
Blue Vision, which builds collaborative AR, leave stealth with $14.5M led by GV - rosshemsley
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/15/blue-vision-labs-which-builds-collaborative-ar-emerges-from-stealth-with-14-5m-led-by-gv/
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politician
I can't wait for the integration with HMDs!

It'll be so useful to see contextual advertising near all of my favorite shops
with the great deals that I love -- all without having to clip coupons! It'll
be great when this is paired with facial recognition, so that I can see just
the ads that I need for my personal situation at that moment. Maybe they'll
even give me a better deal since I'm such a frequent customer!

Two thumbs up!

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dotsh
I totally don't get how this could be useful without smart glasses. Most
people already spend to much time staring at their phones and with this crap
will be even worst. Such solutions were already years ago and were not adopted
because phones were too weak and software unusable. Nothing has changed except
that we have better phones and rest is still a crap.

I just wait for someone to fall under the car collecting gold circles...

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, AR have a huge potential but not for flying emojis
or playing RPG games running all over the city like a maniac with a huge
phone.

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malux85
> Most people already spend to much time staring at their phones

Compared to what? This sounds like something a closed minded person would say.
My grandmother says "I cant believe you stare at screens all day". Today,
people my age don't even question it.

The phones years ago were too old, and the software was pretty unusable, but
now the hardware is significantly better, you can push a 100,000 poly model in
realtime over 30 fps video and it's smooth. Have you used the BBC app that
allows you to walk around the mummy tomb? It's smooth and gorgeous and really
fun.

I'd have to say that their promo video was pretty uninspiring, I'd like to
have seen a spatially aware map-type demo, or some higher poly models, or a
simple RPG game. The floating 2D emoji sprites don't do the potential justice,
but hey, they're just starting out!

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dotsh
> Compared to what?

For instance compared to talking with each other. Didn't you spot that at
every bar? Snapchat or Facebook Messenger are the main sources of
communication now even for people who sit side by side. But probably I'm
closed minded and I do not see a bigger picture.

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TeMPOraL
Yes, you are, because you seem to put everything under the common label of
"staring at screens" :).

You look around the bar, and see lots of people staring at screens. Were you
to look closer, peek over everyone's shoulder, you'd see that the group over
that table is skimming the project document they met to talk about. That
couple over there just took out their phones to skim the news, the first
moment they had during the day for that. That girl next to the entrance is
ordering a taxi. That awkward-looking guy fiddling with his phone just got an
important message from his SO, and as untactful as it may be between friends,
he doesn't feel comfortable not replying immediately. Etc.

The range of activities we do over phones is so big, that you can't just
bundle it together. Many of those activities become social objects themselves,
i.e. something we start talking about or doing together.

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dotsh
> Yes, you are, because you seem to put everything under the common label of
> "staring at screens" :).

I'm not and don't exaggerate with this. I don't mind if someone commute for a
an hour and a half to work and reads a book, skim the news news or prepare for
work meeting. This is not the point here.

It just hurts me as I see people who evidently met to spend time together and
for 40 minutes did not exchange words but they scroll through instagram or
facebook all the time and I am a witness to such situations constantly.

But this is not a thread about it, anyway I think that the AR deserves better
times and much more convenient equipment than the phone in hand.

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throwaway84742
They must be seeing something I don’t, if you pardon my pun. I don’t see “AR
collaboration” as even remotely viable outside of a few very specific niches,
and will remain skeptical of this whole AR thing until I see a demo. The only
spaces I’m aware of where AR/VR collaboration is currently viable all deal
with the physical world to one extent or another: real estate sales, furniture
sales, construction, that sort of thing. I could get behind “Kingsman” style
teleconferencing if it works spectacularly well. Other than that, I’m drawing
a blank.

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mattbierner
Any idea how it works behind the scenes? From some of the details, I assume
the mapping is gps + sensors + something like Photosynth or this:
[https://www.popsci.com/gear-amp-
gadgets/article/2009-09/buil...](https://www.popsci.com/gear-amp-
gadgets/article/2009-09/building-virtual-cities-automatically-150000-flickr-
photos)

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KaiserPro
pretty much that.

They have gone round and taken a video of every street in a certain area,
unpacked it, extracted salient points, reconstruct those points to get a 3d
map.

From that, given any 2d image you should be able to extract a bunch of
"salient points" or known points, which from their relationship to each other
can tell where the camera is, and what direction its pointing.

The two hard parts are 1) collecting the data 2) searching the data in
reasonable amount of time

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mlevental
you can see it here in their demo

[https://youtu.be/tXwVg2S9wuY?t=60](https://youtu.be/tXwVg2S9wuY?t=60)

the "salient points" are called keypoints and their feature vectors are called
descriptors

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-
invariant_feature_transf...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-
invariant_feature_transform#Keypoint_descriptor)

you are correct that the challenge is collecting and indexing/retrieving but
there have been techniques that do this for a while

[https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~michjc/papers/p144-park.pdf](https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~michjc/papers/p144-park.pdf)

(they even tested against SIFT descriptors)

the real thing that i'm puzzled by with blue vision is how they're registering
against ARKit descriptors (if they are at all) since apple doesn't expose them
in the ARKit api (only the point cloud itself). ARCore used to expose them
([https://stackoverflow.com/a/29012790](https://stackoverflow.com/a/29012790))
but i don't think it does anymore. they must be doing the registration because
they only support devices that are running ARKit/ARCore (and without it they
would just have built a SLAM system - albeit backed by an "arcloud" \- that
sits beside ARKit/ARCore and would most likely be inferior).

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iltaiuti
> the real thing that i'm puzzled by with blue vision is how they're
> registering against ARKit descriptors (if they are at all) since apple
> doesn't expose them in the ARKit api (only the point cloud itself). ARCore
> used to expose them
> ([https://stackoverflow.com/a/29012790](https://stackoverflow.com/a/29012790))
> but i don't think it does anymore. they must be doing the registration
> because they only support devices that are running ARKit/ARCore (and without
> it they would just have built a SLAM system - albeit backed by an "arcloud"
> \- that sits beside ARKit/ARCore and would most likely be inferior).

I have had a look at their API documentation, and what they do is they provide
you with an anchor, and that's where you attach your SCNode-s. They use the
built-in ORB-SLAM to position your SCNodes, but these are all relative to the
main anchor, hence achieving stability and persistence.

~~~
mlevental
yea that's clever. that way you don't have to track just identify. still
leverage arkit/arcore to do the tracking.

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kirykl
Just looking around me now and imagining everything I see having an augmented
reality overlay it seems exhausting. I guess the giant blue arrows will help
me focus.

~~~
speps
[https://vimeo.com/166807261](https://vimeo.com/166807261)

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dmitrygr

         The SDK will initially be free to use

Now there's a way to get people to use it

"initially"

/s

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mlevental
how else exactly do you think they'll make money. or do you think they should
be giving this away for free?

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barcoder
Sell people's tracking data like most "free" software

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eggie5
they posted on Who's Hiring back on November last year

