VR was once a thing then died off over the last few years, I was a huge fan and had a huge collections of headsets from all brands and still today have some here which have not been really used that much in fairness, I remember when VR was a thing and we covered lots of news and headsets then I just seemed to fade away. Here is the thing though it has been still growing in the background for different applications with some companies but as for the consumer end a different story, I have from time to time took a headset out and this one was in a different league a the time which was for education and was really cool from Veative VR and I was lucky to test this here in Ireland and the only one to do so.
Sony has a new VR headset coming out next year which I can’t wait for and it is welcome in my book and hopefully add to the revival of VR AR and of course we await something from Apple pretty soon to which some will say it will kickstart the industry just like their 5G phones didn’t and we all know how 5G is at the moment, depending where you reside of course but as for Ireland it has not been a hit and will not be for some time yet and event though 5G phones at the start where expensive and far and few between that has changed but the uptake in 5G has not and I wonder if the same thing will apply here for Augmented and Virtual reality.. Point being sony made it a bit more affordable for those to access a great VR experience but has so much wires and set-up a pain but was a step up from what Samsung offered and Sony already had hardwear out there for millions to access and cheaper than the other high end offering s back then like HTC VIVE for example.
I still have my note 4 and the Samsung Gear VR headset today, Samsung did it really well with not having to have an expensive system to drive it (if you had a compatible phone that is) and was affordable which is akin to this headset which just requires a Facebook account to login which some sniff at but ask the same some do they use social media at all which is hypocritical all the same but having said that I get it when it comes to data but as it always has been and will be for the foreseeable future YOU are the product like it or not and of course if you choose to use such hardware and we all know how Facebook do things.
So for me I have two Facebook accounts and chose my websites one to use the device and login etc I did have an Oculus account before obviously with Samsung VR and did not care, today though a different matter. Data is a big thing but you are the product and that is a fact end of story..
Anyway moving on this headset I have a while and have been to busy with work the site and personal matter to actually test this out so I had some time to have a quick look and test it out recently and I like what I see apart from paying for lots of content, it has took me back to the Samsung VR times and would rate this headset slightly better considering you do not need any additional expensive hardwear just to run it, will the novelty wear off? Give me a few weeks and let me see and if it is worth the near 500 euro price tag to buy and ask any questions you might have over on the YouTube channel where we give you a hands on approach and not the lazy stock image one with no context as there is many today who still have not even tried the VR experience and even now I have showed some friends and they have been impressed but some felt dizzy.
There is no shortage of scams out there today and each day we see several hit the news, however one I got today was something new to me and very clever almost fell for it until i noticed some things happening in the thread then I rang the person in question and played the scammer along for the ride and things quickly slowed down. Yes I went further than I should have but my Instagram has 2FA but they still tried their hand however Instagram got in there before them which was a good move and good to see.
By the message thread you can see this person thought he had me roped in and was getting inpatient, Instagram has no service allowing your friend to help you out but these clowns thought they did, this was news though earlier this year stating they are testing such a feature buy way of letting you select two friends seen below is a sample of what we are talking about here.
Leaning on your friend’s help to access your account
To help people who have lost access to their accounts, we’re testing a way for people to ask their friends to confirm their identity and regain access to their account. We will have more to share about this feature soon. THIS IS NOT YET A FEATURE>> BE VERY AWARE..
Below is the messages I had got from Facebook Instagram and the conversation I had after I thought something was not quite right here and made that phone call and the user was not aware either until the phone call then their phone started hopping messages.. They begin with stating they have a new phone, click on images to enlarge and have a read.
In turn what will happen here is you will get a message with a link and then you copy and past it back to the person on the Instagram account in their private message and here is where they will try login to your account, but after stringing this lad along today I began to throw up some logic by stating you do not live In Nigeria You do not have network issues and then when asked where do you live is where it all fell apart.
In short this could easily catch people out and perhaps not a good move for Instagram going forward just now anyway but it has been touted as a feature which has not been rolled out to users and a good attempt to try take over your account and you know what comes after that. If you ever receive such a message, it would be better to run the details on a people finder free lookup site to verify the identity of the person before replying anything.
Developing the next generation of advanced AI will require powerful new computers capable of quintillions of operations per second. Today, Meta is announcing that they designed and built the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) — which they believe is among the fastest AI supercomputers running today and will be the fastest AI supercomputer in the world when it’s fully built out in mid-2022. Their researchers have already started using RSC to train large models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision for research, with the aim of one day training models with trillions of parameters.
RSC will help Meta’s AI researchers build new and better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples; work across hundreds of different languages; seamlessly analyze text, images, and video together; develop new augmented reality tools; and much more. Our researchers will be able to train the largest models needed to develop advanced AI for computer vision, NLP, speech recognition, and more. We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together. Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform — the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role.
Why do we need an AI supercomputer at this scale?
Meta has been committed to long-term investment in AI since 2013, when we created the Facebook AI Research lab. In recent years, we’ve made significant strides in AI thanks to our leadership in a number of areas, including self-supervised learning, where algorithms can learn from vast numbers of unlabeled examples, and transformers, which allow AI models to reason more effectively by focusing on certain areas of their input.
To fully realize the benefits of self-supervised learning and transformer-based models, various domains, whether vision, speech, language, or for critical use cases like identifying harmful content, will require training increasingly large, complex, and adaptable models. Computer vision, for example, needs to process larger, longer videos with higher data sampling rates. Speech recognition needs to work well even in challenging scenarios with lots of background noise, such as parties or concerts. NLP needs to understand more languages, dialects, and accents. And advances in other areas, including robotics, embodied AI, and multimodal AI, will help people accomplish useful tasks in the real world.
High-performance computing infrastructure is a critical component in training such large models, and Meta’s AI research team has been building these high-powered systems for many years. The first generation of this infrastructure, designed in 2017, has 22,000 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs in a single cluster that performs 35,000 training jobs a day. Up until now, this infrastructure has set the bar for Meta’s researchers in terms of its performance, reliability, and productivity.
In early 2020, we decided the best way to accelerate progress was to design a new computing infrastructure from a clean slate to take advantage of new GPU and network fabric technology. We wanted this infrastructure to be able to train models with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte — which, to provide a sense of scale, is the equivalent of 36,000 years of high-quality video.
While the high-performance computing community has been tackling scale for decades, we also had to make sure we have all the needed security and privacy controls in place to protect any training data we use. Unlike with our previous AI research infrastructure, which leveraged only open source and other publicly available data sets, RSC also helps us ensure that our research translates effectively into practice by allowing us to include real-world examples from Meta’s production systems in model training. By doing this, we can help advance research to perform downstream tasks such as identifying harmful content on our platforms as well as research into embodied AI and multimodal AI to help improve user experiences on our family of apps. We believe this is the first time performance, reliability, security, and privacy have been tackled at such a scale. supercomputers are built by combining multiple GPUs into compute nodes, which are then connected by a high-performance network fabric to allow fast communication between those GPUs. RSC today comprises a total of 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems as its compute nodes, for a total of 6,080 GPUs — with each A100 GPU being more powerful than the V100 used in our previous system. The GPUs communicate via an NVIDIA Quantum 200 Gb/s InfiniBand two-level Clos fabric that has no oversubscription. RSC’s storage tier has 175 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashArray, 46 petabytes of cache storage in Penguin Computing Altus systems, and 10 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashBlade.
Early benchmarks on RSC, compared with Meta’s legacy production and research infrastructure, have shown that it runs computer vision workflows up to 20 times faster, runs the NVIDIA Collective Communication Library (NCCL) more than nine times faster, and trains large scale NLP models three times faster. That means a model with tens of billions of parameters can finish training in three weeks, compared with nine weeks before.
Designing and building something like RSC isn’t a matter of performance alone but performance at the largest scale possible, with the most advanced technology available today. When RSC is complete, the InfiniBand network fabric will connect 16,000 GPUs as endpoints, making it one of the largest such networks deployed to date. Additionally, we designed a caching and storage system that can serve 16 TB/s of training data, and we plan to scale it up to 1 exabyte.
All this infrastructure must be extremely reliable, as we estimate some experiments could run for weeks and require thousands of GPUs. Lastly, the entire experience of using RSC has to be researcher-friendly so our teams can easily explore a wide range of AI models.
A big part of achieving this was in working with a number of long-time partners, all of whom also helped design the first generation of our AI infrastructure in 2017. Penguin Computing, our architecture and managed services partner, worked with our operations team on hardware integration to deploy the cluster and helped set up major parts of the control plane. Pure Storage provided us with a robust and scalable storage solution. And NVIDIA provided us with its AI computing technologies featuring cutting-edge systems, GPUs, and InfiniBand fabric, and software stack components like NCCL for the cluster. …and doing it remotely, during a pandemic
But there were other unexpected challenges that arose in RSC’s development — namely the coronavirus pandemic. RSC began as a completely remote project that the team took from a simple shared document to a functioning cluster in about a year and a half. COVID-19 and industry-wide wafer supply constraints also brought supply chain issues that made it difficult to get everything from chips to components like optics and GPUs, and even construction materials — all of which had to be transported in accordance with new safety protocols. To build this cluster efficiently, we had to design it from scratch, creating many entirely new Meta-specific conventions and rethinking previous ones along the way. We had to write new rules around our data center designs — including their cooling, power, rack layout, cabling, and networking (including a completely new control plane), among other important considerations. We had to ensure that all the teams, from construction to hardware to software and AI, were working in lockstep and in coordination with our partners.
Beyond the core system itself, there was also a need for a powerful storage solution, one that can serve terabytes of bandwidth from an exabyte-scale storage system. To serve AI training’s growing bandwidth and capacity needs, we developed a storage service, AI Research Store (AIRStore), from the ground up. To optimize for AI models, AIRStore utilizes a new data preparation phase that preprocesses the data set to be used for training. Once the preparation is performed one time, the prepared data set can be used for multiple training runs until it expires. AIRStore also optimizes data transfers so that cross-region traffic on Meta’s inter datacenter backbone is minimized.
How we safeguard data in RSC
To build new AI models that benefit the people using our services — whether that’s detecting harmful content or creating new AR experiences — we need to teach models using real-world data from our production systems. RSC has been designed from the ground up with privacy and security in mind, so that Meta’s researchers can safely train models using encrypted user generated data that is not decrypted until right before training. For example, RSC is isolated from the larger internet, with no direct inbound or outbound connections, and traffic can flow only from Meta’s production data centers.
To meet our privacy and security requirements, the entire data path from our storage systems to the GPUs is end-to-end encrypted and has the necessary tools and processes to verify that
these requirements are met at all times. Before data is imported to RSC, it must go through a privacy review process to confirm it has been correctly anonymized. The data is then encrypted before it can be used to train AI models and decryption keys are deleted regularly to ensure older data is not still accessible. And since the data is only decrypted at one endpoint, in memory, it is safeguarded even in the unlikely event of a physical breach of the facility.
Phase two and beyond
RSC is up and running today, but its development is ongoing. Once we complete phase two of building out RSC, we believe it will be the fastest AI supercomputer in the world, performing at nearly 5 exaflops of mixed precision compute. Through 2022, we’ll work to increase the number of GPUs from 6,080 to 16,000, which will increase AI training performance by more than 2.5x. The InfiniBand fabric will expand to support 16,000 ports in a two-layer topology with no oversubscription. The storage system will have a target delivery bandwidth of 16 TB/s and exabyte-scale capacity to meet increased demand.
We expect such a step function change in compute capability to enable us not only to create more accurate AI models for our existing services, but also to enable completely new user experiences, especially in the metaverse. Our long-term investments in self-supervised learning and in building next-generation AI infrastructure with RSC are helping us create the foundational technologies that will power the metaverse and advance the broader AI community as well.
Snapchat has become uber popular with people to chat off late and has become the talk of the town giving tough time to competitors. Recently Snapchat acquired an app that is specialized in selfie animations called Looksery. Now, Facebook has taken up the challenge dominated by Snapchat by acquiring a similar app that goes by the name of MSQRD to bring similar features to its messaging service as well.
When Snapchat acquired Looksery, the app disappeared from app stores and instead showed up within the Snapchat app as a feature called Lenses. Now, Facebook has apparently acquired Masquerade which is often stylized as MSQRD. The startup also specialized in filters and lenses of sorts for selfies but instead focuses more on video rather than still images.
After the takeover, the key members of the startup which was originally based in Belarus will start working out of Facebook’s London office.
In the past, Facebook had tried to acquire Snapchat for a sum of US$ 3 Billion and when that deal fell through, they brought out similar features on their messaging platform. So this acquisition too should be a move to bring their messaging service to the same level or take it one step higher. Not sure just how and when Facebook is planning to implement this into their own products but, this giant is on the quest of getting everything under one umbrella.
Facebook is working hard on making us use their services, and now the have add a new app to fight with Vine, let’s take a look at Riff.
Riff is the new Video app from the big blue, and it present and interesting way of share stories.
Once you have the app, you log in with your FB ID and immediately can start using the service, you can watch some of the videos already done by the developers or some global videos made from other users.
What’s the story with the app?
Well, you just need an idea, make a short video (20sec limit unlike Vine) explaining your idea, and then any FB friend you have can add another video to the same story.
Once they have done that, they friends can do the same, so your initial story now have hundreds of sequels.
The story can remain as Riff exclusive or you can share them on the social networks you have.
The app is on IOS and Android, with no words on WP
Pics art has been around a while now and i have used it many a time and now its on the 1520,1020 WP8 its a great app to use and get creative.
The app gives you access to a powerful set of features, clip art and other built-in tools. You can apply hundreds of different effects to your photos, giving you the ability to change your pictures in ways you might not have thought possible before.
And photo editing is just the beginning.
Try your hand at drawing, too
While you can use the full suite of drawing tools in PicsArt to add flourishes to pictures that are in your photo gallery, you can also create your own images from scratch with those tools.
You will also find a cool collage option so you can combine your photos in different ways to create new ways to see your images.
And, PicsArt easily integrates with other online services like Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and others, so you have access to all of your photos right on your phone.
Share your masterpiece with the world
When you are satisfied with how your image looks, you can share your digital masterpiece with other PicsArt users. You can also choose to follow your favorite artists that are on PicsArt.
And don’t forget to submit your best work to one of the many PicsArt photo competitions – they add new contests all the time.
Using in-app purchasing, you can buy additional effects, clip art, and features to increase your editing options. More features are being added to the app on a regular basis.
For your convenience, the app is localized in 15 different languages and you can get more information about the app from the PicsArt website.
You can download PicsArt for free here. At this time, it is available for both the Lumia 1020 and Lumia 1520. Other devices will be added soon – we will update once we have more details.
Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful,
looping videos for your friends and family to see.
• Free, unlimited uploads
• Instantly post videos on Vine, then share to Twitter and Facebook!
• Find, follow, and interact with people close to you
• Explore trending posts, featured hashtags and editor's picks
• Pin favorite Vine accounts and channels to your home screen
• Connect to Vine from within camera mode
• Pin the Vine camera to your home screen and launch with
one tap.
