Author: James Ashley

Creating a Chatbot with Microsoft Azure QnA Maker and Alexa

James Ashley

QnA Maker is Microsoft’s easy-to-use, cloud-based API for turning a public-facing FAQ page, product manuals, and support documents into a natural-language bot service. Because it takes in pre-vetted data to use as its “smarts,” it’s one of the easiest ways to build a powerful bot for your company.

Alexa, of course, is the world’s most pervasive host for conversational bots. It’s found in homes, corporate boardrooms, and anywhere else people want easy access to web-based information.

In this article, I will show you how to attach the plumbing to push the Q&A information your company wants users to know onto the conversational bot devices that they are most frequently using.

Part 1: Creating a bot service with QnA Maker

To get started, I first created a free Azure account to play with. I then went to the QnA Maker portal page and clicked the Create a knowledge base tab at the top to set up the knowledge base for my bot. I then clicked the blue Create a QnA service button to make a new QnA service with my free Azure account.

I followed the prompts throughout the process, which made it easy to figure out what I needed to do at each step.

In step 2, I selected my Azure tenant, Azure subscription name, and Azure resource name associated with the QnA Maker service. I also chose the Azure QnA Maker service I’d just created in the previous step to host the knowledge base.

I then entered a name for my knowledge base and the URL of my company’s FAQ to use as the brains for my knowledge base. If you just want to test this part out, you can even use the FAQ for QnA Maker itself.

QnA Maker has an optional feature called Chit-chat that let me give my bot service a personality. I decided to go with “The Professional” for this, but definitely would like to try out “The Comic” at some point to see what that’s like.

The next step was just clicking the Create your KB button and waiting patiently for my data to be extracted and my knowledge base to be created.

Once that was done, I opened the Publish page in the QnA Maker portal, published my knowledge base, and hit the Create Bot button.

After filling out additional configuration information for Azure that was specific to my account, I had a bot deployed with zero coding on Microsoft Bot Framework v4. I could even chat with it using the built-in “Test in Web Chat” feature. You can find more details in this cognitive services tutorial.

Part 2: Making your bot service work on Alexa

To get the bot service I created above working with Alexa, I had to use an open-source middleware adapter created by the botbuilder community. Fortunately, the Alexa Middleware Adapter was available as a NuGet package for Visual Studio.

I went to the Azure portal and selected the bot I created in the previous section. This gave me the option to “Download Bot source code.” I downloaded my bot source code as a zip file, extracted it into a working directory, and opened it up in Visual Studio 2017.

When the bot is automatically generated, it’s created with references to the Microsoft.AspNetCore.App NuGet package and the Microsoft.AspNetCore.App SDK. Unfortunately, this had compatibility issues with the middleware package. To fix this, I right-clicked on the Microsoft.AspNetCore.App NuGet package in the Solution Explorer window and removed it. This automatically also removed the equivalent SDK. To get back all the DLLs I needed, I used NuGet Package Manager to install the Microsoft.AspNetCore.All (2.0.9) package instead. Be sure to install this specific version of the package to ensure compatibility.

After making those adjustments to the solution, I went to the Visual Studio menu bar and selected Tools -> Nuget Package Manager -> Manage Nuget Packages for Solution. I searched for Adapters.Alexa and installed the Bot.Builder.Community.Adapters.Alexa package.

If your downloaded app is missing its Program.cs or Startup.cs file, you will need to create these for you project in order to build and publish. In my case, I created a new Microsoft Bot Builder v4 project and copied these two files from there. In the Startup method of the Startup class I created a ConfigurationBuilder to gather my app settings.

Then in the ConfigureServices and Configure methods, I added a call to services.AddAlexaBot and UseAlexa in order to enable the Alexa middleware and set up a special endpoint for calls from Alexa.

Following these code changes, I published the Web App Bot back to my Azure account. The original QnA Bot Service now has an additional channel endpoint for Alexa. The Alexa address is the original Web App Bot root address with /api/skillrequests added to the end.

At this point, I was ready to go to my Amazon account and create a new Alexa skill. I went to: https://developer.amazon.com/alexa and signed in. (If you don’t already have a developer account, you will need to enter your information and agree to the developer EULA.) Next, I tapped the Alexamenu item at the top of the developer page and selected Alexa Skills Set. This took me to https://developer.amazon.com/alexa/console/ask, where I clicked the Create Skill button.

I wrote in a unique name for my skill, selected Custom for the model, and clicked Create skill. On the following screen, I selected Start from Scratchfor my template.

I selected JSON Editor.

Next, I opened another web browser and went to this source code, and copied the example JSON found in the README.md file.

I returned to the web browser that had the Amazon Alexa portal opened and pasted the JSON into the box. I change the invocationName to the name of my skill, clicked Save Model, and finally clicked Build Model.

After waiting patiently for the build to complete, I selected Endpoint in the left navigation window and clicked HTTPS. I then entered the address of the Azure App Service URL and added /api/skillrequests to the end.

To distribute my Alexa skill so people can use it on their own Amazon devices, I clicked the Distribution link in the Alexa developer console and followed the instructions from there.

And before I knew it, I was able to have a conversation with my company’s FAQ page, using the QnA Maker’s professional chit-chat personality, from my living room.

Microsoft’s convergence of chatbots and mixed reality

James Ashley

One of the biggest trends in mixed reality this year is the arrival of chatbots on platforms like HoloLens. Speech commands are a common input for many XR devices. Adding conversational AI to extend these native speech recognition capabilities is a natural next steps toward a future in which personalized virtual assistant backed by powerful AI accompany us in hologram form. They may be relegated to providing us with shopping suggestions, but perhaps, instead, they’ll become powerful custom tools that help make us sharper, give honest feedback, and assist in achieving our personal goals.

If you have followed the development of sci-fi artificial intelligence in television and movies over the years, the move from voice to full holograms will seem natural. In early sci-fi, such as HAL from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey or the computer from the original Star Trek, computer intelligence was generally represented as a disembodied voice. In more recent incarnations of virtual assistance, such as Star Trek Voyager and Blade Runner 2049, these voices are finally personified by full holograms of the Emergency Medical Hologram and Joi.

In a similar way, Cortana, Alexa, and Siri are slowly moving from our smartphones, Echos, and Invoke devices to our holographic headsets. These are still early days, but the technology is already in place and the future incarnation of our virtual assistants is relatively clear.

The rise of the chatbot

For Microsoft’s personal digital assistant Cortana, who started her life as a hologram in the Halo video games for Xbox, the move to holographic headsets is a bit of a homecoming. It seems natural, then, that when Microsoft HoloLens was first released in 2016, Cortana was already built into the onboard holographic operating system.

Then, in a 2017 article on the Windows Apps Team blog, Building the Terminator Vision HUD in HoloLens, Microsoft showed people how to integrate Azure Cognitive Services into their holographic head-mounted display in order to provide smart object recognition and even translation services as a Terminator-like HUD overlay.

The only thing left to do to get to a smart virtual assistant was to tie together the HoloLens’s built-in Cortana speech capabilities with some AI to create an interactive experience. Not surprisingly, Microsoft was able to fill this gap with the Bot Framework.

Virtual assistants and Microsoft Bot Framework

Microsoft Bot Framework combines AI backed by Azure Cognitive Serviceswith natural-language capabilities. It includes a set of open source SDKs and tools that enable developers to build, test, and connect bots that interact naturally with users. With the Microsoft Bot Framework, it is easy can create a bot that can speak, listen, understand, and even learn from your users over time with Azure Cognitive Services. This chatbot technology is sometimes referred to as conversational AI.

There are several chatbot tools available. I am most familiar with the Bot Framework, so I will be talking about that. Right now, chatbots built with the Bot Framework can be adapted for speech interactions or for text interactions like the UPS virtual assistant example above. They are relatively easy to build and customize using prepared templates and web-based dialogs.

One of my favorite ways to build a chatbot is by using QnA Maker, which lets you simply point to an online FAQ page or upload product documentation to use as the knowledge base for your bot service. QnA Maker then walks you through applying a chatbot personality to your knowledge base and deploying it, usually with no custom coding. What I love about this is that you can get a sophisticated chatbot rolled out in about half a day.

Using the Microsoft Bot Framework, you also have the ability to take full control of the creation process to customize your bot in code. Bot apps can be created in C#, JavaScript, Python or Java. You can extend the capabilities of the Bot Framework with middleware that you either create yourself or bring into your code from third parties. There are even advanced capabilities available for managing complex conversation flows with branches and loops.

Ethical chatbots

Having introduced the idea above of building a Terminator HUD using Cognitive Services, it’s important to also raise awareness about fostering an environment of ethical AI and ethical thinking around AI. To borrow from the book The Future Computed, AI systems should be fair, reliable and safe, private and secure, inclusive, transparent, and accountable. As we build all forms of chatbots and virtual assistants, we should always consider what we intend our intelligent systems to do, as well as concern ourselves with what they might do unintentionally.

The ultimate convergence of AI and mixed reality

Today, chatbots are geared toward integrating skills for commerce like finding directions, locating restaurants, and providing help with a company’s products through virtual assistants. One of the chief research goals driving better chatbots is to personalize the chatbot experience. Achieving a high level of personalization will require extending current chatbots with more AI capabilities. Fortunately, this isn’t a far-future thing. As shown in the Terminator HUD tutorial above, adding Cognitive Services to your chatbots and devices is easy to do.

Because holographic headsets have many external sensors, AI will also be useful for analyzing all this visual and location data and turning it into useful information through the chatbot and Cognitive Services. For instance, cameras can be used to help translate street signs if you are in a foreign city or to identify products when you are shopping and provide helpful reviews.

Finally, AI will be needed to create realistic 3D model representations of your chatbot and overcome the uncanny valley that is currently holding back VR, AR, and MR. When all three elements are in place to augment your chatbot — personalization, computer vision, and humanized 3D modeling — we’ll be that much closer to what we’ve always hoped for — personalized AI that looks out for us as individuals.

Here is some additional reading on the convergence of chatbots and MR you will find helpful:

Increasing Business Reach with Azure Bot Service Channels

James Ashley

Where do bots live? It’s a common misconception that bots live on your Echo Dot, on Twitter, or on Facebook. To the extent bots call anywhere their home, it’s the cloud. Objects and apps like your iPhone and Skype are the “channels” through which people communicate with your bot.

Azure Bot Service Channels

Out of the box, Azure Bot Service supports the following channels (though the list is always growing):

  • Cortana
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • GroupMe
  • Kik
  • LINE
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Skype
  • Skype for Business
  • Slack
  • Telegram

Through middleware created by the Bot Builder Community, your business’s bots can reach additional channels like Alexa and Google.

With Direct Line, your developers can also establish communications through your bots and your business’s custom apps on the web and on devices.

Companies like Dixons Carphone, BMW, Vodafone, UEI, LaLiga, and UPS are already using Microsoft Azure Bot Service support for multiple channels to extend their Bot reach.

UPS Chatbot, for instance, delivers shipping information and answers customer questions through voice and text on Skype and Facebook Messenger. UPS, which invests more than $1 billion a year in technology, developed its chatbot in-house and plans to continue to update its functionality, including integration with the UPS My Choice® platform using Direct Line. In just the first eight months, UPS Bot has already had more than 200,000 conversations over its various channels.

LaLiga, the Spanish football league, is also reaching its huge and devoted fan base through multiple channels with Azure Bot Service. It is estimated that LaLiga touches 1.6 billion fans worldwide on social media.

Using an architecture that combines Azure Bot Service, Microsoft Bot Framework and multiple Azure Cognitive Services such as Luis and Text Analysis, LaLiga maintains bots on Skype, Alexa and Google Assistant that use natural language processing. NLP allows their chatbots to understand both English and Spanish, their regional dialects, and even the soccer slang particular to each dialect. They are even able to use a tool called Azure Monitor anomaly detection to identify new player nicknames created by fans and then match them to the correct person. In this and similar ways, LaLiga’s chatbots are always learning and adapting over time. LaLiga plans to deploy its chatbots to almost a dozen additional channels in the near future.

Conclusion

Because social media endpoints are always changing, developing for a single delivery platform is simply not cost-effective. Channels provide businesses with a way to develop a bot once but deploy it to new social media platforms as they appear on the market and gain influence. At the same time, your core bot features can constantly be improved, and these improvements will automatically benefit the pre-existing channels people use to communicate with you.

Digital Heroism in a DeepFake World

James Ashley1 Comment

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I recently did a talk on deepfake machine learning which included a long intro about the dangers of deep fakes. If you don’t know what deepfakes are, just think of using photoshop to swap people’s faces, except applied to movies instead of photos, and using AI instead of a mouse and keyboard. The presentation ended with a short video clip of Rutgar Hauer’s “tears in rain” speech from Blade Runner, but replacing Hauer’s face with Famke Janssen’s.

But back to the intro – besides being used to make frivolous videos that insert Nicholas Cage into movies he was never in (you can search for it on Youtube), it is also used to create fake celebrity pornography and worse of all to create what is known as “revenge porn” or just malicious digital face swaps to humiliate women.

Noelle Martin has, in her words, become the face of the movement against image based abuse of women. After years of having her identity taken away, digitally altered, and then distributed against her will on pornography websites since she was 17 years old, she decided to regain her own narrative by speaking out publicly about the issue and increasing awareness of it. She was immediately attacked on social media for bringing attention to the issue and yet she persisted and eventually helped to criminalize image based sexual abuse in New South Wales, Australia, with a provision specifically about altered images.

Criminalization of these acts followed at the commonwealth level in Australia. She is now working to increase global awareness of the issue – especially given that the webservers that publish non-consensual altered images can be anywhere in the world. She was also a finalist in the 2019 Young Australian of the Year award for her activism against revenge porn and for raising awareness of the way modern altered image technology is being used to humiliate women.

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I did a poor job of telling her story in my presentation this week.  Beyond that, because of the nature of the wrong against her, there’s the open question of whether it is appropriate even to try to tell her story – after all, it is her story to tell and not mine.

Fortunately, Noelle has already established her own narrative loudly and forcefully. Please hear her story in her own words at Tedx Perth.

Once you’ve done that, please watch this Wall Street Journal story about deepfake technology in which she is featured.

When you’ve heard her story, please follow her twitter account @NoelleMartin94 and help amplify her voice and raise awareness about the dark side of AI technology. As much as machine learning is in many ways wonderful and has the power to make our lives easier, it also has the ability to feed the worst impulses in us. Because ML shortens the distance between thought and act, as it is intended to do, it also easily erases the consciousness that is meant to mediate our actions: our very selves.

By speaking out, Ms. Martin took control of her own narrative. Please help her spread both the warning and the cure by amplifying her story to others.

HoloLens 2 announcement Quick Recap

James Ashley3 Comments

Basic sensors look the same between HL1 and HL2, which is nice. Still 4 monochrome cameras for SLAM, 1 TOF for spatial mapping. For me personally, knowing the size of the battery and the refresh rate of the TOF with more consistent power is really huge. Also curious about burn in from the battery-bun. Doesn’t it get hot? And the snapdragon 850 is just an overclocked 845. That’s going to be a bit hotter too? Also curious why MEMS? It’s not cheaper or lighter or much smaller than LCOS so, I think, must be the reason for the FOV improvement (right?) but  Karl Guttag complains this will make for more blurry digital images (complain? who Karl?).

Piano playing stage demo was cool but there was noticeable awkwardness in the way the hand gestures were performed (exaggerated movements) — which is actually really familiar from working with magic leap’s hand tracking. Either that needs to get better by the summer or there’s going to be some serious disappointment down the road.

Anyone seen any performance comparisons between the NVidia Tegra X2 (Magic Leap’s SOC) and Qualcomm 850 (HoloLens 2’s SOC)? I know the 845 (basically same as 850) was regarded as better than X1, but most assumed X2 would leapfrog. Haven’t found anything conclusive, though.

Doubling of FOV between HL1 and HL2 might have been miscommunicated and meant something different from what most people thought it meant. It turns out the FOV of the HL2 is actually very close to the FOV of the Magic Leap One, both of which are noticeably bigger than the original HoloLens but still significantly smaller than what everyone says they want.

My friend and VR visionary Jasper Brekelmans calculated out the HL2 FOV in degrees to be 43.57 x 29.04 with a diagonal of
52.36. Magic Leap is 40 x 30, with a diagonal of 50 (thank you magic leap for supporting whole numbers).

From now on, whenever someone talks about the field of view in AR/VR/MR/XR, we’ll all have to ask if that is being measured in degrees or steradians. Oh wells.

Internet bad boy Robert Scoble turns out to probably have one of the most interesting takes on the HoloLens 2 announcement. I hope his rehabilitation continues to go well. On the other hand it was a really bad week for tech journalists in general.

Unity even made an announcement about HoloLens 2 and even though they have been working on their own in-house core tools for XR development, way down deep in the fine print they are saying that you will need to use the Mixed Reality Toolkit v2 to develop for HoloLens – which is very eeeeenteeresting.

Coolest thing for me, outside of the device itself, was the Azure Spatial Anchors announcement. No one is really paying attention to Azure Spatial Anchors, yet, but this is a game changer. It means implementing Vernor Vinge’s belief circles. It means anyone can build their own Pokemon Go app. And it works on ARKit, ARCore and HoloLens –> so the future of XR is cross-platform.

Mike Taulty, who I can’t say enough great things about, as usual has dived in first and written up a tour of the new service.

Crap, my boss just came back from lunch. Gotta work now.

The Fork in Mixed Reality

James Ashley

Futuristic Spaceman - Programmer Reading Projected Information

Yogi Berra gnomically said, “when you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  On the evening of Friday, February 1st, 2019 at approximately 9 PM EST, that’s exactly what happened to Mixed Reality.

The Mixed Reality Toolkit open source project, which grew out of the earlier HoloLens Toolkit on github, was forked into the Microsoft MRTK and a cross-platform XRTK (read the announcement). While the MRTK will continue to target primarily Microsoft headsets like the HoloLens and WMR, XRTK will feature a common framework for HoloLens, Magic Leap, VR Headsets, Mobile AR – as well as HoloLens 2 and any other MR devices that eventually come on the market.

So why did this happen? The short of it is that open source projects can sometimes serve multiple divergent interests and sometimes they cannot. Microsoft was visionary in engineering and releasing the original HoloLens MR Headset. They made an equally profound and positive step back in 2016 by choosing to open source the developer SDK/Framework/Toolkit (your choice) that allows developers to build Unity apps for the HoloLens. This was the original HoloLens Toolkit (HLTK).

While the HLTK started as a primarily Microsoft engineering effort, members of the community quickly jumped in and began contributing more and more code to the point that the Microsoft contributions became a minority of overall contributions. This, it should be noted, goes against the common trend of a single company paying their own engineers to keep an open source project going. The HLTK was an open source success story.

In this regard, it is worth calling out two developers in particular, Stephen Hodgson and Simon Jackson, for the massive amounts of code and thought leadership they have contributed to the MR community. Unsung heroes barely captures what they have done.

In 2017 Microsoft started helping to build occluded WinMR (virtually the same as VR) devices with several hardware vendors and it made sense to create something that supported more than just the HoloLens. This is how the MRTK came to be. It served the same purpose as the HLTK, to accelerate development with Unity scripts and components, but now with a larger perspective about who should be served.

In turn, this gave birth to something that is generally known as MRTK vNext, an ambitious project to support not just Microsoft devices but also platforms from other vendors. And what’s even more amazing, this was again driven by the community rather than by Microsoft itself. Microsoft was truly embracing the open source mindset and not just paying lip service to it as many naysayers were claiming.

But as Magic Leap, the other major MR Headset vendor, finally released their product in fall, 2018, things began to change. Unlike Microsoft, Magic Leap developed their SDK in-house and threw massive resources at it. Meanwhile, Microsoft finally started throwing their engineers at the MRTK again after taking a long hiatus. This may have been in response to the Magic Leap announcement or equally could have been because the team was setting the stage for a HoloLens 2 announcement in early 2019.

And this was the genesis of the MR fork in the road: For Microsoft, it did not make sense to devote engineering dollars toward creating a platform that supported their competitors’ devices. In turn, it probably didn’t make sense for engineers from Google, Magic Leap, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. to devote their time toward a project that was widely seen as  a vehicle for Microsoft HMDs.

And so a philosophical split needed to occur. It was necessary to fork MRTK vNext. The new XRTK (which is also pronounced “Mixed Reality Toolkit”) is a cross-platform framework for HoloLens as well as Magic Leap (Lumin SDK support is in fact already working in XRTK and is getting even more love over the weekend even as I write).

But XRTK will also be a platform that supports developing for Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, HTC Vive, Apple ARKit, Google ARCore, the new HoloLens 2 which may or may not be announced at MWC 2019, and whatever comes next in the  Mixed Reality Continuum.

So does this mean it is time to stick a fork in the Microsoft MRTK? Absolutely not. Microsoft’s MRTK will continue to do what people have long expected of it, supporting both HoloLens and Occluded WinMR devices (that is such a wicked mouthful — I hope someone will eventually give it a decent name like “Windows Surface Kinect for Azure Core DotNet Silverlight Services” or something similarly delightful).

In the meantime, while Microsoft is paying its engineers to work on the MRTK, XRTK needs fresh developers to help contribute. If you work for a player in the MR/VR/AR/XR space, please consider contributing to the project.

Or to word it in even stronger terms, if you give half a fork about the future of mixed reality, go check out  XRTK  and start making a difference today.

Why you should watch “2047: Virtual Revolution”

James Ashley

In the wake of Apple’s successes over the past decade, agencies and technical schools like the Savannah College of Art and Design have been pumping out web designers and a career ecosystem that supports them as well as a particularly disciplined, minimalist, flat aesthetic that can be traced back to Steve Jobs. One of the peculiarities of the rise of 3D games and VR/AR/MR/XR platforms is that these children of the Jobs revolution have little interest in working with depth. The standards of excellence in the web-based design world — much less the print-based design world it grew out of – are too different. To work in 3D feels too much like slumming.

br

But design is still king in 3D as well as on the web. When the graduates of SCAD and similar schools did not embrace 3D design, film FX designers like Ash Thorp and Greg Borenstein jumped into the space the left vacant. For a period after the release of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report in 2002, there was a competition among FX artists to try to outdo the UIs that were created for that film. From about 2010, however, that competitive trend has mellowed out and the goal of fantasy UX in sci-fi has changed into one of working out the ergonomics of near-future tech in a way that makes it feel natural instead of theatrical. By carefully watching the development of CGI artifacts in the 21st century – as an archeologist might sift through pottery shards from the ancient past –, we can see the development of a consensus around what the future is supposed to look like. Think of it as a pragmatic futurism.

co

The 2016 French film 2047: Virtual Revolution, written and directed by Guy-Roger Duvert and staring Mike Dopud, is a great moment in the development of cinematic language in the way it takes for granted certain sci-fi visual cliches. Even more interesting is what appears to be a relatively low-budget film is able to pull off the CGI it does, indicating a general drop in price for these effects. What used to be hard and expensive is now within reach and part of the movie making vernacular.

quit

The story is about a future society that spends all its time playing online RPGs while the corporations that run these games have taken over the remnant of the world left behind. But what I found interesting was the radial interface used by players inside their RPGs.

mlui

It bears a passing similarity to the magic leap OS navigation menu.

mech

It also gives a nod to popular gaming genres like Gandam battle suits …

cd

Fantasy UX (FUX) from films like Blade Runner and The Matrix …

wow

And World of Warcraft.

Play the movie in the background while you are working if you don’t have time to get into the plot about a dystopic future in which people are willingly enslaved to VR … blah, blah, blah. But look up from time to time in order to see how the FX designers who will one day shape our futures are playing with the grammar of the VR\AR\MR\XR visual language.

The effects for 2047 appear to have been done by an FX and VR company in France called Backlight. The movie is currently free to Amazon Prime members.

For some more innovative FUX work, please take a look at 2013’s Ender’s Game or the Minority Report tv series from 2015.

Things of Note 01-02-2019

James Ashley1 Comment

Mike Taulty has a great series on Project Prague: https://mtaulty.com/category/projectprague/

Christopher Diggins has listed out some undocumented APIs in the 3DS Max .NET SDK: https://cdiggins.github.io/blog/undocumented-3dsmax-dotnet-assemblies.html that nobody knows about. Tres cool.

Magic Leap received approximately 6,000 submissions for its Independent Creator program. I think I’m associated with at least 20 of those. Considering that cash is Magic Leap’s biggest asset, this is a great way to be using its muscle. Building up an app ecosystem for mixed reality is a great thing and will help other vendors like Microsoft and Apple down the road. And who knows. Maybe one of those 6000 proposals is the killer MR app.

There are rumors of a HoloLens v2 announcement in January, but don’t hold your breath. There are also rumors of a K4A announcement in January, which seems more likely. In the past, we’ve seen one tech announcement (Windows MR [really Windows VR]) substitute for silence regarding HoloLens, so this may be another instance of that.

Many people are asking what’s happening with the Microsoft MRTK vNext branch. It’s still out there but … who knows?

The Lumin SDK 0.19 started rolling out a couple of weeks ago and the LuminOS is now on version 0.94.0. HoloLens always got dinged for iterating too slowly while Magic Leap gets dinged for changing too quickly. What’s a bleeding edge technology company to do?

I’ve gotten through 4 of the endings of the Black Mirror movie Bandersnatch on Netflix. It makes you think, but not very hard, which is about the right pace for most of us. And Spotify has a playlist for the movie. You should listen to the Bandersnatch playlist on shuffle play, obviously.

Magic Leap Store publishes first pay app

James Ashley

seedling

The Magic Leap store (aka Magic Leap “World”) has published its first app for $9.99. This is an app created by Insomniac but published by Magic Leap itself, so in some sense is a trial run for its store. “Seedling” already made its first appearance at the Leap conference in Los Angeles in October.

$9.99 is also an interesting price, perhaps signaling a target for apps on Magic Leap devices. Back in the day, $.99 was the target price for Apple Store apps. When Microsoft came out with Windows Phone, they marketed the idea that apps should sell for more than that on their platform (more towards $1.49 or $1.99). On Steam, the magic price point for games seems to be $20 to $60.

sketchup

For the HoloLens, which uses the online Windows Store as its distribution channel, the most frequent price point seems to be free. This makes sense since even with a purported 50K HoloLens devices currently in the world, the total market is still too small to support a reasonably priced game. Trimble initially went the other way with their SketchUp Viewer,  which lists for about $1.5K, apparently trying to recoup their investment with a high price tag. Their subsequent HoloLens offering, part of a collaboration service, is free.

In order to buy Seedling, I had to go into my online magic leap creator’s account and add a payment method. This is an interesting aspect of all current VR and AR devices: entering data is rarely – and entering financial data is never – done through the actual device. We still live in a world where one must switch to either a phone or a computer in order to establish the credentials that will be used through the device.

This is ultimately a pre-NUI UX problem involving the difficulty of doing data entry without a keyboard and mouse (though we are finally getting comfortable with doing this on our smart phones, thanks to the rising comfort level with using web apps on tiny screens). This will be an ongoing problem for developing apps for the enterprisy market, where the exchange of data is pretty key.

Who knows, maybe solving this UX dilemma for the enterprise will end up being the killer app we’ve all been waiting for. I wonder how much someone would charge for it?

Thank you Techorama Netherlands

James Ashley

amsterdam

At the beginning of October I was invited to deliver two sessions at Techorama Netherlands: one on Cognitive Services Custom Vision and one about the HoloLens and the Magic Leap One. This is one of the best organized conferences I’ve been to and the hosts and attendees were amazing. I can’t say enough good things about it.

The lineup was also great with Scott Guthrie, Laurent Buignon, Giorgio Sardo, Shawn Wildermuth, Pete Brown, Jeff Prosise, etc. It is what is known as a first tier tech conference. What was especially impressive is that this is also the first time Techorama Netherlands was convened.

I want to also thank my friend Dennis Vroegop for hosting me and showing me around on my first trip to the Netherlands. He and Jasper Brekelmans took a weekday off to give me the full Amsterdam experience. It was also great to have beers with Roland Smeenk, Alexander Meijers and Joost van Schaik. I’m not sure why there is so much mixed reality talent in the Netherlands but there you go.