Uploaded June 2019 | Updated September 2026, 5 hours ago
The Reality Lab Lectures - Tuesday, May 14, 2019
TALK TITLE: Radical Experimentation: Creating Content for Emerging Technologies
SPEAKER: Jessica Brillhart (Founder, Vrai Studio & Vrai Pictures)
TALK ABSTRACT: Emerging technology has the capacity to expand our understanding of the world and evolve our ability to connect to each other – but in order to do this in any meaningful way, it is imperative to consider the technology’s affects on current pipelines and ecosystems, its impact on culture as a whole, and its ability to satiate – or change entirely – the current wishes and desires of a media-consuming society.
The talk will be presented in three parts or “case studies,” each focusing on a specific emergent technology where creative development was leveraged as a means to test and better understand the technology in question. Each case study will explore how the considerations previously listed were met and the output that resulted. The first case study will focus on Jump, a 360-degree stereoscopic live-action virtual reality pipeline developed at Google. The second case-study will focus on Bose AR, an audio-only augmented reality technology developed at Bose which allows users to experience spatial and immersive audio. The third will focus on Inception, a convolutional network. Initially trained on ImageNet to extrapolate contents of images, the process was then reversed to instead identify and and enhance patters in those images – essentially dream upon them. The result was a computer vision program called DeepDream.
I propose that in order to truly and adequately address the potential societal and cultural affects of emerging technology, iterative creative output and experimentation must not only be implemented but continuously encouraged. Not only does this necessary process maximize an emergent technology’s chances of success – thus playing a crucial role in that technology’s development – but it also prepares it for introduction into a modern society. This process initiates an ecosystem in which users at scale are able to understand a technology’s potential, thus willfully embracing it as part of their lives in both an observational and active capacity.
Event held on the UW-Seattle Campus and recorded by UW CSE Production Team
© UW Reality Lab, 2019
http://realitylab.uw.edu
The Reality Lab Lectures - Tuesday, May 14, 2019
TALK TITLE: Radical Experimentation: Creating Content for Emerging Technologies
SPEAKER: Jessica Brillhart (Founder, Vrai Studio & Vrai Pictures)
TALK ABSTRACT: Emerging technology has the capacity to expand our understanding of the world and evolve our ability to connect to each other – but in order to do this in any meaningful way, it is imperative to consider the technology’s affects on current pipelines and ecosystems, its impact on culture as a whole, and its ability to satiate – or change entirely – the current wishes and desires of a media-consuming society.
The talk will be presented in three parts or “case studies,” each focusing on a specific emergent technology where creative development was leveraged as a means to test and better understand the technology in question. Each case study will explore how the considerations previously listed were met and the output that resulted. The first case study will focus on Jump, a 360-degree stereoscopic live-action virtual reality pipeline developed at Google. The second case-study will focus on Bose AR, an audio-only augmented reality technology developed at Bose which allows users to experience spatial and immersive audio. The third will focus on Inception, a convolutional network. Initially trained on ImageNet to extrapolate contents of images, the process was then reversed to instead identify and and enhance patters in those images – essentially dream upon them. The result was a computer vision program called DeepDream.
I propose that in order to truly and adequately address the potential societal and cultural affects of emerging technology, iterative creative output and experimentation must not only be implemented but continuously encouraged. Not only does this necessary process maximize an emergent technology’s chances of success – thus playing a crucial role in that technology’s development – but it also prepares it for introduction into a modern society. This process initiates an ecosystem in which users at scale are able to understand a technology’s potential, thus willfully embracing it as part of their lives in both an observational and active capacity.
Event held on the UW-Seattle Campus and recorded by UW CSE Production Team
© UW Reality Lab, 2019
http://realitylab.uw.edu
![Reality Lab Lectures: Gordon Wetzstein - Computational Near-eye Displays [VR180]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5CwQ5O64s2Q/mqdefault.jpg "Reality Lab Lectures: Gordon Wetzstein - Computational Near-eye Displays [VR180]
[Filmed in VR180. For the 3D experience, please view with Cardboard, Daydream or PSVR]
The Reality Lab Lectures - Friday, June 8, 2018
Talk Title: Computational Near-Eye Displays: Engineering the Interface Between Our Visual System and the Digital World
Speaker: Gordon Wetzstein (Asst. Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, leader of the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab)
Recording Details: This recording was made with a Z CAM K1 Pro 3D camera.
Close Captions: This talk was also recorded with traditional 2D cameras with close captioning, available here: https://youtu.be/BXnDXAQpmWg
Talk Abstract: Immersive visual and experiential computing systems, i.e. virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), are entering the consumer market and have the potential to profoundly impact our society. Applications of these systems range from communication, entertainment, education, collaborative work, simulation and training to telesurgery, phobia treatment, and basic vision research. In every immersive experience, the primary interface between the user and the digital world is the near-eye display. Thus, developing near-eye display systems that provide a high-quality user experience is of the utmost importance. Many characteristics of near-eye displays that define the quality of an experience, such as resolution, refresh rate, contrast, and field of view, have been significantly improved over the last years. However, a significant source of visual discomfort prevails: the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). Further, natural focus cues are not supported by any existing near-eye display. In this talk, we discuss frontiers of engineering next-generation opto-computational near-eye display systems to increase visual comfort and provide realistic and effective visual experiences.
Event held on the UW-Seattle Campus
© UW Reality Lab, 2018
http://realitylab.uw.edu")
