Tag Archives: collaboration

Ray-Ban Stories

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The social network Facebook showed smart glasses. They are released together with the Ray-Ban brand and cost $ 299.

Facebook Luncurkan Kacamata Pintar Ray-Ban Stories, Bisa Memotret hingga  Dengar Podcast

The device looks like ordinary glasses, but is equipped with several interesting functions at once. Firstly, the device can take photos and videos using two built-in 5-megapixel cameras. The duration of the video is no more than 30 seconds, and in total about 30 short videos or 500 photos will fit on the built-in memory of the glasses. A special feature is that one camera writes square videos, and the second takes photos. For this reason, the picture is slightly shifted to the side. This can be a problem when shooting in the first person. And the image quality is an order of magnitude worse than that of smartphones five years ago.

The glasses allow you to play music from your smartphone through the speakers built into the shackles, receive phone calls and interact with the Facebook View app. The View application is extremely simple, in it you can see everything taken with glasses, synchronization occurs instantly and without your participation. The application has a small and simple editor, you can edit your pictures or videos, create collages. The device connects to smartphones on the iOS or Android operating system using Bluetooth.

However, the battery of the glasses is not happy with its autonomy yet – they work for about 6 hours and on average discharge by 20% in just an hour of use. It takes only one hour to fully charge the gadget. The kit includes a USB Type C cable.

Glasses can be used by people with both good and poor eyesight – in the latter case, you need to consult an ophthalmologist to know which lenses to choose when ordering. Depending on the type of lenses, the price also varies: from $ 299 to $ 379.

The idea to make Ray Ban Stories came about thanks to one email in 2019. In it, the head of the Luxottica Group company offered to make such glasses. The addressee was Mark Zuckerberg, who supported the development.

Facebook does not expect that these simple cameras will replace people’s smartphones. “Our mission is to help create tools that will help people feel connected anytime, anywhere. We want to create a sense of social presence, a feeling that you are next to another person living in the same space, regardless of physical distance,” they say on Facebook. The cooperation between the two companies looks interesting, as they combine their strengths — Ray-Ban models are popular and well-known in the market. The global meaning of launching glasses is that Meta wants to accustom the audience to hand-free devices in this way. This will make it easier for people to get used to full-fledged glasses and VR and AR helmets. Ray Ban Stories in this case serves as a transitional gadget.

The concept of Facebook and Ray-Ban collaboration strongly resembles Snapchat — Spectacles glasses released in 2016. Snapchat released the third generation of its glasses, but they failed to attract the attention of the target market. In 2017, the company wrote off the value of unsold inventory by $40 million.

Do you know what they were able to do in Ray Ban and what is really cool? These glasses look like glasses, and it’s hard to recognize a gadget in them. Symmetrical cameras on the frame look like a design element, and that’s all. The LED warning that you are shooting something is not very bright, and you do not pay attention to it. ”Almost no one pays attention that you are recording or filming something. People are not used to the fact that ordinary glasses can have cameras (the same Google Glass looked different, and many have heard about them). The main thing is to learn how to hold your head properly, otherwise you get a picture that dances after your gaze,” – says one of the users of this device.

Would you try such glasses for $299?

Resources:

https://vr-store.com.ua/ray-ban-stories-detail https://www.ray-ban.com/usa/ray-ban-stories https://www.androidpolice.com/ray-ban-stories-review/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2022/04/28/ray-ban-stories-review-comfortable-but-limited/?sh=46abc07364ca

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A single artwork created by 6 million artists!

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The internet allowed us to cooperate in many various tasks – from writing documents and coding to… creating masterpieces! Recently, on April Fools’ day, Reddit opened the so-called “r/place” which simply was a huge empty white canvas of size 2000 x 2000 pixels that could be edited by every user. For four days, every Redditor could change the color (32 colors were available) of a single-pixel every 5 minutes – this rule forced people to collaborate to have an impact on the canvas.

During the first two days, around 72 million pixels were placed by more than 6 million users! On average, 2.5 million pixels were changed every hour! Just have a look at this video showing the progress in creating the r/place canvas of 2022:

Since a single pixel meant nothing, just after the event started, large communities of people started working together on planning their contribution to the canvas. Many Redditors connected via other subreddits to coordinate in creating pixel arts. However, other platforms like Discord and Twitch played significant roles – streamers had specifically big impact since their communities are usually active while watching streams. Some of these collaborations resulted in really outstanding pixel arts — check out these examples (there are so many of them that I couldn’t choose which ones are my fav):

A social experiment

It is important to mention, that this was the second edition of r/place after the first one in 2017. Reddit is one of the biggest information exchange platforms with 174 million registered users (2020). Events like “r/place” are social experiments that show us how people can collaborate in creating something creative. This one proved again how online communities of people who usually don’t know each other can collaborate even without talking to each other. It also reveals that handling such an experiment can be difficult from the technical standpoint — Reddit needed to take care of many issues including frontend, backend, handling millions of requests every hour, bots, and many more. After the event finished, the data of every single pixel were shared by Reddit and now, everyone can dig through the history o every piece of the artwork!

Do you think that this kind of experiments are useful in exploring the nature of online communities? May collaboration in creating pixel arts translate into the real world problems?

Sources:

https://www.reddit.com/r/place/?cx=1280&cy=1795&px=204&ts=1649112460185

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_(Reddit)

https://www.redditinc.com/blog/how-we-built-rplace/

https://hyperallergic.com/371903/more-than-a-million-strangers-collaborate-pixel-by-pixel-on-a-digital-canvas/

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Collaborative community joins the race for the best AI

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Chatbots, online translators, text generators, and grammar checkers – these are a few of many modern applications of artificial intelligence language models. The most popular and advanced models like GPT-3 or BERT are claimed to “understand” human language. Unfortunately, these solutions are not open to the public. Why? Because mainly big corporations like Google, Microsoft or Huawei can afford to access enormous computing resources and have researchers to develop them.

?According to the official paper of GPT-3, it would take 355 years to train this AI model on a computer equipped with one of the most advanced graphics cards.

Open-source solution

To tackle the problem of the centralization of hyper-advanced AI models, hundreds of researchers from all around the world have gathered to bring an open-source solution to the public. Independent research and industrial volunteers formed a collaborative project called BigScience and created an enormous language AI which will complete its training in 4 months – anyone can track the progress in model training here: click!. The model is predicted to be excellent in performing various language-related tasks in 46 languages ?.

Implications of open-source

Currently, most advanced AI owned by hi-tech companies can be accessed by individuals, but one who wants to use them either needs to match specific conditions or pay for the access. One of the reasons is that the organizations that own AI solutions like GPT-3 still don’t know all of the potential misuses that could harm people and thus, want to control the purposes their solutions are used for. However, the new AI model created by BigScience collaborative community is most probably going to be open to anyone. It means that its use-cases will not be controlled.

Governments should join the collaboration

Hyper-advanced AI models can solve many problems and bring enormous value to society. In my opinion, collaborative projects like BigScience show that sooner or later, hyper-advanced AI solutions will be available to anyone. That’s the reason why I believe that governments should look into the problem of harmful applications of AI and establish a law to prevent such cases. Hopefully, that would encourage at least some hi-tech corporations to share their resources to help in democratizing advanced AI safely!

Sources:

https://huggingface.co/bigscience/tr11-176B-ml-logs

https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/

https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/building-a-tb-scale-multilingual-dataset-for-language-modeling

https://ied.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/sharing-economy.png

https://www.reddit.com/r/GPT3/comments/p1xf10/how_many_days_did_it_take_to_train_gpt3_is/

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Collaborative consumption

Reading Time: 2 minutessharing-new-shopping

With the rise of social media, many predicted it to be the end of real life interaction; that everyone is doomed to a life of isolation and loneliness. But we as social beings, as our primitive instincts dictate, came up with this brilliant-brilliant idea of sharing resources as always. Just like we share our thoughts, ideas, pictures, personal information online, people resorted to share things they own but don’t use 24/7. A famous collaborative consumption example is the power drill. You don’t need a power drill 24/7/365, you just need the hole, wouldn’t it be nice to share it or rent it while it’s not in use!

Most of us would have used at least one or two sharing economy websites. Very popular examples are Airbnb, Couchsurfing and Uber.

So, the textbook definition of sharing economy or collaborative consumption is, it is an economic model based on sharing, swapping, trading, or renting products and services, enabling access over ownership. It is reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume.

Here is a video of Rachel Botsman, an expert in collaborative consumption explaining how it kicks bottom. In this talk, she mainly explains what is collaborative consumption and the types of collaborative consumption – redistribution markets, collaborative lifesyles, product service systems. She further discusses how collaborative consumption goes deeper than consumption itself, it reshapes the current model of consumption, reinforces the positive values of our society such as trust, individual identity and community bonding and makes way for sustainable living.

This helps us save money, socialize and be a good citizen. Now, if you want to join the sharing economy, here is the link to an article which lists out different areas of your life : books and media, transportation, travel, fashion, farming, living space, office space, parking lots and social lending and the websites under each category that facilitates the collaboration

http://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/strategy/disruptive-business-models-based-on-collaborative-consumption/

Top 15+ disruptive business models based on collaborative consumption

 

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