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(PRWeb January 05, 2022)

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As we head into 2022, let's take a look at the technology trends set to reshape the landscape for banks.  

Visitors to The Design Museum in London will be able to experience a new exhibit with the exterior of the building transformed in AR, bringing to life the realities of extreme weather due to climate change. In turn, the building materials themselves transform, to highlight ways in which we can adapt to combat these challenges.

This inaugural Landmarker project, in partnership with social media app Snap, sees architect Mariam Issoufou Kamara reimagine the Design Museum building to mark its fifth birthday in its current home. The project ties into the Design Museum’s mission to make the impact of design visible and demonstrate its role in addressing contemporary issues.

Visitors to the museum will be prompted to ‘Open their Snapchat’, at which point Snap’s AR technology will transform the building in front of their eyes – at least, on their phones – bringing the sometimes distant effects of climate change close to home by demonstrating the likely real-world results.

Kamara – an architect from Niger, who studied architecture at the University of Washington – founded her architecture and research practice, atelier masōmī, in 2014. Her belief is that architects have an important role to play in creating spaces that have the power to elevate, dignify and provide people with a better quality of life.

For the Snap AR project, Kamara chose to explore how architecture can adapt to extreme weather conditions, not only highlighting the ongoing effects of climate change but also demonstrating a tangible way that buildings can be adapted and repurposed to face contemporary problems.

Kamara said: “For an architect whose practice is in a desert country like Niger, the effects of the climate crisis are already all around us through increased droughts, floods and even climate refugees. This collaboration with the Design Museum and Snap really allowed me to explore a future where the climate has changed drastically, a new normal if you will. I wanted to use the facade of the Design Museum to explore how the built environment might respond to harsh conditions and how we could perhaps put buildings to use in order to serve new needs under extreme conditions.”

Justin McGuirk, chief curator at The Design Museum, said: “The imaginative re-use of existing structures needs to be at the heart of a climate-conscious architecture. Since augmented reality is such an engaging way of reimagining buildings, we are delighted to be partnering with Snap and Mariam Kamara to explore how our own home might be adapted in the future. What better way to celebrate the Design Museum’s birthday, and the revival of a much-loved building, than to keep visualising alternative futures for it.”

Will Scougal, international head of creative strategy at Snap, added: “Sometimes, seeing is believing. This is another example of how Snap can use its augmented-reality platform to tell really important stories. Climate change is the defining issue of our generation and this Lens brings what can feel like something distant closer to home, making it harder to ignore.”

Kamara’s redesign can be seen by either clicking the icon in the Snap Map or by scanning the Snapcode.

The Design Museum is one of the world’s leading museums devoted to contemporary architecture and design. Since it opened its doors in 1989, the museum has displayed everything from an AK-47 assault rifle to Christian Louboutin high-heeled shoes. In November 2016, The Design Museum relocated to Kensington, west London.

Arachnophobia is among the most common phobias and can have upsetting consequences, from panic attacks to arachnophobes avoiding everyday occasions due to fear of encountering a spider.

A well-established treatment for arachnophobia and similar phobias is exposure therapy, in which patients are guided by a therapist through more and more stimulating or realistic exposures to their fear. For instance, the patient may begin by looking at a cartoon spider and progress to handling a tarantula.

Arachnophobes can be reluctant to partake in exposure therapy, however, due to fear of exposing themselves to real spiders towards the end of treatment. Hoping to reassure arachnophobes, the Basel team developed an AR app, Phobys, based on established principles of exposure therapy: “It’s easier for people with a fear of spiders to face a virtual spider than a real one,” explained Anja Zimmer, who led the study.

The app projects a realistic 3D spider model onto the user’s background as captured through their phone camera. It has nine different levels of exposure, challenging the user to get close to, and eventually interact with, the virtual spider. It makes use of game elements, such as rewarding feedback, animation, and sound effects.

Each level ends with a self-assessment of fear and disgust. Once the user’s fear response has been dampened, they can move on to the next, more intense, level.

Zimmer and her colleagues put Phobys to the test in a clinical trial involving 66 arachnophobic participants. Over two weeks, the participants either completed six half-hour training units with the app or, for the control group, had no intervention.

Before and after treatment, they were asked to approach a real spider in a transparent box as closely as their fear would allow: the group that had used Phobys showed significantly less fear and disgust towards the real spider and was able to move closer than the control group.

The researchers worked with a spin-off from the University of Basel, MindGuide at GeneGuide AG, to refine their app. It is now available as a freemium app in the App Store and Play Store for people with mild fear of spiders to use alone; users with severe arachnophobia are not advised to use Phobys without supervision from a professional.

In 2013, another spider-related app, Phobia Free, based on similar principles – using exposure to spiders to reduce arachnophobia, although not including the AR elements of Phobys – was approved by NHS England to feature in its app library. All apps in the NHS library can be considered clinically safe. University of Kent researchers have incorporated exposure therapy into VR to provide tools to help patients with eating disorders, part of a wider move towards adoption of extended-reality technologies to supplement traditional psychological therapies.

Previous versions of Spectacles have focused on taking photos and videos from a first-person perspective, but Snap Inc co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said this recent version would enable people to “bring their imagination to life”.

While wearing the Spectacles, users will see Snapchat lenses and other virtual items appear in front of them as if actually placed in the physical world. But Snapchat said the new Spectacles are currently not for sale and instead aimed at AR creators and developers who build Snapchat lenses.

The firm also unveiled plans to make its camera more inclusive and better at capturing different skin tones. Spiegel said the platform was building new camera software that worked for all users “regardless of who they are and what they look like”.

The announcement comes as the social media platform revealed over 280 million people now use it globally every day, and over 500 million every month – with around 40 per cent of the Snapchat user base now found outside North America and Europe.

“As we continue to develop new experiences for Snapchatters, it’s the trust that we have built with our community over the last decade that allows us to experiment with new technologies,” Spiegel said. “With the evolution of the camera from a communications tool to an augmented reality platform – that trust has never been more important.”

He added that the way the firm tries to improve on its business model is by looking critically at its products to make sure they are inclusive of all members of our global community. “The camera itself was initially optimised to capture the appearance of white skin,” he explained. “While cameras have evolved and become better at capturing different skin tones, there is a lot more work to do. And we are determined to contribute to these efforts.”

Spiegel also highlighted the environment as a key area of focus for the company – revealing the firm was now carbon neutral and committed to launching an in-app educational awareness campaign later this year on the environment.

During the summit, Snapchat announced a wide range of updates, features, and new tools for the app and developers, including a new Story Studio app which will give users a range of professional editing tools to make content to be posted on Snapchat.

Snapchat’s Reesha Sodha said the new app would offer a “suite of easy to use, powerful editing tools to make professional content for mobile, on mobile”. “It’s a fast and fun way to make original, engaging vertical videos that share right to Snapchat – and anywhere else,” she added.

The unique design of Sony's controllers uses an “orb” shape that allows gamers to hold the controller naturally, while playing with a high degree of freedom.

It uses adaptive trigger buttons that can increase their tension depending on what’s happening on screen; advanced haptic feedback to try and make sensations in the game world more impactful, and finger touch detection which can detect a user’s fingers without any pressing.

The controller is also tracked by Sony’s new VR headset through a tracking ring across the bottom of the controller.

In a blog post, Sony said it would start supplying prototypes to game developers soon, although it did not give exact dates for when a refreshed PlayStation VR system might be released to consumers.

PlayStation’s senior vice president for platform, Hideaki Nishino, said the new hardware had been made “from the ground up” with the aim of making a “huge leap from current-gen VR gaming”.

Microsoft has also been in the spotlight this week after gamers reported error messages appearing on their Xbox consoles that mentioned VR headsets. However, the firm denied it was developing VR for the platform, attributing the messages to a “localisation bug”.

Meanwhile, Facebook has announced it is developing a wristband which has been designed to control augmented reality (AR) glasses, which are expected to launch later this year.

Wearers of the band would be able to interact with the virtual world with their finger movements, the company said in a blog post.

Contextually aware AI is being developed which will be able to understand a users’ commands and actions as well as the context and environment around them.

It will make inferences about what information a user might need or commands they might want to carry out depending on the context.

The wristband input is designed to make selecting a choice effortless by letting users interact with virtual, always-available buttons through slight finger movements.

This marks an escalation of Facebook’s interest in a hotly contested race among tech giants including Apple, Amazon and Google to develop AR devices that could eventually replace smart phones.

In September 2020, Facebook said it was about five to 10 years away from being able to bring “true” augmented reality glasses to the market.

Addressing delegates at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, TCL unveiled its first self-branded smartphone, whilst further revealing that it had concrete plans to also produce foldable electronics and 5G phones. TCL has years of experience producing consumer electronics under the BlackBerry and HP Palm brands, but this announcement marked its first serious step into the global smartphone market.

According to Stefan Streit, TCL global marketing manager, the maturation of the IoT – a world in which connected devices are constantly exchanging data – marks a good time for the company to bring something new to the market. He believes that hardware innovation in the smartphone market has stalled in the past decade and TCL can bring “more than another Chinese smartphone” through the introduction of entirely new form factors and features. He acknowledges that this will not happen overnight; rather, it is part of a “very long-term strategy” for the company.

The first step in this strategy is the launch of the Plex smartphone, which boasts a large, high-performance LCD display and retails for €329. Jason Gerdon, TCL’s head of global communications and strategy, says that this budget-friendly price point was made possible thanks to years of affordable manufacturing experience, vertical integration in the TCL consumer group and selectivity in deciding which features to optimise. TCL chose to focus on catering to the increasing consumption and generation of media on smartphones, beefing up the display (powered by its own dedicated chipset) and camera set.

“The smartphone market is really, really saturated and if you try to build a one-size-fits-all phone, the reality is that’s not really practical anymore,” said Gerdon. “I liken a smartphone now to a car: everyone has their own tastes, everyone has different budgets, everyone has different needs, so for us it's about looking at how we can take what we’re experts in and finding that bit of the market that we can address.”

TCL acknowledges that it does not have a sufficiently strong reputation at this point to shift top-range smartphones: “Prices at the thousand-dollar range are brand-related and not our territory”. The first iteration of the Plex – already available in some markets – will not be launched in the UK, with TCL claiming to be unconcerned about selling a large number of handsets. The Plex instead marks the starting point for a portfolio of devices to be rolled out over the coming years. “It’s very important for us that this is a long-term strategy and this is bigger than just a smartphone; this is an entire TCL ecosystem coming to the market,” Streit added.

At next year’s major consumer tech events, TCL are expected to reveal a design for their foldable smartphone, having previously revealed a prototype at IFA (slightly chunky, wide-rimmed and proportioned like a miniature laptop or old-school Nintendo DS). Gerdon believes that despite seeing a “flash in the pan” surrounding foldable electronics in early 2019, the area remains a ‘Wild West’ with almost any form factor being possible. He commented how ensuring that the software running on these devices responds in a meaningful way to folding and bending is just as important as nailing the novel hardware; for example, how should Android respond when you wrap a flexible screen around your wrist?

“If you don’t have a good [software] solution there it doesn’t matter how good the hardware experience is, the user will be disappointed because they feel like this isn’t smart any more. This is a thing where we feel like it takes time and we accept the challenge,” Streit said. TCL confirmed that it is has been working with other parties to experiment with software to suit more unusual foldable electronics, with the possibility of future flexible displays worn on the wrist and multi-hinge devices. The company hopes that these devices could be sold for “much less” than the $2,000+ price point emerging as standard for a foldable phone.

In addition to foldable devices, TCL is in the relatively advanced stages of developing a ‘wearable display’ which conjures up the appearance of a large, bright cinema-style screen held before the eyes without blocking out peripheral vision, allowing for a private yet not totally isolated viewing experience. Streit confirmed that the device had generated interest from the porn industry, inevitably, in addition to other potential business partners in such sectors as fashion and design. Under TCL’s “cautious” approach to rolling out this portfolio of devices and building a reputation as a reliable brand, however, it could be years until this type of display is available to consumers.

“We couldn’t care less about the marketing message of saying ‘We’re first!’. If you’re first to market but the product fails, then what have you achieved?” Gerdon said, diplomatically neglecting to name any competitors perhaps guilty of this.