Apple’s Safari Technology Preview, Object Theory’s Mixed Reality Collaboration Service for HoloLens, and Fidelity marks down Cloudera and Dropbox—SD Times news digest: March 31, 2016

Apple is giving developers a sneak peek of its upcoming Safari Web technologies in iOS and OS X. The Safari Technology Preview allows developers to experiment with the latest layout technologies, visual effects, and developer tools to provide input on how they are implemented.

The Safari Technology Preview includes the most recent version of WebKit; the latest versions of Web Inspector and Responsive Design Mode that let developers modify, debug and optimize their websites; the ability to provide feedback using the Bug Reporter; the ability to run side-by-side with the current version of Safari; and iCloud support.

In addition, developers can preview ECMAScript 6, B3 Java JIT compiler, improved IndexedDB implementation, the latest version of Shadow DOM; the ability to programmatically cut and copy text; and the ability to define a policy for their Web apps.

Object Theory announces Mixed Reality Collaboration Service
The software development company dedicated to the Microsoft HoloLens, Object Theory, has announced a new service to help organizations design and build multi-user holographic experiences. The Mixed Reality Collaboration Service features shared, remoted experiences, customized avatars, 3D model display, and annotations.

“With our Mixed Reality Collaboration service, Object Theory’s enterprise customers can improve communications effectiveness between dispersed teams, regardless of their location,” said Michael Hoffman, founding partner at Object Theory. “This allows for efficient viewing and discussion of the same 3D models as if they were in the same place. The shared experience can easily transition between viewing a miniature ‘situation room’ style model, and walking around within a full-scale model.”

Fidelity cuts value of Cloudera and Dropbox
Fidelity Investments has cut the estimated valuation of technology companies Cloudera and Dropbox. This is the latest indication of concern over the high prices of startups that have raised millions from private investors, but delayed going private, reportedReuters.

Fidelity, which has become a large investor in pre-IPO companies through mutual funds, marked down its stake in Big Data software company Cloudera by nearly 37%, said Reuters.

Cloudera, backed by Fidelity as well as high-profile investors like Google Ventures and T. Rowe Price, has a $4.1 billion valuation in the private market. Investors have anticipated its IPO for more than a year, said the report.

Fidelity also cut the estimated worth of Dropbox by almost 20%. Dropbox has been valued up and down by Fidelity, and it is estimated to be worth about $10 billion in the private market, said Reuters.

Common sleep disorders keeping Canadians awake

March 31, 2016

No. 2. Amy Cuddy explains how your body language shapes who you are.

Craig Barritt/Getty

Views: 32 million

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy details the scientific evidence behind power posing. Her research shows that the way you sit, stand, and hold yourself not only affects the way others perceive you, but changes your body chemistry.

She explains how assuming a high-power pose, like standing with your feet spread and planting your hands on your hips, can increase your feelings of dominance and lower your stress.

Watch it here »

No. 5. Jill Bolte Taylor demonstrates what a stroke does to the brain.

TED

Views: 18 million

Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist, learned firsthand what a stroke does to the human mind when a blood vessel in her brain burst one morning.

Witnessing her motion, speech, and self-awareness shut down one by one, Bolte spent the next eight years relearning how to think, walk, and talk. While the left side of her brain was permanently damaged, the right side experienced a windfall of creative energy. Today, she serves as a powerful voice for brain recovery.

Watch it here »

No. 15. Dan Gilbert reveals the science behind happiness.

TED

Views: 12 million

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert explains the fallacy behind the notion that to achieve happiness, people must get what they want. He uses psychology and neuroscience to explain that what we think makes us happy is, often, wrong.

As Gilbert says, “Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.”

Watch it here »

Mayo Clinic May Have Just Solved One Of Virtual Reality’s Biggest Problems

There’s no denying the power virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift andHTC Vive possess to make you feel physically present in a non-physical world,but there’s one drawback that degrades its appeal and presents a real obstacle toVR software developers: motion sickness. Apparently the Mayo Clinic has been hunkered down for 11 years trying to solve this very problem, and today they’re announcing the commercial availability of the technology they’ve been developing. It’s a bit difficult to wrap your head around, but it’s incredibly exciting.

First let’s outline why so many of us can suffer motion sickness in VR. While it’snot as common as it was a few years ago with early Oculus Rift dev kits, itdefinitely restricts the kind of games and experiences being developed right now.VR sickness (sometimes called simulator sickness) results from a visual andvestibular mismatch. I’ve made the mistake of associating it more with a conflictbetween what your eye is seeing and what your brain believes, but that’s notentirely accurate according to Mayo Clinic scientists.

A simple illustration of how Mayo Clinic’s GVS technology works | Image Credit: Mayo Clinic

You hear a lot about VR needing to deliver a solid 90fps framerate. Some neatadvances have been made on the hardware side of VR technology such as Oculus’Asynchronous Time Warp, which is a fancy way of saying they can generate extraframes when and if a game can’t maintain that desired 90fs sweet spot. Thishelps reduce judder, which contributes to motion sickness.

But the motion sickness is actually happening because our vestibular system — acomplicated sensory system in our inner ear that provides balance and spatialorientation — is out of whack. When we walk a character through a room in a VRgame without walking ourselves, a mismatch happens because we don’t feel thatmotion represented in 3D space. Our brain instantly notices that discrepancybetween what you’re seeing and what you’re feeling. It’s why you see a lot of earlyVR games using “blinking” to teleport a player from one spot to the next insteadof physically walking them there. It’s why, right now, we’ll never see a traditionalshooter like Call of Duty or Destiny ported to VR.

The Mayo Clinic has patented a new technology called Galvanic VestibularStimulation (GVS), which synchronizes your inner ear to what a person isviewing. Using that Call of Duty scenario, imagine feeling the sensation ofsprinting toward cover, of jumping up to a rooftop, or even something as extremeas jumping off that rooftop. What about a movie like Avatar where the viewer canactually feel the sensation of flight? Imagine what this could do for a VR rollercoaster simulator like NoLimits 2, just as one existing example.

Stepanek goes on to mention that GVS can alleviate balance disorders like vertigoand improve balance overall.

Los Angeles-based startup vMocion has secured the exclusive global license to use Mayo Clinic’s GVS technology in commercial products, and that’s where things get real. The platform they’ve developed can be integrated into existing operating systems, devices like VR or AR glasses, smartphones, and TVs. Are presentative for the company tells me that vMocion’s platform can use any existing game to create that sense of motion. Game developers technically wouldn’t need to add any additional code to their games, provided the platform they’re developing for supports vMocion’s technology. It would automatically sync movement seen onscreen to four stimulation points, thus delivering that believable sensation of movement to the inner ear.

Apple Releases New ‘Safari Technology Preview’ Browser [Download]

Apple has released a new ‘Safari Technology Preview’ browser that gives users an early look at upcoming web technologies in OS X and iOS.

Safari is the best way to see the sites on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Safari Technology Preview gives you an early look at upcoming web technologies in OS X and iOS including the latest layout technologies, visual effects, and developer tools so you can provide input on how they are implemented and deliver a best-in-class user experience on all Apple devices.

Here’s some highlighted features…

Preview the latest web technologies. Get a preview of the latest advances in Safari web technologies, including HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Safari Technology Preview includes the most recent version of WebKit, the rendering engine that powers Safari.

Easy to update. You can update Safari Technology Preview right from the Mac App Store. Updates occur every few weeks and include the most recent additions and improvements to WebKit.

Access powerful developer tools. Use the latest version of the powerful Web Inspector and Responsive Design Mode to modify, debug, and optimize your websites.

Provide feedback. Use Bug Reporter to send feedback directly to Apple about issues and enhancement requests. Simply select Report an Issue from the Help menu in Safari Technology Preview.

Run side-by-side with Safari. Safari Technology Preview is a standalone app that works side-by-side with the current version of Safari, so you can continue to use and reference the current release.

Surf seamlessly with iCloud. Safari Technology Preview works with iCloud, so you can access your latest Safari Favorites, bookmarks, and Reading List.

Keep current. The WebKit blog keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

You can download Safari Technology Preview from the link below…

Quantum computing with single photons getting closer to reality

integrated quantum circuits
(Left) Illustration and (right) color-coded microscope image of a nanowire (green) integrated in a photonic waveguide (gray on left, purple on right). In the illustration, the photons emitted from the nanowire are depicted as red spheres. …more
(Phys.org)—One promising approach for scalable quantum computing is to use an all-optical architecture, in which the qubits are represented by photons and manipulated by mirrors and beam splitters. So far, researchers have demonstrated this method, called Linear Optical Quantum Computing, on a very small scale by performing operations using just a few photons. In an attempt to scale up this method to larger numbers of photons, researchers in a new study have developed a way to fully integrate single-photon sources inside optical circuits, creating integrated quantum circuits that may allow for scalable optical quantum computation.

The researchers, Iman Esmaeil Zadeh, Ali W. Elshaari, and coauthors, have published a paper on the integrated quantum circuits in a recent issue of Nano Letters.
As the researchers explain, one of the biggest challenges facing the realization of an efficient Linear Optical Quantum Computing system is integrating several components that are usually incompatible with each other onto a single platform. These components include a single-photon source such as quantum dots; routing devices such as waveguides; devices for manipulating photons such as cavities, filters, and quantum gates; and single-photon detectors.
In the new study, the researchers have experimentally demonstrated a method for embedding single-photon-generating quantum dots inside nanowires that, in turn, are encapsulated in a waveguide. To do this with the high precision required, they used a “nanomanipulator” consisting of a tungsten tip to transfer and align the components. Once inside the waveguide, single photons could be selected and routed to different parts of the optical circuit, where logical operations can eventually be performed.
“We proposed and demonstrated a hybrid solution for integrated quantum optics that exploits the advantages of high-quality single-photon sources with well-developed silicon-based photonics,” Zadeh, at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, told Phys.org. “Additionally, this method, unlike previous works, is fully deterministic, i.e., only quantum sources with the selected properties are integrated in photonic circuits.
“The proposed approach can serve as an infrastructure for implementing scalable integrated quantum optical circuits, which has potential for many quantum technologies. Furthermore, this platform provides new tools to physicists for studying strong light-matter interaction at nanoscales and cavity QED [quantum electrodynamics].”
One of the most important performance metrics for Linear Optical Quantum Computing is the coupling efficiency between the single-photon source and photonic channel. A low efficiency indicates photon loss, which reduces the computer’s reliability. The set-up here achieves a coupling efficiency of about 24% (which is already considered good), and the researchers estimate that optimizing the waveguide design and material could improve this to 92%.
In addition to improving the coupling efficiency, in the future the researchers also plan to demonstrate on-chip entanglement, as well as increase the complexity of the photonic circuits and single-photon detectors.
“Ultimately, the goal is to realize a fully integrated quantum network on-chip,” said Elshaari, at Delft University of Technology and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. “At this moment there are a lot of opportunities, and the field is not well explored, but on-chip tuning of sources and generation of indistinguishable photons are among the challenges to be overcome.”
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-quantum-photons-closer-reality.html#jCp