Google open sources Seurat, a tool for reducing mobile VR complexity

Today is the day Google makes good on a lot of its 2017 I/O VR promises. The company just announced that it will be open sourcing Seurat, a tool designed to reduce complexity in high-fidelity mobile VR scenes, improving performance considerably.

This launch arrives alongside the release of the Mirage Solo, the first headset on the Daydream VR platform to make use of Google’s WorldSense positional tracking system. The headset is standalone and runs on a mobile chipset so it’s a lot more resource-constrained than headsets that connect to gaming PCs.

Seurat is a software tool that aims to reduce polygon count. Basically, Seurat takes all of the possible viewpoints that a VR user may have given their limited range of movement and removes the area of the 3D environment that they’d never be able to see. Seurat removes object permanence from the equation, so if you can’t see it in virtual reality, chances are it doesn’t actually exist at all.

In the snippet above from a new Blade Runner title, Google says the Seurat program was able to take a scene with 46.6 million triangles and reduce it down to 307,000. This is especially useful for developers with existing renders that they’re porting from more capable hardware to the more strained mobile VR hardware.

Source code and documentation for the tool is available on its GitHub page.

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A friendly robotic arm plays tic-tac-toe to help rehabilitate patients

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel are building a tic-tac-toe game to help patients with their rehabilitation exercises. The game is played on a grid of boxes and includes “embodied” and non-embodied play. Embodied play means a robotic arm will grab and place a marker – in this case a small cup – and non-embodied play includes bright lights that light up to mark the computer’s spot.

The system uses a Kinova arm and cups. The cups are part of the rehabilitation process and help users learn to grasp and manipulate objects after an illness or accident.

“Playing Tic Tac Toe with a set of cups (instead of X’s and O’s) is one example of a game that can help rehabilitate an upper limb,” said Dr. Shelly Levy-Tzedek. “A person can pick up and place many cups while enjoying a game and improving their performance of a daily task.”

Interestingly the speed of the robot had an effect on the users. A slower robot would make users perform more slowly while a faster robot sped up the game. This could be used to modify the game for individual patients and individual needs. Because the robot never gets tired the rehabilitation staff can pay attention to the minute movements of a patient, catering the speed and type of play to the patient’s particular needs.

The research paper appeared in Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience.

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You can now easily buy movie tickets with Google Assistant

Google Assistant is gaining some new capabilities thanks to a deal with Fandango which should make ordering movie tickets a quick and easy process. Simply tell Google Assistant that you want to buy some movie tickets and you’ll see what’s playing nearby, you can dial in the specificity to find out just what’s playing at a specific theater of what theaters a particular flick is going to be at.

The deal is going live on May the Fourth in honor of the Star Wars marketing holiday and the fact that advanced tickets for Solo: A Star Wars Story are going on sale today.

This functionality is something that’s been available on Siri, but Google Assistant allows you to make the purchase without downloading the Fandango app which had pretty much negated most of the utility this feature had on Siri.

For now, this launch is just for Google Assistant on Android phones but if you’re perplexingly a heavy user of the Google Assistant app on iOS than you’ll be able to get your movie ticket ordering functionality sometime later this year.

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You can now easily buy movie tickets with Google Assistant

Google Assistant is gaining some new capabilities thanks to a deal with Fandango which should make ordering movie tickets a quick and easy process. Simply tell Google Assistant that you want to buy some movie tickets and you’ll see what’s playing nearby, you can dial in the specificity to find out just what’s playing at a specific theater of what theaters a particular flick is going to be at.

The deal is going live on May the Fourth in honor of the Star Wars marketing holiday and the fact that advanced tickets for Solo: A Star Wars Story are going on sale today.

This functionality is something that’s been available on Siri, but Google Assistant allows you to make the purchase without downloading the Fandango app which had pretty much negated most of the utility this feature had on Siri.

For now, this launch is just for Google Assistant on Android phones but if you’re perplexingly a heavy user of the Google Assistant app on iOS than you’ll be able to get your movie ticket ordering functionality sometime later this year.

Read Full Article