VR Police Training

Axon has announced the acquisition of VR studio Foundry 45 which it says will bolster its VR training offerings. Axon is the company behind the well-known Taser stun guns which are employed by police and military forces around the world. In modern times the company has also focused on body cams and software for administration and management of public safety organizations.

Axon has a vested interest in making sure the users of its Taser products are well trained. Not just for the safety of users and targets but also for liability and the company’s image. The promise of VR training is not only that it can feel more real but also that it can be cheaper and easier for public safety organizations to deploy, allowing for more training time with a broader range of scenarios and less overhead.

More information:

https://www.roadtovr.com/axon-taser-foundry-45-acquisition-vr-training/

Deep Learning Tracks Animals

The ability to capture the behavior of animals is critical for neuroscience, ecology, and many other fields. Cameras are ideal for capturing fine-grained behavior but developing computer vision techniques to extract the animal’s behavior is challenging even though this seems effortless for our own visual system. One of the key aspects of quantifying animal behavior is pose estimation. In a lab setting, it’s possible to assist pose estimation by placing markers on the animal’s body like in motion-capture techniques used in movies. But as one can imagine, getting animals to wear specialized equipment is not the easiest task, and downright impossible and unethical in the wild.

For this reason, researchers at EPFL have been pioneering markerless tracking for animals. Their software relies on deep learning to teach computers to perform pose estimation without the need for physical or virtual markers. Their teams have been developing DeepLabCut, an open-source, deep-learning “animal pose estimation package” that can perform markerless motion capture of animals. In 2018 they released DeepLabCut, and the software has gained significant traction in life sciences: over 350,00 downloads of the software and nearly 1400 citations. In 2020, the Mathis teams released DeepLabCut-Live!, allows researchers to rapidly give feedback to animals they are studying.

More information:

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/time-to-get-social-tracking-animals-with-deep-lear/

Personalised XR Avatars Into Reality

Geenee AR has partnered with Ready Player Me to help bring your digital identity to the real world. Similar to many of the AR filters you might find on Snapchat or Instagram, the experience uses full-body tracking to layer a virtual avatar, along with accessories such as NFTs, virtual clothing, and other features, over your real-world body in real-time.

The best part is no coding is required. You simply drag and drop your Ready Player Me avatar directly into Geenee’s WebAR Builder platform and the software does all the work for you. You’re then free to create fun photos and videos of yourself wearing your digital counterpart. With brands and industries all making the shift to the metaverse, digital twinning is becoming just as important for individuals.

More information:

https://vrscout.com/news/brings-your-vr-avatar-into-the-real-world-using-ar-tech/