It’s Time to Get Comfortable with AI, Machine Learning, and VR: They’re All Here to Stay
Emerging Tech Roundup — April 23
The Quantious team’s top picks for timely trending news in the tech world.
This week in tech: Sony introduced a new technology used to pair foods, VR usage is on the rise within the MLB, IKEA + Apple are introducing a new way to window shop, AI is steadily being incorporated into our lives, and Zoom is ready to help startups flourish.
Sony’s FlavorGraph Uses AI to Predict Which Ingredients Will Pair Together
(Engadget, April 19)
Sony has given us a glimpse of their “deep learning system,” FlavorGraph, which presents scientific backing to the intuition of chefs when pairing different foods. Sony used molecular information about ingredients and a history of food pairings from almost 1 million recipes to assemble the FlavorGraph. Upon compiling the graph, researchers found that when foods have similar dominant flavors in their molecules, they likely pair well together. The graph digs deeper than the obvious food pairings and serves as a starting point to find unconventional, delicious food pairings that even the most seasoned chefs may not think of.
VR Usage & Consumer Attitudes, Wave V
(ARtillry, April 19)
This week, Wave V of the VR Usage & Consumer Attitudes brief showed the slow and steady growth of consumers’ interest in VR. For starters, the percentage of households that own or have access to a VR headset has increased from 19% to 23% in the past year. Within these households, 70% report a high satisfaction rate and monthly usage of 80% or more. Although the usage of current VR owners is on the rise, the interest in VR ownership from those who do not already own a set, has decreased from 29% to 20%. This has been a hardship for VR marketers, and ARtillry Intelligence CEO and Chief Analyst, Mike Boland, said it is comparable to “trying to sell TVs on the radio.” Marketers believe that this decrease is expected and is likely happening because until one has owned a VR headset, they do not know what they’re missing out on. Someone won’t know how much interest they have in VR, until they have actively used it first-hand.
Olson, A’s Utilizing VR to Prepare for At-bats
(MLB, April 17)
Matt Olson of the Oakland A’s spoke on his experience using VR to prepare for opponents before facing them in-person, during the game. The VR headset collects and uses data including a pitcher’s velocity, movement, and release point, (among other criteria) to provide a realistic at-bat simulation. Olson has seen improvement when using the simulation before games and plans to continue his use. VR use in baseball is growing in popularity across the league and the team manager of the A’s, Bob Melvin, expects it to “stay for the long haul.”
Ikea + Apple Redesigned Their AR App, Improving User Experience and Playing with Your Interior Styling!
(Yanko Design, April 16)
IKEA was the first of many online retailers to integrate AR into their online shopping experience. Shoppers could use the IKEA Place App to position furniture in their home before purchasing it, which added convenience. Partnered with Apple, IKEA has redesigned their app into IKEA Studio and added new features. The revamped app relies on LiDAR sensors to analyze rooms, gauge measurements, and design floor plans for furnished rooms. Within the app, shoppers can move furniture around to test different designs, experiment with different color schemes, and more. The app is still in beta testing and actively taking applications for customers who want to try out the new experience. In the future, designers at SPACE10 hope to integrate the same features from the app into a pair of glasses for additional user convenience.
12 Expert Tips to Help Small Businesses Affordably Leverage AI/ML
(Forbes, April 19)
These tips will help you get the most out of your AI and ML (Machine Learning) experience, while keeping costs as low as possible. First, save yourself time by identifying a specific problem you want to solve with AI. Start by identifying the typical tasks your employees take on, that don’t necessarily amplify their talents — how can AI help eliminate them? For example, customer service bots are a fantastic starting point for assimilating AI/ML. It’s a quick and easy way to provide better service to your customers while also conservatively investing in AI. Once you identify how you want to use AI, look for an open-source code, perhaps from ML Core, MediaPipe, or ML Kit, to serve as a backbone. You can then modify it to cater to your specific needs. Using AI in quantifiable areas makes it easier to measure success. As you gain comfort implementing and using AI/ML, begin using it to gather customer insights and continuously clean the data. What do your customers expect from an online experience? What will make them click away from your website? What draws them in? AI can be used to tell you. Checkout the full Forbes article for more tips.
Zoom Launches $100m Zoom Apps Investment Fund
(TechCrunch, April 19)
Zoom has just announced their Zoom Apps investment fund and is looking for qualified companies to include in their portfolio. Each company is expected to receive anywhere from $250,000 to $2.5 million to build their company. Zoom’s goal is to serve as more than an app itself, but a platform for growth to their users (and their businesses) as well. Each startup will have access to Zoom’s platform and resources, allowing them the extra helping hand they may have needed to flourish. The investments will start relatively small, but will allow for the qualified startups to get early support to fund their ideas. Zoom is encouraging dedicated entrepreneurs to apply to be considered for a spot in the opportunity-rich portfolio.
Virtual Humans Outperform Real People Teaching Career Leadership Skills, Study Finds
(Forbes, April 19)
A study hosted by the Human Interface Technology Lab New Zealand at the University of Canterbury, suggested that workers may have more success from leadership training if they use virtual humans. 30 participants were administered in trying to learn leadership, communication, and negotiation skills from virtual humans. Participants showed an increase in comfort level when learning from virtual trainers. Although American workers are rather hesitant about technology taking over the workplace, the abilities of virtual humans are too valuable to ignore. Robot leadership trainers can “provide self-reflective learning and engagement, realistic scenarios of what leaders may encounter on the job, constructive performance feedback, a consistent training experience, and a means for evoking feelings of social presence” (Forbes). If American workers can overcome the unsettling feeling of how accurately humans are represented by robots nowadays, they can learn a lot from this growing technology.
