After wrestling for more than a decade with the development of a technology that would create a three-dimensional map of the physical world, the team at 6D.ai is finally ready to open up to developers its toolkit that the company says has done exactly that. When company chief executive Matt Miesnieks announced the launch of 6D in March, he laid out a vision for its growth that had three goals: The company would build APIs to capture the three-dimensional geometry of the world; it would apply that three-dimensional data to build semantic APIs so applications can understand the world; and it would partner and extend those APIs to create an operating system for reality. Having achieved the first goal, the company is now working on the second. "The whole purpose of this company wasn't'Hey there's this new technology!' It's what can AR do in its fully realized form and what is a native experience for AR that hadn't worked in prior mediums and what's stopping that stuff from being effective and how do you solve those problems," says Miesnieks. For Miesnieks the problems confronting augmented reality come down to creating believable visual objects that integrate seamlessly into the world. That act of creation depends on persistence, occlusion and interaction, according to Miesnieks.

Augmented World Expo, better known as its acronym AWE, has grown to become one of the AR and VR world's most important gatherings, with over 6,000 attendees expected. The conference, May 30 - June 1, 2018, takes place in the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley. This year AWE is preparing 100,000 square feet of exhibition space for 250 exhibiting companies and featuring 350 speakers. Attendees will engage in hundreds of tech demos, art installations, educational sessions and product launches. Bridging the gap between technology and the human experience, AWE 2018 will feature around 1000 demos of headsets, software, and tools - plus more meetings than you can possibly tuck into a manic schedule.

Any mention of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, inspires some trepidation in many people, including designers, but those most familiar with it say that designers should be excited about the advent of AI. "I'm very excited about the future with AI, but we do need to make sure we are responsible with it, as with any other technological development,'' Silka Miesnieks, head of the design lab at Adobe, told the Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore on Wednesday. "Our superpower as humans is our creativity, and we are all creative," she said, adding that AI can aid human creativity but not replace it. "We spend a lot of time thinking about unintended consequences and trying to avoid them. And we urge all designers to do that too," she said. Rod Farmer leads organizational transformation by design for McKinsey & Company. As digital expert associate partner, he helps clients bridge the worlds between design, digital, and business impact. He took a similar view to Miesnieks. "In most cases, AI only affects a percentage of a job a person does, but rarely the whole job.

Any mention of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, inspires some trepidation in many people, including designers, but those most familiar with it say that designers should be excited about the advent of AI. "I'm very excited about the future with AI, but we do need to make sure we are responsible with it, as with any other technological development,'' Silka Miesnieks, head of the design lab at Adobe, told the Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore on Wednesday. "Our superpower as humans is our creativity, and we are all creative," she said, adding that AI can aid human creativity but not replace it. "We spend a lot of time thinking about unintended consequences and trying to avoid them. And we urge all designers to do that too," she said. Rod Farmer also embraces the possibilities. As digital expert associate principal at McKinsey, Farmer researches how to bridge the gap between human-computer interfaces and software engineering practices. He took a similar view to Miesnieks. "In most cases, AI only affects a percentage of a job a person does, but rarely the whole job.

The problems that augmented reality startups aim to solve often seem trivial. Just as the HBO show Silicon Valley skewered the industry's obsession with placing digital mustaches precisely on people's faces, the problem of allowing multiple phones to know where exactly your coffee table is could seem pretty laughable. But with augmented reality, things can get complicated and consequential rather quickly. What's more interesting is that all of this can be done in the background so that while users are playing an AR game with a passive camera feed -- something similar to Pokémon GO -- they could also be gathering rich 3D data of the environments that they're navigating. "One of the big things holding back engaging AR is for content to feel like it's actually physically part of the world," CEO Matt Miesnieks told TechCrunch in an interview.