August 2019 – The MWC LA Conference is once again bringing
the latest technology and information on 5G, connected cars and everything
wireless to the US. The MWC LA
conference is the North Amercian centered show of the industry leading cellular
MWC Barcelona conference in
February.
The Conference in LA shows off the new technologies for the
ever ongoing advanced in cell phone and the associated wireless
connectivity. While the big title may be
5G, it also means connected cars, new experiences for entertainment and gaming,
and security for all these connections..
For Entertainment, the long awaited higher performance for
mobile games is on the way. This will
allow the cell phone and table platforms to have similar gaming graphics as
console games offered just a short while back.
It also means that PC and console games can enjoy new wireless
controllers and connectivity bringing a new gaming experience.
The 5G technology is also supposed to be the last piece of
the puzzle to allow Virtual Reality to become the mainstream viewing
environment for all gaming and content.
It has been hypothesized by several VR makers that while their sales
targets have been behind for over a decade, with 5G deployment their sales will
beat all expectations and replace TVs and cell phones as the primary screens in
peoples lives. This are pretty big shoes
for 5G to fill.
The conference will also cover entertainment content which
is about streaming media in a cellular and wireless environment. These discussions pertain not only to being
able to enjoy your favorite movie and live sports with a better quality of
experience, but also for being able to
participate in high quality video conferences and intranet based video message
delivery.
The conference has keynotes from many leaders including FCC
Chairman Ajit Pai, Executives from Verizon, Intel, US Cellular, Ericsson, Nokia
and Open Table.
The 3 day event is returning to the LA Convention Center
October 22-24, 2019.
The first
decade of the 21st century was known for introducing smartphones to the masses,
as well as introducing the first smart TV. Ten years later starting in 2010,
the world became socially connected thanks to companies such as Facebook,
Twitter and Netflix. We are now rapidly approaching a new period of consumer
technology called the Data Age.
This “Data
Age” comes to life under the shadow of the tremendous flow of data security and
privacy concerns becoming the number one issue across the entire globe.
Different countries are dealing with these complex issues with different
solutions and with The European Union for example, implemented strict rules and
regulations, last year, called GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
China, on other hand, has no government organized privacy and security
regulations.
Both
companies and individuals are at risk.
“With computing processing power increasing dramatically, even passwords
that are 14 to 20 characters long will be readily crackable and largely
ineffective for protecting high-value, high-risk assets and transactions by
2020”- warns Forrester, an American market research company that provides
advice on existing and potential impact of technology to its clients and the
public.
As risky as
this as can be, the world must stay
connected because only this connectivity allows us to live in smart cities, in
intelligent houses, drive connected cars and very soon be driven by autonomous
vehicles.
This next
generation of data connectivity will require wireless technology from 5G that
can connect devices with the next generation fast speeds. Those in the race to
bring the technology to marketplace and get a foot int the door for the
business that goes with it include China Telecom, KDDI in Japan, SK telecom in
South Korea, through Verizon and AT&T in the USA, Shaw and Rogers in
Canada, to Ericsson all over Europe:
Vodafone and BT in United Kingdom, Deutsche Telecom in Germany, Orange
in France and Telefonica in Spain. As 5G becomes a crucial component of
technology development, the entire world needs to adapt to it.
In the last
few years, home security cameras, thermostats, and connected lighting equipment
have become more common in homes and sales continue to increase. Just imagine
how the IoT (Internet of Things) environment is going to explode with the
rollout of 5G.
For example,
for smart home development into existing homes, consumers usually don’t buy all
those devices from the same platforms or at the same time. This brings the
challenge of how the consumer can connect all these different products, brands
and platforms together as well as the devices that haven’t even been invented
yet. The idea of a practical smart home is like bringing together different
instruments to create a symphony orchestra that need to play in unison. Following connectivity, the Smart Home’s
Next Trend will be Interoperability and Intelligence.
It is
difficult to imagine the smart home without some type of digital assistance
activated by voice and equipped with Artificial Intelligence. Three truths
about voice/AI assistant are: 1.) Digital assistance is going into everything:
devices, appliances and cars 2.) Support for digital assistance has become
table stakes: services, brands, commerce 3.) Voice is quickly becoming the
“go-to” interface – it allows you to keep doing what you are doing as well as
have the digital assistant do something that normally requires your hands.
For example,
Amazon Alexa has nearly 60,000 skills and 20,000+ compatible devices. The way
how we interact with digital assistance shown the study done by Consumer
Technology Association (CTA) in August 2018. US online adult study shows how
people make a use of Amazon Alexa(in%): Ask questions – 63, Check the weather – 58, Listen
to music/radio/podcasts – 50, Set a timer or alarm – 45, Call someone – 32, Check
the news/sports – 30, Send a message to someone – 25, Search for
recipes/cooking information – 23, Check personal calendar – 22.
We also
beginning to understand the limits of automation. AI intelligence and
automation are really transform the way we access data, we use data. AI is
helping us to understand the data. The
first generation of voice control required people to learn “command words” and
“special phrases”. With AI in the
system, it can now understand conversation and what actions to do next. For example, without AI and data analysis you
would say “Alexa, turn up the thermostat by 2 degrees” now you can say “Alexa,
I am cold”. The system will recognize
who “I” is and the context for the word “cold” based on what location you were
talking from and the system can respond “would you like me to turn up the
thermostat by 2 degrees”.
This
direction of connectivity, interoperability, high speed data and analytics as
well as “personalized models” is what is driving the next generation of Smart
Home. The “personalized models” are the
core of the privacy concerns. It means
the computer has to both know that it is you, and more importantly know
everything about you – what you eat, where you shop, what temperature you like
the house, what shows you watch and what music you listen to, who you visit and
talk to, what your schedule is, what your interests are, To be able to be helpful, the computer has to
know how to help. By knowing how to help
you be more comfortable, it means that all of that data has to be stored
someplace, and hopefully used only for your benefit. Governments, companies, and technology are
all working together, finally, to try and insure the next decade is a
beneficial Data Age to make your life better.
In this interview, recorded for Roadway Media at RSA 2019, Daniel
Frank of Deloitte’s Cyber Risk and Financial Services team talks to Bright Blue
Innovation’s Lidia Paulinska about GDPR, US privacy regulations and the
integration of privacy requirements and practices into the existing security
environment. The discussion includes
trends applicable to SMBs and enterprise clients.
In this interview, recorded for Roadway Media at RSA 2019, Larry
Link, President & CEO of Cequence talks to the Bright Blue Innovation’s
Lidia Paulinska about the increased attack surface for security based on the
direct to business & customer exposure from the use of external facing
applications. They discussed the need
and solutions for administering and protecting the application space.
In this interview, recorded for Roadway Media at RSA 2019,
the CEO Jay Kim of Datalocker talks to Bright Blue Innovation’s Lidia Paulinska
about the expanding need for secure removable storage media in the enterprise
and SMB marketplace.
At the GTC 2019 Keynote conference in San Jose this month, Nvidia’s CEO and founder Jensen Huang announced Omniverse, an open collaboration platform to simplify studio workflows for real-time graphics.
This has been in the works for nearly 25 years with the company, who have been long trying to make this happen throughout the years, worked closely with Pixar Animation Studios. With Omniverse, the production pipeline in producing a full featured animated film now has become much simpler and more efficient in the process, as well as being a big money saver for the Hollywood animation studios.
Huang explained, “If you take a look at a major film and it cost something like $300M to 350M to produce that film and the vast majority of it is post production which is otherwise known as rendering and it might take something along the lines of that year and a half a year to year and a half.”
“If you could even save one month on what is otherwise a one year long project, the amount of money you could possibly say is in the millions and so this is one of the reasons why this industry is such in a hurry to find ways to accelerate the rendering process and to accelerate the production process.”
Making animated films has always been labor intensive throughout the complete complex rendering pipeline; from the beginning of its concept, modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, lighting and finally, the rendering process itself.
“You have to render it make it look totally perfect…and then once you create the character, you have to composite a whole bunch of other characters in the scene and all the environments and all the special effects…are done in physics simulation it is so so complicated.” Huang continued, “…a few shots may be assigned to a studio, a few shots would be assigned to another studio… as a result, multiple studios in multiple sites are all working on a movie at the same time.”
Omniverse includes portals — two-way tunnels — that maintain live connections between industry-standard applications such as Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.
This new open collaboration platform streamlines 2D and 3D product pipelines across industries. Omniverse is built around the latest industry standards for design collaboration.
It supports Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology for exchanging information about modeling, shading, animation, lighting, visual effects and rendering across multiple applications. It also supports NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language, which allows artists to exchange information about surface materials across multiple tools.
In addition to Pixar, there are presently more than 200 animation film studios around the world but you can now work with any film studio no matter which continent they are located in.
Astonishingly, graphic artists and designers will be able to view updates made in real time, as though they are in the same room sitting next to each other through NVIDIA’s Omniverse Viewer, which gives users a live look at work being done in a wide variety of tools. No matter where the filmmakers or studios are, even if they are working with on remote laptops, Omniverse connects and unifies all the designers together from anywhere making it one identifiable project, instead of hundreds of small projects that studios have been so accustomed to throughout the years.
To top it off, the Omniverse Viewer delivers the highest quality photorealistic images in real time by taking advantage of rasterization as well as support for NVIDIA RTX RT Cores, CUDA cores and Tensor Core-enabled AI.
“With Omniverse, NVIDIA has created a product artists will be eager to put to work,” said Guido Quaroni, vice president of Software at Pixar. “When we open sourced USD, our goal was to make it easier to combine complex characters and environments into a single scene. Omniverse raises the bar, leveraging USD to enable scalable real-time collaborative workflows across some of the industry’s major software packages.”
With Omniverse, artists can see live updates made by other artists working in different applications. They can also see changes reflected in multiple tools at the same time.
As a result, artists now have the flexibility to use the best tool for the task at hand.
For example an artist using Maya with a portal to Omniverse can collaborate with another artist using UE4 and both will see live updates of each others’ changes in their application.
Whether it’s Epic Games, Adobe or Autodesk, or any other Pixar collaborator, they are all encouraged by the new platform, as it allows artists to collaborate regardless of the tool they use and without the need for time-consuming conversions.
“We love the idea of connecting tools from all vendors to enable collaborative workflows,” said Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games. “We adopted USD and MDL to streamline workflows where assets originate from many different applications, so it’s great to see NVIDIA extend that ecosystem to enable live connections with simultaneous updates.”
“Omniverse is an exciting concept that will enable artists around the world to collaborate on digital content creation,” said Sebastien Deguy, vice president of 3D and Immersive at Adobe. “We look forward to seeing its development and evolution.”
“We’re thrilled to explore the potential of NVIDIA Omniverse to give our customers access to immersive, interactive and collaborative experiences across industries,” said Amy Bunszel, senior vice president of Design and Creation Products at Autodesk. “We share their vision of better world modeling and simulation. By combining USD and RTX, Omniverse promises to accelerate the future of design and make.”
Huang professed at the Keynote address, “I can’t wait to see the first major motion movie made by Pixar, rendered completely on RTX”. With Omniverse, it should be even more productive.
“To infinity and beyond!”
Here is a video demonstrating Omniverse at the Keynote, with CEO Jensen Huang.
