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CAN 2017 – Highlights and Favourites

The always-fantastic Art & Tech resource Creative Applications have put together their list of highlights from the year:

As 2017 comes to a close, we take a moment to look back at the outstanding work done this year. From spectacular performances, large scale installations, devices and tools to the new virtual spaces for artistic exploration – so many great projects are being added to the CAN archive! Here are a just few, 25 in total, that we and you enjoyed the most this year.

Have a look for yourself here

Elastic Man

Interactive webtoy from Adult Swim put together by David Li features an elastic Morty head which you can stretch and pull to your hearts desire.

Try it out for yourself here

Purple stimboard for anon

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TESS_ERACT

Street Fighter II in the real world

Proof of concept experience by Abhishek Singh makes classic game Street Fighter II playable in the real world using iOS ARKit and Unity, and can be played via two iPhones:

Remember the classic arcade game Street Fighter 2? I rebuilt it as a multiplayer AR game to actually take it into the streets. I’m calling it the Real World Warrior edition.

Link

Death Mask

Programming project from Or Fleisher and Anastasis Germanidis combines Augmented Reality and Machine Learning, using a Neural Net trained for age prediction through mobile camera device:

‘Death-Mask’ predicts how long people have to live and overlays that in the form of a “clock” above they’re heads in augmented reality.  The project uses a machine learning model titled AgeNet for the prediction process. Once predicted it uses the average life expectancy in that location to try and estimate how long one has left.

The aesthetic inspiration derives from the concept of death masks. These are sculptures meant to symbolize the death of a person by casting his face into a sculpture (i.e mask).

The experiment uses ARKit to render the visual content in augmented reality on an iPad and CoreML to run the machine learning model in real-time. The project is by no means an accurate representation of one’s life expectancy and is more oriented towards the examination of public information in augmented reality in the age of deep learning.

Link

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Researchers make a breakthrough toward the next generation of memory devices

A*STAR and NTU researchers have created a thin film material that allows them to control the size and density of magnetic skyrmions. In addition, they have also achieved electrical detection of these skyrmions. The fabrication process for these films is compatible with current industrial methods. This discovery is a breakthrough and is a key step towards the creation of a skyrmion-based memory device, which is one of the promising contenders for the next generation of memory technologies.

The discovery has been recently published in Nature Materials.

Skyrmions are small particle-like magnetic structures about 400 times smaller than a red blood cell. They can be created in magnetic materials, and their stability at small sizes makes them ideal candidates for memory devices. Since the discovery of room temperature skyrmions in 2015, there has been a global race to create a skyrmion memory device because such a device could potentially hold more information, while using less power.

The need for more memory

Increasingly large amounts of data are created daily in our rapidly digitalised world. Moreover, cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Things (IOT), edge computing, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) require immediate processing of this data for effective performance. This requires the development of memory devices with increasingly higher capacities.

Read more.

AR Experiments

Following the announcement of ARCore, Google Creative Lab have released a site featuring various projects using the framework ranging from drawing in mid-air, portals, and strange characters popping up:

AR Experiments is a site that features work by coders who are experimenting with augmented reality in exciting ways. These experiments use various tools like ARCore, an SDK that lets Android developers create awesome AR experiences. We’re featuring some of our favorite projects here to help inspire more coders to imagine what could be made with AR. 

At the moment, these projects are compatible with Android Nougat devices such as the Pixel and Samsung S8 but rollout for other devices is happening.

You can explore the set of experiments here

Creating Face-Based AR Experiences

Apple have just published an example for developers on how to use their front facing camera on the iPhone X for AR apps:

This sample app presents a simple interface allowing you to choose between four augmented reality (AR) visualizations on devices with a TrueDepth front-facing camera (see iOS Device Compatibility Reference).

The camera view alone, without any AR content.

The face mesh provided by ARKit, with automatic estimation of the real-world directional lighting environment.

Virtual 3D content that appears to attach to (and be obscured by parts of) the user’s real face.

A simple robot character whose facial expression is animated to match that of the user.

Link

An intro video can be found here