Although Google Glasses didn’t make much of a splash in the consumer pool, one of the big three tech firms is likely to introduce a new consumer-facing augmented reality device “very soon.” So says Don Shin, founder and CEO of CrossComm.

CrossComm is a Durham-based mobile, web, and immersive app development studio that helps organizations bring their digital aspirations to life. With an in-house team of programmers, CrossComm designs and develops custom apps for mobile (iOS + Android), web, AI, SDKs, and wearables (Apple Watch) and both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

The company was rated the number 1 mobile app developer in the Southeast by review site Clutch.co and won a national award for the Forbes Under 30 networking app.

CrossComm’s Chief Software Architect, Sean Doherty has been invited to be one of 13 Code & Programming speakers at the highly prestigious SXSW conference in March, 2018.

If you attended Moogfest in downtown Durham earlier this year, you may have experienced the augmented reality app CrossComm developed for the event. It allowed users to view the event through a smartphone web cam, receiving augmented data as they did so.

Following tranformative shifts in computing

In a phone interview with Shin, WRAL Techwire asked him for a simple definition of VR and AR.

“Virtual reality, the most common term in the public mind, replaces one’s perspective of reality with a computer generated one,” Shin explained. “Augmented reality replaces it with computer generated data and images.”

While immersive VR requires a device such as a headset or a holodeck like space, you can experience AR via the camera on your smartphone with computer generated images.”

Shin said 10-employee CrossComm, currently located in the American Underground@Main, has been around since 1998 and Netscape One. “We’ve been looking for and leveraging every major shift in transformative computer technology since. We developed one of the first 500 iPhone apps and adopted Android from version one.”

About three years ago, “We saw a shift toward the special and visual and artificial intelligence (AI). So, even though our background is in web and mobile app development, we started an internal lab on AI, AR,.and VR.”

AI and AR work hand-in-hand Shin said. To provide heads-up displays that augment reality, whether though a smartphone camera or other device, you need computer vision. “The computer needs to know what you’re looking at before it can augment the world around you,” Shin said.

Once the computer knows what it is looking at, “You can use your phone camera to look at everyday objects and the computer knows what it is, a person, a water bottle. Then it can translate a word from Spanish using Google translate, or show additional information about something from Wikipedia or access a data base for additional product information if you’re shopping.”

It is the same technology underlying driverless cars, he added.

Neural networks depend on data fed to them

Even though AI technology has greatly improved, the neural networks it uses for machine learning have been around for decades. The reason its hot today is largely because the Internet collects tons of statistics and data that can be used by the computer program to make predictions.

“Now that we have a profile of the entire human race via the Internet, we can train neural networks to recognize patterns in the data.”

He acknowledges that the neural networks senses tons of variables, but it can’t tell us which ones it used to come to a conclusion. That’s one of many ethical and cultural issues Shin says we need to think about in the AI, AR, and VR space.

Because the neural network cannot tell you what data it used to make a prediction, “There is no accountability,” Shin said. “The scary part is that AI networks rely on the data fed to them. What if they rely on faulty data to make a prediction? What if they used prejudiced or biased data?”

Think about ethical, priacy, and security issues now

There are ethical problems we need to wrestle with, Shin points out. What if a neural network used by a life insurance company uses faulty data that says you’re not a good bet, for example. What can you do if the network can’t tell you which variables it used to make that decision?

While Google glasses shifted to Enterprise uses, Shin thinks one of the big three tech giants, Google, Microsoft, or Apple, will come out with an augmented reality device, probably glasses again. Walking through the world, you would see real time information – lower prices at another store if you’re grocery shopping, maps showing where you are, and more.

AR and VR applications already have significant applications relevant to businesses and organizations, Shin noted. “It will take off in the Enterprise even before consumer uses.” It is already being used in construction, architecture, manufacturing, design, engineering and about anything dealing with visual and data models.

“But I do think thought leaders and technology leaders need to start thinking about what a special computing future looks like. We have to think about how to make the technology useful to humanity and not a hindrance to us. I’m passionate about how to make technology useful to us.”

He concluded, “What kind of security and privacy issues will we have to think through when a computer is continually processing the world around us. We need to think about these issues now before we’re behind the eight-ball.”

  • VIDEO: CrossComm’s YouTube channel provides background on many of these topics. Watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFNkmnYmFSE&feature=youtu.be