Wednesday 4 January 2017

How Virtual Reality Is Changing The World


Crouching low amid the sparse vegetation of the African bush, a trio of lion cubs lollop towards me. Our eyes meet. Branches crack. It’s hot, bright and as the evening sun beats down, I spin around to find myself completely alone. Bathed in a golden light, the cubs come within a few centimetres, their already-giant paws crunching through the long grass and off into the distance.
Seconds later, the C-shaped curve of Rio’s Copacabana reveals itself from a rooftop swimming pool 16 floors up. It’s a cloudless day, and Sugarloaf Mountain is visible at the mouth of Guanabara Bay far in the distance. Then I’m in the middle of a crowd of partygoers dancing the samba in a favela, drinks raised aloft, before riding a thermal, bird-like, high above Ipanema beach on a paraglider, able to gaze up, down and all around as seemingly miniature cars and office blocks the size of Lego bricks zip by hundreds of feet below. All I can hear is the whistle of the wind in my ears.
If all this sounds unrealistic, that’s because it is. Indeed, it’s rather a let-down to find myself still perched in 
my south London sitting room when I leave the virtual-reality (VR) world. In VR – the much-hyped, much-talked-about and certainly much-invested-in new storytelling format – the impossible is seemingly made possible.



Crouching low amid the sparse vegetation of the African bush, a trio of lion cubs lollop towards me. Our eyes meet. Branches crack. It’s hot, bright and as the evening sun beats down, I spin around to find myself completely alone. Bathed in a golden light, the cubs come within a few centimetres, their already-giant paws crunching through the long grass and off into the distance.
Seconds later, the C-shaped curve of Rio’s Copacabana reveals itself from a rooftop swimming pool 16 floors up. It’s a cloudless day, and Sugarloaf Mountain is visible at the mouth of Guanabara Bay far in the distance. Then I’m in the middle of a crowd of partygoers dancing the samba in a favela, drinks raised aloft, before riding a thermal, bird-like, high above Ipanema beach on a paraglider, able to gaze up, down and all around as seemingly miniature cars and office blocks the size of Lego bricks zip by hundreds of feet below. All I can hear is the whistle of the wind in my ears.
If all this sounds unrealistic, that’s because it is. Indeed, it’s rather a let-down to find myself still perched in 
my south London sitting room when I leave the virtual-reality (VR) world. In VR – the much-hyped, much-talked-about and certainly much-invested-in new storytelling format – the impossible is seemingly made possible.



Mind-blowing and incredibly lucrative (more on which later), if 2016 has had one big tech buzz-phrase, it’s VR. The promise is great: simply by strapping on a headset that looks not dissimilar to a pair of skiing goggles, viewers can be instantly transported to another place or time. Want to be on the front row at a fashion show? No problem. Balenciaga’s a/w ’16 show (the first masterminded by change-maker Demna Gvasalia) was broadcast in virtual reality, meaning anyone with a headset could take a seat. Meanwhile, both Raf Simons (in his final show for Dior) and Hussein Chalayan have released 360-degree videos of their shows – and Dior has launched its own VR headset, Dior Eyes. As Chalayan told Dazed magazine earlier this year.


Whether the medium will revolutionise the fashion industry in the same way that online retail has remained to be seen, but that’s certainly the aim. As well as making luxury more accessible than ever (how many people have the opportunity to sit front row at a Paris show without the aid of VR?), it has cost-cutting potential. Designers can use it to bring sketches to life, providing an immersive 360-degree look at pieces pre-production. Virtual-reality development company Trillenium is using the technology to create a “virtual shop” for its backer Asos, which will enable shoppers to wander “stores” in cyberspace. VR mirrors – long talked about – are coming to fruition, too
                                                      
                                  
It’s now seriously big business. Facebook bought premium VR headset manufacturer Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion and, according to the website TechCrunch, more than $1.2 billion was invested in VR technology in the first three months of 2016. Adweek quotes other research predicting that more than 52 million virtual-reality headsets will be sold in America by 2020, and global search queries on Google increased fourfold over the past year. Last November, The New York Times gave away one million of Google’s “Cardboard” viewing headsets to its subscribers, which could be used alongside a smartphone and the paper’s dedicated app to access exclusive VR stories. Similarly, the BBC screened the Rio Olympics earlier this year in VR.
If things continue on this trajectory, advocates claim immersive experiences will become the default way we consume everything from news to films. Acclaimed actor and director Jon Favreau has worked on VR projects with Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray and Christopher Walken. And Hollywood filmmaker Robert Stromberg, who has won Academy Awards for his work on Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, is also the co-founder of Los Angeles-based studio the Virtual Reality Company, which has Steven Spielberg as an adviser.
                                              
“VR is a whole new medium that has the potential to change the world,” says Stromberg. “As a viewer, you can create a narrative story and become either a part of that storyline or observe in a way that you’ve never been able to before… It’s like watching a play. The viewer has the option to choose where they want to look and what they want to see.”
It’s making waves in culture, too. The National Theatre has a virtual-reality studio, and last year the Barbican held a VR-based exhibition. But it’s Björk who is trailblazing the medium as an art form (her VR exhibition was at Somerset House in September). Long hailed as a pioneer in music videos, she last year released “Stonemilker”, a private performance of a track from her Vulnicura album. Shot on location on a remote, windswept Icelandic beach, the video is viewable in full 360-degree VR, providing a virtual one-to-one recital.
“One of the strengths of virtual reality is that it has a tremendous impact on the viewer,” says Farkas. “I don’t think anything can rival the intimacy and the closeness you feel to a story when 
you are viewing it in this way. The memories you form of being in virtual reality make a deeper, more permanent and more emotional impact than with other media.”

Alejandra Quesada, a producer at the Virtual Reality Company, believes VR connects with women more profoundly than with men. “VR seems to heighten women’s senses, their intuition,” she says. “Guys love VR, but there’s a certain sense of wonderment I’ve seen in every woman who’s experienced it.”
VR has revolutionised medicine, with surgeons using it to visualise operations – such as open-heart surgery – before a patient goes into the theatre. “Cedars-Sinai hospital here in Los Angeles is working a lot with VR, and many hospitals are integrating it,” 
says Quesada. “There’s research into stroke recovery using the headsets to aid physical therapy. It’s also been shown to help people with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, phobias and seasonal affective disorder.”
Robert Stromberg goes one step further. “This will be how we will socialise in the future,” he tells me 
from LA. “This phone call wouldn’t need to happen; we would both choose a place and time, put our headsets on and meet in a virtual space to talk.”
It’s the potential for education that Nate Mitchell, co-founder of Oculus, says he is most excited about. “Virtual field trips to museums are already possible, but it will soon be feasible for a class of kids to put on headsets and visit the moon or the Colosseum,” he says. “This is truly hands-on learning.”


Source- NOTEY.



Mozage V2.0 Picture Blog

Its me :P

The club and audience















You can find all the other Updates here at our facebook page Facebook

The contents of mozAge V2.0 were
Cybersecurity
WebCompat
MozVR and much more... find it on our facebook page above.





Friday 19 August 2016

How to land a job in virtual reality tech :)

Now’s the time to get in on the ground floor of this cutting-edge sector.

Some people believe virtual reality (VR) technology has the potential to change our lives even more than the smartphone has—and that technology is developing rapidly. Products like the Oculus Rift have the power to immerse users in seamless, real-seeming virtual environments, while Google's Cardboard platform can turn your smartphone into a VR machine with little more than a few folds of paper. Naturally, such advancements go hand in hand with a rising demand for workers, and now might just be the right time for interested job seekers to break in.
“The virtual reality space is taking off, and I believe the job opportunities are only going to grow in the next few years,” says Nate Beatty, co-founder of IrisVR in New York City.
If you’re looking to break into this emerging tech sector, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind as you launch your job search.
Develop needed skills
Demand for job candidates with VR knowledge is up 37% over last year, according to Road to VR, and because the technology is new, companies are having difficulty meeting that demand.
If you’re interested in the software side of the industry, you need experience designing and developing with 3D modeling software, programming experience with C/C++, game development or graphics programming, Beatty says. “Anyone who can pick up new tech easily, has some basic programming background, and is forward-thinking enough to see how VR would fit into the professional workflow would be a prime candidate for lots of awesome new B2B VR startups.”
Much of the VR hardware technology is based on PC and cell phone technologies, which are skills that can transfer, says Steve Santamaria, COO of Envelop VR in Seattle. “A newer skill set is optics, which are critical to great visualization. Hardware engineers that can help to continue to shrink the form factor, increase performance and optics fidelity, and improve battery and connectivity capability will be in high demand.”
Understand the market
Everyone knows the big players in the VR market—Oculus, Google and Samsung—but the majority of jobs are with smaller companies and startups.
“Given that Microsoft and Oculus/Facebook—the two largest employers—account for less than 2% of all VR gaming professionals, there’s much more opportunity in the long tail,” says Jeremy Schifeling, CEO of Break into Tech, in Silicon Valley.
Although gaming is giving VR its boost in the market, it is being explored for countless other applications, Beatty says. “Industries like architecture, engineering and construction will undoubtedly use VR for 3D design, while medical, military and education will certainly take advantage of the tech to do simulations, safety training or to enable people to experience and explore remote places or inhabitable environments.”
As the industry grows, companies will need more than just programmers and engineers—they will need visionary CEOs, product and project managers, support and business developers, Santamaria says. “But today, early on, pre-customers, it will be the technical people visioning and creating the VR products,” he says. “Later, after the industry is established you will see more of the mature industry jobs being listed.”
Make connections
As with any industry, networking can be crucial—perhaps even more so while VR technology is in its infancy—so reach out to some of the players and get your resume circulating.
Joining groups on professional social networks can also help, Schifeling says, as many VR professionals belong to and network within these groups. SVVR, or Silicon Valley Virtual Reality, organizes monthly meetups for developers and entrepreneurs, while the IEEE Virtual Reality conference, held annually, is in its 23rd year. Go to the conferences, meet the people in the field and get your name out there. With a little luck, you'll end up with a job that offers real opportunities and growth potential, even as you build worlds that exist only in a user's headset.

 

Sunday 24 July 2016

Study Jam v1.0

Study Jam

An new series of learning sessions held under the hood of Mozphoenix Community-NIIT University

The session was focused on

JavaScript

Python
and
Mozilla Projects

These sessions , course structure,plan is  designed and developed by Shivang Shekhar (Founder and Club Lead -Mozphoenix Community)

The sessions are highly interesting and fun to be in ad people from diffrent communities like Microsoft Learning Center take active part in these sessions.


These sessions have been a great success of the community.


Glimpse 












IN HOUSE JavaScript SESSION

Tuesday 5 April 2016

IoT event @ NIIT Neemrana

Here are the pictures of IoT Event organized at NIIT university Neemrana by the Firefox Community headed by me-

 Professor Navin Kapoor (IIT Delhi) gave an inaugural speech and the use of IoT in future
 Raspberry Pi was covered in the workshop
  A footfall of 100+ was observed in the workshop and was a grand success.


After the workshop











Social Media links-Find more about the workshop here
https://www.facebook.com/NIITUniv  (university page)

https://www.facebook.com/mozphoenixnu  (Firefox community page)


Workshop Designed developed by- Shivang Shekhar

Monday 14 March 2016

VR the future of Education


 oculus-rift-htc-vive-playstation-vr

The race to explore the wide open frontier of virtual reality attracts all types. Game designers, filmmakers, and theatre artists are all trying their hands at crafting entertainment of all sorts. We’ve also seen journalists develop new ways of immersing audiences in true-life tales, and UX designers start to solve the puzzles of computing in VR. What I want to talk to you about today, however, is a part of the tech sector that isn’t as ‘sexy’ as those, but in the long run it can prove to be as important, if not more so. The subject at hand: educational technology.

EduTech, as it’s known to insiders, is one of those corners of the tech industry that doesn’t get rockstar level attention.
When you think about tech for students you might find yourself envisioning lowest common denominator desktop computers, or, at best, tablets with big rubber bumpers; the kind of thing with less computing power than this year’s Pebble smartwatch. Not that this imagery is accurate, but EduTech isn’t something the mainstream tech press spends a lot of time thinking about.


google expeditions virtual reality field trip 
Which is why it is interesting to see some design houses and even big players being to embrace the educational technology market for VR. The platforms haven’t even remotely begun to standardize, and yet there are both independent developers and big companies like Google that have started to wrestle with what will be the big challenges for VR in the classroom.
One such project is IndyLab VR. Last year I had a long conversation with Viktor Benson, one of the creators behind IndyLab. He’s been working on a science lesson that uses the Samsung Gear VR as a delivery platform and the engineering of race cars to demonstrate physics principles. The mock up I got to see wasn’t all that interactive but, like with a lot of VR, what’s interesting isn’t the product that is currently demonstrable, but the vision of where the it could go and what it could mean.
IndyLab aims to start tackling the design challenges around how a teacher will interact with a VR enabled classroom. This is something that we don’t tend to think about when talking about consumer VR. I suppose if you’ve thought about how a dungeon master would run a virtual D&D session over a series of Oculus Rift headsets, you might have daydreamed an analogous problem. IndyLab isn’t alone in exploring how people will interact inside VR together, with companies like Two Bit Circus already syncing users in VR.
The technical problems around sync and UI are one thing, but the broader issue of access is an even higher stakes game.

 This is where things like the recent kerfuffle over the $600 price of the Oculus Rift get interesting. I know there’s been a lot of hair being pulled out—particularly by folks who derive their income from marketing agencies—about the price of the Rift. So long as the high end of VR is still prohibitively expensive for the average consumer, the thinking goes, the big ad marketing agencies will sink large dollar amounts into budgets for nifty experimental content.

Gamers don’t tend to care about such things. In fact, when I put my gamer hat on, it is somewhat of a relief to think that the bleeding edge of VR isn’t going to be defined by the people responsible for selling us Stella Artois and Ford Focuses. What money the agencies will spend on VR in the coming year will likely be for more wide reaching Cardboard-focused projects.
Yet the wide adoption of VR and the definition of the baseline platform should be of concern for enthusiasts when it comes to the broader issue of the democratization of technology. Especially technology in the classroom.

 virtual_realita_14_of_34
If the baseline platform for a quality educational VR experience is pegged to the high end of the market, that creates a distinct advantage for well-funded schools, exactly the opposite of the vision of VR bringing previously unaffordable educational experiences to all. Access to computing technology for low-income schools has been one of the major battles in the past few decades of education. To see the snooze button get punched on that fight would be incredibly frustrating.
This could, however, be an opportunity for headset makers and other platform holders. Even if educational VR does end up on the high end of the market initially, it would be wise for the makers of the hardware to consider taking losses in order to distribute gear into the schools and classrooms where it can make the most impact.
This sort of brand strategizing is one of the things that kept Apple alive through the 80’s and 90’s. In that era discounts on Apple products and Apple’s domination of the desktop publishing business created a host of positive associations in the minds of the generation that would come into their full buying power at the dawn of the iPhone age.
That’s a bit of the 90s history I’m sure the VR hardware makers would actually love to repeat.




Tuesday 5 January 2016

FREE the BASICS





                                                        FREE The BASICS


        
A new year has begin with the hope to enlighten our life and world. Last year 2k15 was a year of digital revolution as we all noticed the ‘digital india’ movement and net neutrality.Towards the end of 2k15 mark zuckerberg CEO of Facebook bombarded us with his new model popularily known as “free basic” .

So what is free basics and what is so free about it?

So let me tell you there is nothing free in this world, as this world is based on policy of ‘survival of the fittest’.

Free basics is just the substitute of internet.org , its game to control or gain monopoly of most powerful weapon of this generation called internet.

Why suddenly mark zuckerberg started his campaigns and movement in India? Because India is the country with second largest population and big market for giant like Facebook.

Free basics is platform offered by Facebook gives free access to few sites in order to promote net neutrality and access to basic internet facilities but why? Why Facebook is giving free access to some sites only and if giving then to how equality and neutrality will be achieved?
Whoever controls the data ocean control global economy as clear as crystal.

Silicon valley data grab is the new form of COLONIALISM

http://www.siliconbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Internet.org_.jpg
Zero rating tariff model –
A practice wherein service provider offer free data to user for select application And website and paper has become key to the debate on net neutrality.
It also violates the principle of TRAI . Tariff should not be based on policy of discrimination or misleading malpractice.
It’s very important for government of India to promote the concept of “open web”. And internationally also openness should be maintained on web. Power to write , share media on Internet shouldn’t be taken from individuals.

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/themes/OneMozilla/img/mozilla-wordmark.png

There are various Internet responsible organizations fighting for this cause and one of them is Mozilla.
Mozilla promotes web literacy and open web. But what is web literacy?
Mozilla understand web literacy to the skills and competencies required to read and write and participate effectively on web.
Mozilla is active in fighting for online privacy hence being awarded the most trusted internet company for privacy in 2012.
Mozilla works on both the concepts of web literacy as well as web openness and helps us to see the web in a natural way.
Mozilla has worked on various projects to secure the open web concept.
All the mozilla products are open for use and  are free of cost as well as are open source, the fact of openness is the innate part of mozilla organisation.

Mozilla is also running various programes to promote web openness and including people from different regions of the world to work for the open web .

Altogether in present scenario Mozilla is giving the best example of what the web should look like and whats future of the web

Recently mark zuckerberg came to India and visit Delhi university and discussed about free basics . But the issue is free basics or mark is doing nothing to promote web literacy in rural areas of India . In India people have mobile connections but are unable to afford 2g or 3g plans. There is urgency of establishing clears regulation and set principles for cyber law as cyber crime is at its alarming rate.
With the country who is still not considered to be developed one , needs to be aware and well versed with use of technology rather giving free access which might lead to more crimes . And free basics is giving free access to some useless sites and the question is what are the rules standards on which it will be decided by CEO of Facebook to give free access to the sites as one discretion is different from the other , for some wikipedia might be a useful site and not for some.
Free basics is also going to affect Indian startups as owner of paytm , zomato GoQii wrote to TRAI chairman R.s sharma pitching for open internet while seeking clear regulations on the issue of differential pricing for data services.
Indian partner of Facebook reliance has collaborate with social media giant in order to provide services in our country but these services are put on hold by TRAI.

The basis of technology is to grow and let grow but policies and offers like free basics foil this notion.

Too much technology all around
Pen n pencil goes underground

Once studied in lite
Now am busy on sites

Once carrying the math book
Now it changed to Mac book

Too much technology all around
Pen n pencil goes underground

Texting on highway
Will lead u to skyway
My face rested on my book
All I do is Facebook

Ain't free ain't basic
Remind me of qbasic
All I think is on which basis

Its game behind the name
With rise of price in disguise
Will nation be misguide.

All about the power
To conquer d highest tower
Its shame being lame

Too much technology all around
Pen n pencil goes underground.


Special Thanks to 
rohitbloggeroid


Always fighting for open web.

Shivang Shekhar
Mozillan_by_heart