to trust that something that is not actually there, is. So imagine the implications for theater, sports, socializing.

The kinds of filmic (linear and interactive) tools that can or have been built for the “virtual studio” is incredible. This will be significantly different enough from Skype video today that it will make this a much more natural and quotidian part of every-day life… an augmenter, not an encumbrance.”

Apple ARKit, Google ARCore and Facebook Camera Effects could deliver more than 900 million installed base by the end of this year, jumping to nearly 3.5 billion by 2022.
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The current addressable market is massive, yet still lacks two crucial things according to Daly: audience familiarity (and therefore desire to engage) and then the 5G infrastructure that will allow us to no longer need to depend on limited hardware specs on mobile devices.

Mobile is likely to be a huge part of the Augmented/Mixed Reality success equation going forward
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Mobile is likely to be a huge part of the Augmented/Mixed Reality success equation going forward, as Apple ARKit, Google ARCore and Facebook Camera Effects could deliver more than 900 million installed base by the end of this year, jumping to nearly 3.5 billion by 2022.

At the moment WoT AR Spectate only works with replays, but there is no technical reason why more interactive and live content couldn’t be developed for – and supported by – their platform. Wargaming are also interested in developing content that will work on headsets such as Magic Leap, who Daly says they’re currently “talking to.”

Wargaming are also interested in developing content that will work on headsets such as Magic Leap
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At the moment WoT AR Spectate only works with replays, but there is no technical reason why more interactive and live content couldn’t be developed for - and supported by - their platform
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Ultimately they are betting on the fact that just like we got used to having a mobile as a second screen most of the time, perhaps we will soon demand a second (and third-fourth, etc.) volumetric layer of mediated content dynamically appearing around us. Mix that with real-time social co-presence, and you start getting some seriously powerful experiences that we would consider paying for.

Just like we got used to having a mobile as a second screen most of the time, perhaps we will soon demand a second (and third-fourth, etc.) volumetric layer of mediated content dynamically appearing around us
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What Daly and his team hope is that projects like his will show people what is possible while hinting at even more amazing things to come, spurring the public to express more interest and ultimately encouraging content makers to bring about that future a bit faster.

This article was originally published on UploadVR

World of Tanks AR is something that we never knew we wanted…until now.https://t.co/uufxmXaVhj #VR #AR #WorldOfTanks @wargaming_net

— Upload (@UploadVR) August 21, 2018

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 Virtual Battles on Your Coffee Table appeared first on Tech Trends.