As Published: Training Gets a Radical Makeover Through Virtual Reality The ability to train employees with more visually stimulating and memorable materials will have a significant impact on the effectiveness of the training. Research suggests that VR is a particularly effective tool for training that requires memorizing and understanding spatial and visual information, as well as for eliciting effective responses to stressful or difficult situations. Conversely, traditional classroom training can...

As Published: Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse: What it means for the enterprise The idea of the metaverse has been percolating in tech circles since Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. This was the year after the World Wide Web was open to the public, and before websites for general use became widely available. The idea is that many virtual spaces will converge with the internet to...

As published: Workflow Apps Increase Safety for Frontline Workers Three essential use cases that benefit from digital transformation solutions built for the frontline worker.By David Brebner, Founder and CEO, Umajin New, breakthrough workflow applications incorporating hands-free control, location technology, and visualization of key data are extending digital transformation to the frontline worker. By creating AI-enabled digital agents, activities that were previously high-touch experiences can be converted into touchless transactions, enhancing...

As published: VR Training: The Benefits of Real-time Feedback - Training Industry Immersive learning using virtual reality (VR) provides employees with the opportunity to learn by doing, with real-time feedback and task repetition — all of which build proficiency. VR training is a way to safely replicate actual work environments and provide workers with the freedom to fail without causing physical injury, damage to property or loss of revenue. VR...

As published: Advanced location technology creates safer work environments Harassment of hospitality employees is unfortunately very common. Unite Here, a hospitality trade union, surveyed 500 hospitality employees, and found that 58 percent of hotel workers and 77 percent of casino workers surveyed have been sexually harassed by a guest. Unions have been pushing the industry to respond to this issue for years. Several cities and states have passed legislation addressing...

Umajin Solution Examples Smart Health Diagnostic The Challenge Covid-19 has caused many organizations to implement policies for checking health status of individuals entering a facility as well as managing the use of meeting rooms and other shared spaces to ensure that social distancing requirements are maintained. Often this is done using an ad hoc process, by having an employee manually check temperatures of individuals as they arrive, and assigning them...

Umajin Solution Examples Agricultural Logistics Using IoT The Challenge Farming is a $130 billion industry in the US which is very dependent on the timely distribution of key inputs such as seed, fertilizer, and fuel. Farmers in the Midwest depend on agricultural coops for these supplies. Large amounts of material need to be delivered to the fields during the relative short planting season, which is determined by weather and soil...

Umajin Solution Examples Project Management Dashboard The Challenge This organization is a leading multi-disciplinary infrastructure consultancy with more than 3,000 designers, architects, planners and engineers working across the globe. Projects are large and complicated and information shared with clients at periodic review meetings was often incomplete and inconsistent. The organization wanted a Digital Dashboard that it could provide to its clients to share the progress and status of open projects...

Umajin Solution Examples Police and First Responder VR Scenario Training The Challenge There are approximately 800,000 law enforcement officers in the US. Police officers and first responders need to deal with a wide range of situations, and it is difficult and expensive to train officers for all of the situations that they may encounter. Initial training varies by state, but averages around 840 hours/recruit. Annual training varies from 12 to...

Umajin Solution Examples Mobile Forms - Safe Work Permits The Challenge A chemical company with dozens of plants around the world has initiated an “Industry 4.0” program to drive digital transformation across their operation. One of the first objectives was to digitize the paper process used for “safety permits” within the plants. OSHA requires companies to establish a process to disable machinery equipment during servicing and maintenance to prevent the...

Umajin Solution Examples Seikowave Dental Procedure Workflow The Challenge Dentistry and in particularly advanced dental procedures is a growing market. The growth rate is much higher in regions of the world that haven’t had a focus on oral health, but have a growing middle class. There are many standalone procedure workflow packages used in a dental practice, particularly specialist practices like orthodontics, cosmetic veneers and crown design. This means a...

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs “Design-thinking firms stand apart in their willingness to engage in the task of continuously redesigning their business…to create advances in both innovation and efficiency - the combination that produces the most powerful competitive edge.” — Roger Martin, author of the Design of Business Design thinking is not just about making objects,...

The release of Umajin 3.1 brings with it our new multi-user editing feature.  You can now collaborate with your colleagues directly within the Umajin Editor. The multi-user system allows people to work simultaneously on the same project.  A list of users who are currently logged in to the project is displayed in the top right corner of the Umajin Editor.  Any time a project member makes a change to components...

The Umajin Application System has some big upgrades for version 3.0 including a new look and feel. Umajin Editor   We have gone through the whole application and updated the user interface design of our Umajin Editor to look better on higher resolution displays. The design has then followed on to our Umajin Editor Lite as well. All component and action icons have been updated as well to give a...

Umajin powered the real-time IOT dashboards for PwC connected solutions at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We were also showing off the Umajin Spatial technology that is being deployed in market with the leading hotel brands LINK. There were three custom-built bays loaded with sensors for different vertical markets which were all easily connected up to the Umajin real-time platform. In the amusement and entertainment bay we were showing some...

ARIA was a good opportunity to catch up with others working on AR/VR and to present at MIT about some of our discoveries building co-spaced AR and VR applications. We have found some surprising side effects of having multiple people interacting while collaborating in the real world and in the virtual world. Click for the PRESENTATION LINK We are using an amazing high-speed tracking system from our partner PhaseSpace which allows...

Umajin has a new LLVM frontend. This is integrated alongside LLDB and using our QT creator IDE we can now perform step by step debugging and watching variables in JIT compiled Umajin code. We can even step from Umajin code into the underlying C++ engine! Our new front end adds some amazing language features to Umajin taking advantage of lots of new capabilities in the recent versions of LLVM, bumping...

Umajin has new PBR lighting model. Physically based rendering or PBR is a shading model in computer graphics that seeks to render graphics in a way that more accurately models the flow of light in the real world. Basically, you get to decide the lighting information for each pixel, its shininess, its roughness, its color, its occlusion. The underlying shader models the materials microsurfaces and how they reflect, absorb and...

Umajin demonstrated a multi-person co-spaced VR environment at the combined ISMAR/AWE show in Munich. There were three different demos, in this specific demo users had to triage inbound events occurring in Hong Kong. The two users were huge in scale compared to the city and could see incoming events as orange markers. When they picked a marker the details of the event would be transferred to a tablet. From the...

Umajin showed off its data presentation and dashboarding layer, digital agents, 3D animation and VR rendering in this interactive experience, generated from the underlying data for each of the WPP BrandZ international reports. This event was focused on the new top 100 China brands report and was powered by BrandZ, Semaphor, Umajin and the new Intel NUC.  The experience allowed visitors to the House of Lords to go through a...

See article on Information Management (more) We are moving toward a digitally-enabled world, where the lines between real and digital are blurring. As the digital world becomes an increasingly detailed reflection of the physical world, it creates fertile ground for new business models and ecosystems. To embrace a digitally-enabled world, businesses need to digitally enable and transform every aspect of their operations. And they know this, with 55% of IT...

AI & Chatbots Umajin started using AI and machine visions systems to build visual chatbots back in 1998 while. The idea of adding vision, personality and character to make human computer interaction more fluid has always been an important goal. The voice recognition back in 1998 wasn’t great, but having an animated character talking really helps people connect. We did a lot of work on educational materials for kids and the...

Pavan Bahl from MouthMedia Network hosted a great panel with John Gibson from Samsung, Megan Berry from Reveal (and myself from Umajin). It was very interesting to dig into the trends that are actually driving users to repeat interactions and conversion versus those which might get a lot of attention but do not show high repeat-ability. An example of a popular cool interaction would be a custom skill for Amazon...

Umajin was privileged to share the AGA booth with two of our partners, PwC and SalesForce. This was at the huge G2E event (Global Gaming Expo) that was hosted at the Sands Expo Center. Umajin was able to demonstrate how resorts can create their own touch interfaces and visual digital agents that can utilize IoT to control lighting and HVAC. How they can incorporate wayfinding, parking and location based offers....

This event was hosted by WPP and features some amazing speakers including Paul Sweeney the Director of US Research for Bloomberg, Andy Hood Head of Emerging technologies AKQA, Michael Ross Chief Scientist for Dynamic Action to name a few. Umajin was presenting our new face of retail. The ability for companies and brands to build 24/7 visual digital agents to represent their products and services. Using natural language processing, text...

Umajin presented technology and spoke at the AGA and PwC Innovation Summit. With Umajin having a big focus in the hospitality space it was very interesting to work through some of the enormous challenges the AGA member organisations face in transforming their businesses to be more nimble and digital.

It’s very exciting to have version 2.0 of Umajin live. Here are some of the new features: http://help.umajin.com/overview/new-in-umajin-2-0/ We also have a new developer website: http://developer.umajin.com/ Along with a new solutions page showing off some of the capabilities of Umajin: http://www.umajin.com/solutions/ Lots of new tutorials and examples are going up on the help and developer sites.  Its cool to see what all our users are creating and we are trying to capture this...

The BrandZ event in Beijing was a great opportunity to showcase Umajin and what it can do for agencies and brands. We were showing the sales enablement solution and how it can help digitise a brands sales process. We also showed off the latest version of Rozie which used Umajin’s machine vision stack to analyse peoples faces and draw their portrait. Having some of the top brand CEO’s made for...

Our partners NexCom and Intel were at ISE 2017. NexCom’s booth had an area showing off retail solutions built on Intel, powered by Umajin.

Here we see the HTC Vive headset and high speed tracking used to explore a Umajin scene with two animated characters. Because of the level of immersion an application designed to really surprise people can be more stressful that just watching a horror movie. Given you are not focusing on the surprise horror genre – it is very important for VR to manage the users physiological load. The general goal...