SINGAPORE - Technology is changing street culture - from the way people play, create and sell products such as toys and sneakers.

Over the weekend (Dec 1 and 2) visitors to Culture Cartel, billed as Asia's first all-encompassing street culture convention, got a chance to see first-hand how toy and streetwear companies, as well as artists, are adopting new techniques and processes.

The first virtual reality (VR) graffiti battle in Asia using Tilt Brush by Google, a software launched in 2016which allows a user to paint in 3D space through virtual reality, was featured at the event.

Tilt Brush allows the user to paint with three-dimensional brush strokes to create life-sized images such as of stars, light and even fire., It works by projecting a fully immersive digital world around the user.

Mr Marc Wong, 31, head of content for Culture Cartel, says: "If you pick the Tilt Brush up, you will see it is quite a magical experience, whether it is used to create a doodle, design a car or paint a landscape. The possibilities are endless."

All one needs is a VR-ready computer, a VR system such as the HTC Vive, and the Tilt Brush software, he adds.

The software can be downloaded, and VR-ready computers are available at electronic stores here, as well as online stores.

Mr Wong adds: "The purpose of this battle is to showcase how graffiti has evolved with technology, and the future we are heading towards."

During the battle, eight contestants - none with any experience with VR, but with a good grasp of freestyle writing or drawing - competed among themselves using their VR painting skills.

The winner was full-time visual artist Eman Raharno Jeman, 32, who goes by the name Clogtwo.He won a HTC Vive system, which consists a VR headset, two controllers and two base stations, valued at $949 altogether.

In one of the battles, he drew a sunset scene of a flamingo among some plants on a lake. He said: "Real graffiti are 2D art pieces, and I liked how the Tilt Brush allows me to create 3D virtual pieces and worlds that you are can be immersed in. The artwork can be floating and free-flowing."

Toy and sneaker companies are also using new technology to improve their processes.

When local designer toy studio Mighty Jaxx created its first figure in 2012, it was hand-sculpted and the process was long and painful.

Mighty Jaxx founder, Mr Jackson Aw, resolved to find a better way and since then has been using ZBrush, a digital sculpting tool that allows for 3D modelling, texturing and painting. This software uses technology which stores lighting, colour, material, and depth information for all objects on the screen.

The toys are then printed using a Form 2 3D printer, which creates high-resolution parts at a fraction of the cost and footprint of industrial 3D printers. The printer can also prepare preliminary physical models for quality checks.

The initial sculpt for all his toys at Culture Cartel were made in this way, with all the equipment housed in Mighty Jaxx's studio in Geylang.

Mr Aw, 29, says: "These are currently the latest technologies used in the industry. Both offer flexibility in scaling of models, and adjustments take much less time than sculpting the toys by hand. There are no notable drawbacks."

Apart from the creation of products, technology has also changed the way they are distributed.

Home-grown sneaker boutique Limited Edt has been selling some of its shoes through a mobile app, Frenzy, since the middle of this year.

The app, available on iOS and Android platforms, brings together sneaker and streetwear products for sale.

Mr Mandeep Chopra, 42, Limited Edt's managing director, says: "Using the app lets us cut out the problems of bots and overselling, which we face on our webpage because of the crazy demand of some of the launches.

"It also adds a layer of novelty and fun to the checkout experience through the use of dropzones, which are geo-fenced zones where buyers must physically be in to access certain sales."

The marketing trades are replete with calls for Big Health to innovate more smartly, to use data more aggressively, and to play into the rapid consumerization of patients. And savvy readers would do well to recognize that, as marketers, authors of these pieces want their clients to speed up, take more risk, and, above all, spend more on marketing, because that’s what gets them out of bed in the morning. Innovation – marketing what’s new – is always exciting.

But birthing innovation will always be hard for big business – and especially for Big Medical and Big Pharma.

Innovation requires new ways of thinking. Driving disruption from within can mean taking a sledgehammer to existing relationships, while thinking different introduces huge amounts of risk into businesses that have made a career out of building predictable and sustainable operations. 

So how should healthcare marketers move fast and break stuff? How much inspiration should they draw from the incessant calls to ignore their best instincts and plow forward into the unknown?

Successful innovation has its own well-defined set of rules that any budding revolutionary can follow. Here are three.

Marketers of all types are in the idea business. Every product, drug, or innovation starts as an idea. And every idea, no matter how fanciful or revolutionary, has supporters. 

Many marketers know this strategy as Chasm Theory and apply with ruthless abandon what this model tells them about market penetration. According to Chasm Theory, revolutionaries have specific characteristics. They are often the first on their block to welcome a new idea. They like to be the first to champion change. They move quickly. Revolutionaries are few, fiercely independent, and willing to fight for change. 

Evolutionaries, on the other hand, are much more numerous and way more prudent. They too are aware of the need for change, but they will wait patiently for new ideas to prove themselves before welcoming them into the fold.

Marketers of all sorts can use this rule to their advantage. Ask yourself: Does my audience seek revolution or evolution? Can I get further by presenting my case as a chance to support radical change or would I be better served by wrapping my case in the soothing language of logical next steps? 

In my experience, evolution is a far more effective strategy for seeking support from pragmatically oriented healthcare executives.

I spent my formative years in advertising learning from giants in one of the world’s largest and most famous ad agencies. Developed to serve enormous manufacturing and distribution companies like Kraft, their globally renowned branding process included more than 20 steps. When I attempted to bring that same model to emerging businesses in Silicon Valley, I was laughed out of the room. 

Now I tell clients of all types that if they can’t make significant progress in a quarter, they will fail. Period.

One of the easiest ways to change how you think about marketing is to make the process more inclusive and open. Big companies like their hierarchies, but excessive structure can often feel like wasteful politics to innovators toiling away in the depths of an organization. 

Emerging companies don’t suffer the same disadvantage. They can quickly assemble the executive team for group meetings designed to work through opportunities. 

Big companies can follow suit. By encouraging senior executives to hash out opportunities in a series of short workshops, savvy marketing teams can quickly understand opportunities and map out the easiest paths to success—and avoid months of costly primary research and lengthy review cycles. 

Apparently, Steve Jobs used this Picasso quote when he introduced the iPhone. But the idea that borrowing ideas is inferior to outright theft has been with us for a long time. “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” wrote TS Eliot.

Back in 2000, the dot-com industry fell in love with the first-mover advantage granted to those brave enough to think and act differently. But 18 years later, success has become more transparent and open, and often goes to companies who are building on ideas pioneered by others. Google’s Android phone followed the iPhone; Warby Parker aped Amazon and Zappos to win in prescription spectacles. 

To use this third rule to win, healthcare marketers should look outside their immediate category for inspiration. For example, Vituity, formerly CEP America, spun what it learned on the battlefield into a billion-dollar operation focused on, among other things, optimizing emergency-room traffic.

Never before has innovation in adjacent categories been so easy to apply to new areas. The key here is to look for similar applications in different industries. Rapid iteration benefits from the diverse perspectives drawn from groups who have attempted to drive the same change in another industry. It turns out that stealing ideas that your executives can relate to is a very easy way to introduce new thinking into stodgy operations that are struggling to change.

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Imagine this: a world where crimes can be stopped before they occur, and where police officers can crack cases in record time. This may have been an unrealistic dream 20 years ago, but now, it is no longer a distant impossibility.

Across the world, the police are using artificial intelligence and data analytics to develop new tools and methods of working, so they can catch criminals more quickly and efficiently.

DXC Technology has identified three big trends for the future of public safety. Here are case studies from across Asia and the world of how public safety agencies are going through digital transformation; using artificial intelligence; and enabling cyber analytics.

1. Digital transformation

The Singapore Police Force (SPF) has set up a digital unit to research and develop tech-enabled tools that help officers work more efficiently. “It’s useful internally to have a part of the police force that sees themselves maybe first as a technological organisation, rather than a police organisation,” said Assistant Commissioner Alvin Moh, Director of Planning and Organisation Department of the Singapore Police Force, at the Innovation Labs World summit.

His agency is building a police smartphone with custom apps that will transmit real-time information on the ground 24/7 to officers. Police officers “will be able to make better and faster decisions, [and have] more effective response”, K. Shanmugam, Minister of Law and Home Affairs, announced at the SPF’s annual workplan seminar in May. From next March onwards, 8000 front-line police officers will be able to use their smartphones to respond to incidents.

According to Moh, it is essential for the police to reinvent their investigation methods to keep up with new modes of crime. “The old mode of working is, I seize the laptop, I want to get it analysed, I send it to my tech experts. Moving forward, that cannot be the case anymore, it’s too many devices,” Moh remarked. Police robots will soon patrol and engage with residents to complement the patrol work of real officers, he said.

These patrol robots are equipped with cameras that transmit a 360-degree view of their environments to their command posts in real-time. During its patrol, the cameras can detect and flag suspicious activities, so police officers can be swiftly deployed to the scene.

The Home Team Academy has begun using virtual and augmented reality to create more immersive and realistic training environments for its police officers. “We have started to embrace training simulators, augmented reality”, said Moh. These augmented environments train officers by simulating potential incidents like terror attacks, which officers can respond to.

Handheld scanners now allow officers to take real-time 3D scans of crime scenes. They take measurements of objects found at crime scenes without physically measuring the real object.

2. Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is now helping police officers to identify crime patterns and stop future crimes. “Based on accumulated experience or data, they can predict how much percent of this would be happening,” Noboru Nakatani, Executive Director of the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI) in Singapore told GovInsider.

The Netherlands is using AI algorithms to analyse huge amounts of investigation requests, so its police officials can sieve out important intelligence on potential threats. “Sometimes, very valuable information can end up in a file, in an office. But what if in this file is crucial information about a potential terrorist group?” said Anita Hazenberg, Innovation Director of the IGCI. AI allows police agencies to be “more efficient towards each other with law enforcement co-operation,” she added.

Meanwhile, police officers can now outsource tasks to AI and robotics, so they have more time to work on more complicated cases. “In a couple of years, some police functions will hardly exist. There will be robots,” Hazenberg predicted.

The Dubai Police has built smart police stations that are run entirely by AI-powered robots. “There are no human beings there,” she said. The smart police station, which operates 24/7, provides services like crime reporting, lost-and-found requests, and victim support, and receives labour complaints and home security requests.

3. Cyber analytics

As cyberspace becomes the new domain for warfare, cyber attacks are now the new norm. In June, the personal information of 1.5 million patients were stolen from Singapore’s SingHealth servers – the country’s largest cyber breach to date. Meanwhile, last year’s WannaCry ransomware attacks infected tens of thousands of computers across 74 countries, Wired reported.

Countries are fighting back against cyber threats with big data analytics. Australia, for one, is building a national network of cyber threat sharing centres to detect and protect its citizens from malicious cyber attacks.

In these sharing centres, cyber security experts from academia, businesses and government can pool sensitive data on cyber threats in an online sharing portal. They then use big data analytics to detect patterns of malicious cyber activity and implement adaptive, data-driven ways of responding to cyber threats. So far, the federal government has set up centres in four major cities – Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney – with plans to roll more out across Australia.

At the state level, the New South Wales (NSW) government has inked an AUD$11 million deal with Data61 – Australia’s largest data innovation group – to use data analytics to identify cyber threats in real-time. “Cyber security has emerged as one of the most high profile, borderless and rapidly evolving risks facing governments across the globe, so it is essential we are at the forefront of new ideas and thinking,” announced Victor Dominello, NSW’s Minister for Finance, Services and Property, in a press statement.

With tech-enabled tools for crime fighting, police officers are transforming the very face of law enforcement to keep their cities and communities safer.

Khai Hwa Toh is General Manager for Defence and Homeland Security at DXC Technology.

The AR/VR industry seems to have made its mind up on platforms, based on responses to Digi-Capital and AWE’s Global AR/VR Industry Survey (full details in Digi-Capital’s Augmented/Virtual Reality Report). While there are still opportunities for niche players and startups, clear standouts are now top of mind across the XR industry.

At the top level, mobile AR matters more to the industry than either smartglasses or VR today. And in mobile AR, we’re really talking Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore. For smartglasses, where most of the activity is enterprise-focused today, Microsoft HoloLens outweighs all others. For nascent consumer smartglasses, Magic Leap One is on top despite not being an actual consumer product yet (it’s primarily a developer product today). The least surprising result is Facebook and HTC platforms leading what VR companies cares about, and that’s before Oculus Quest launches next year.

All of this could change as new platforms launch, particularly if Apple enters the smartphone-tethered smartglasses market (which Digi-Capital has forecast for late 2020 for a while now).

At the top platform level, mobile AR matters to 76 percent of all respondents, with smartglasses (65 percent) similar to VR (62 percent). Mobile AR’s installed base of over 900 million by the end of 2018, growing to nearly three and a half billion by 2022, had a clear impact on the industry’s mental model despite its early stage. However, the overlap shows cross-platform approaches are prevalent for many companies. 17 percent are focused on other XR platforms, including Web XR, projection-based AR, screen based AR, heads up display, holograms and augmented audio.

Mobile AR companies are equally focused on ARKit (77 percent) and ARCore (73 percent), again showing the cross-platform nature of the market. Vuforia (39 percent) came in ahead of the mobile social AR platforms of Facebook Spark AR (26 percent) and Snap Lens Studio (17 percent), as well as Wikitude (21 percent). Of the 16 percent of other platforms (some of which provide specific point solutions), 6D.ai, 8th Wall, Unity and inhouse mobile AR platforms came in strongly. Such a strong showing by Apple and Google makes mobile AR appear to be dominated by those platforms, with clear points of differentiation needed for others to thrive.

Smartglasses have been largely enterprise focused to date, with 75 percent of companies saying that HoloLens matters to their smartglasses focused businesses. The Q3 2018 launch of Magic Leap One (57 percent) had a clear impact, even though it is not an end-user product yet. Google Glass for Enterprise (35 percent), Vuzix (33 percent), Meta (33 percent) and ODG (32 percent) are broadly similar in scale, followed by Daqri (26 percent), Epson (25 percent) and Kopin (14 percent). Other platforms mentioned include RealWear, Mira, Leap Motion North Star and the hoped for (but as yet unconfirmed) Apple smartglasses. It is going to be interesting to see how this distribution changes if and when Apple enters the market.

VR companies’ major priorities are HTC Vive/Focus/Pro (73 percent) and Oculus Rift (70 percent). These are followed by Oculus Go (57 percent), Microsoft Windows VR (53 percent), Samsung Gear VR (50 percent). Oculus Quest (formerly Oculus Project Santa Cruz) was not announced until after most survey responses were completed. Even with that limitation, 41 percent of respondents were already focused on the platform. Given industry response to its launch at Oculus Connect 5, it seems reasonable to assume that Oculus Quest could index significantly higher in subsequent surveys. Google Cardboard and the more advanced Google Daydream both came in at 39 percent.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the VR sector is Sony Playstation VR relatively low showing (29 percent), despite it being the high-end VR headset leader by sales. This result could be because survey participants are much broader than game developers only, and PSVR is a peripheral for the Sony Playstation 4 game console. Other VR platforms mentioned included Pico, Web VR, Lenovo Mirage and StarVR.

While the industry seems to have picked its winners (for now), consumers and enterprises aren’t as sure yet. Even with an installed base of 900 million ARKit and ARCore capable phones by the end of 2018, no AR/VR platform has truly scaled in terms of active users yet. And that matters far more than the industry’s mental model.

As in many consumer tech markets, whether Apple enters or not is critical. For the last few years, Digi-Capital has forecast Apple launching smartphone tethered smartglasses in late 2020. But as with all things Apple, the only folks who really know are Tim Cook and his inner circle. So don’t place your bets just yet.

SOURCE: https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/27/are-the-ar-vr-platform-wars-already-won/