Gabriel Adade

5/5 (6)

“Bring AR to the slopes with the world’s first augmented reality ski googles.

Interact, navigate, play.”

RideOnVision

We are all familiar with the hassle of reaching out for our phone whilst being on the slopes. Whether it’s to call a friend, change a song, take a picture of the beautiful scenery, or even to check the time, the thought of removing your gloves to embrace the frozen air is chilling. But imagine being able to do all this without using your hands at all?

RideOn Ski Goggles offers the world’s first AR ski experience, fusing the augmented reality experience with snow googles. One of its biggest perks is the fact that it’s operating system is based on Android 4.4 with virtual maps, thus preventing yourself from getting lost again. Its integrated camera enables up to 3 hours of HD video recording, while communication functions allows you to locate, message, and even (video) call hands-free. Instead of disconnecting you from physical reality, like virtual reality (VR) goggles, AR adds another layer to the physical world, enhancing the entire experience.

Watch a quick video of the goggle’s in action – here –

RideOn started in 2014 and a year later overachieved their crowdfunding goal via Indiegogo (151% of $75,000). For now, these goggles are RideOn’s flagship product, and have already been shipped to hundreds of early adopters around the world. The startup hopes to soon bring AR experience to motorcycling, sailing (seen below), aviation, and other outdoor activities, thus disrupting the sport industry.

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While the integration between AR and sports may sound fun, some would think that it would lead to more accidents due to all the distractions. However, RideOn was built with safety in mind for both the rider and skiers/boarders around you. The goggles automatically detect motion and switches to an extremely minimal riding mode to avoid any sort of distraction. All the messages and calls will be delivered and seen only when you are fully still.

Moreover, settings such as playing mini games and tracing your friends while riding down will actually add minimal information embedded on the snow. Within a few minutes, the brain adjusts and the information available resides to reality. Therefore, the AR visuals will not obstruct your ride nor display any serious distractions. The goggles were designed to enhance the downhill experience, not diminish it

However, there is still a small drawback. With the release date approaching this month, the pre-order price on their website hits $629, with the retail price being $899. On top of the RideOn AR Ski Goggles, the buyer will receive access to piste maps and points of interests of all major ski resorts around the world. Even though the experience may definitely appear unique and exciting, for now it is still quite costly.

Would you introduce AR into your outdoor activities? Personally, I think this technology integration was inevitable and will only grow from here. Despite the high price, I would definitely ride with a pair of RideOn goggle’s.

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5/5 (10)

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”

– Stephen Hawking

Five of the world’s biggest technology companies announced this week that they will work together in order to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Microsoft, Facebook, Google’s DeepMind, IBM, and Amazon will tackle the issues behind the safety, privacy, and collaboration between humans and AI. Moreover, Microsoft revealed yesterday that they have formed a 5,000-person engineering and research division focused on the matter.

The idea of living in a world alongside artificial intelligence seemed a reality far from our lifetime, something belonging to science fiction. However, today AI has already become part of our daily lives.

For those unfamiliar with the term “artificial intelligence”, it is defined as the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. Basically, it’s smart software that enables machines to mimic human behavior.

Much like in the movies “Terminator”, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”, and “I, Robot”, AI is usually portrayed as robots with human-like characteristics, but in fact it encompasses all systems. Apple’s SIRI and self-driving cars are already examples of current artificial intelligence, except they are properly referred to as weak AI (or narrow AI), which is AI designed to only perform narrow tasks (e.g. internet searches or voice recognition). The long-term goal, however, is to create strong AI (or artificial general intelligence, AGI) that could outperform humans in almost every cognitive task.

This unsurprisingly raises many concerns, which is why these five companies hope to maximize AI’s potential and to ensure its benefits to the world by conducting research in the following areas:

Ethics, fairness and inclusivity
Transparency
Privacy and interoperability (how AI works with people)
Trustworthiness, reliability and robustness

Despite the obvious advantages that AGI would offer, from facilitating daily human tasks to overcoming human limitations (e.g. space exploration), perhaps one of the biggest argument is still revolved around its ethical and moral values. In sci-fi movies, the AI systems usually end up trying to dominate the humans. Although these are a bit exaggerated, Tom Dietterich (president of the Association for the Advancement of AI) explains that computers won’t just take over the world someday, unless we design them to. Which begs the question, what if one day someone does design them to do so? Additionally, Dietterich stresses that we should also never make AI systems fully autonomous (fully independent of human control) in order to avoid such problems.

Whether you are for or against AI, its rapid development is inevitable. However, will its benefits truly outweigh its consequences? Personally, I do not believe that we can live in a world where human intelligence is outperformed by superior intelligent systems without any unforeseen risks. No matter how safely designed these machines are, they could always end in up the wrong hands. It may seem a minor problem if your laptop crashes or gets hacked, but it’s more serious if an AI system takes over your car, airplane, home, or trading systems. Or worse, imagine losing control of lethal autonomous weapons, which can select and engage targets without human intervention.

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