Spine Bending Work | State of Matterless #21
Howdy! If you’re wondering about how things are in the Matterless realm, look no further.
Spine Bending Work
In last week’s update, we shared the progress we made with gaze detection, a development spearheaded by Robin. Gaze detection allows your matterless pet to turn his head to look at you as you approach. The next step is to have your pet look at you while it’s moving!
Check out the video above (keep in mind that it’s a work in progress), and notice that in addition to the Shiba maintaining its gaze at a specific point, its body bends as it moves in a circle (spine bending). Compared to earlier builds in which the Shiba could only walk in straight lines and snap to change directions, this development towards giving you a believable and reactive pet is in line with our main design principle: intersubjectivity.
Upgrade Complete: Hand Recognition
Auki Labs is behind the critical technologies driving the Matterless vision and has been hard at work improving the experimental monocular hand reconstruction technology that will let you reach out and touch your pet. You can see two of these improvements in the video above; first, the system can now differentiate between your left and right hands. Second, it can track more than one hand at a time.
Notice how much faster it tracks hand movements! The importance of hand reconstruction to Matterless isn’t just about interacting with your pet but seeing others do so as well.
Even More Matterless Things!
Although we’re spending the bulk of our efforts on the pets app, the ultimate realization of the Matterless vision is a whole ecosystem of augmented reality toys for you to play with. We’ve been quietly working on Matterless hovercars to explore a different side of AR, specifically a control scheme revolving around simply looking around with your device instead of a conventional on-screen joystick. We find that this type of control is more intuitive and that virtually anyone who picks it up will instantly “get it”.
Because of the precision and speed, we envision our AR hovercars to move FAST. This design decision has the team working on improving our positioning protocols, which in turn can be used for the benefit of our pets app. Not to mention interoperability!
The Conversation Continues
We’ve uploaded the next part of the AMA we held with our VIPs. Damir and Jason get in depth with our stance on the crypto scene, including the bad news that has affected many, and revealed more about our hovercar development. It’s an insightful conversation, so check it out!
That covers this week’s update. Have a great weekend and see you next week!
Kerwin, social media manager
