Hanover saw, on July 2 and 3, LAAR’s probably final meeting with everyone. Almost a sad point. I didn’t realise starting this project that with a lot of learning and discovery would come a more social aspect: I really got to know these people over the last year on the project, and I’ll be sad to see them slip out of my life. Although, I am sure some of the connections made will be long-lasting (Killer robots Chris? Hint hint).
The meeting felt like a real success. We made progress very quickly compared to some of our other heated discussions which often tended to escalate into very lower level conversations about specifics like the definition of AR, why training a neural net is so labour intensive with the correct dataset or the definition of ‘competence’ and how to measure it. We finally got an agreement to put a pause on development and move on to analysis of our results, documenting and publicising.
After the success of our trials at ProLight and Sound, my colleagues shared some interesting findings and thoughts. Nothing official yet, but there was a suggestion that maybe women do far better with this kind of technology – a sound of relief to an industry dominated by ‘boring white males’ (of which I am one, so I think I’m allowed to say that?). Don’t quote me on this; wait for my colleagues to release the findings. A big thank you to our hosts VPLT, especially Tommy. Tommy is a beautiful and honest man. They facilitated the meeting, and it ran very smoothly.
As we go forward, there are a number of papers we are planning to publish. Currently, I am writing up a technical framework on combining xAPI with AR. Oliver (ITU) and Peter (iSmart) have a number of papers in the works and Chris is leading a project white paper we will be publishing with the breakdown of the entire project to aid industry and future developers.
— Josh Secretan