Tech Talk: Augmented reality in Israel

Today, creating immersive media solutions for augmented reality and virtual reality requires a unique skill set.

By ARIEL SHAPIRA
Night falls over Beersheba’s city center, which is quickly becoming a hi-tech hub for Israel (photo credit: BEERSHEBA MUNICIPALITY)
Night falls over Beersheba’s city center, which is quickly becoming a hi-tech hub for Israel
(photo credit: BEERSHEBA MUNICIPALITY)
Byond, which provides services for brands and media companies such as McCann, Coca-Cola, Samsung, HP and Turner, is officially launching its Byond Immersive Suite, in an open beta release. This launch comes after two years of development and six months of closed beta testing.
Today, creating immersive media solutions for augmented reality and virtual reality requires a unique skill set. In most cases, brands and agencies must employ studios to develop their VR and AR applications, which can lead to long, tedious and costly ad-hoc processes.
Additionally, the AR and VR industry is fragmented by dozens of devices, such as Samsung Gear, HTC Vive and Google Daydream, as well as cardboard and mobile devices, each with their own protocol.
The power of the Byond Immersive Suite is that it allows companies to effortlessly create, upload and publish engaging augmented- and virtual-reality content in minutes with no coding skills required.
Additionally, much like building a website, Byond has made the process of creating fully branded AR, VR and 360 content in the media and entertainment space cost-effective and efficient, as it allows creators to dynamically create and publish across all of today’s leading AR and VR platforms.
As part of the Immersive Suite, Byond has created solutions tailored to specific verticals, such as consumer engagement for brands, media consumption for publishers, virtual store builder for e-commerce businesses, as well as immersive VR and AR tools for learning, training and development.
“Byond offers a platform as a service to empower brands and agencies to create their own personalized interactive and immersive experiences,” Byond founder and CTO Eran Galil said. “By using the Byond Immersive Suite, we significantly reduce the complexity of creating, publishing and analyzing new-media applications across all multiple-display and interaction devices.”
Byond’s initial closed beta phased reached 300,000 viewers and over two million immersive interactions across a wide array of industries and platforms. With the release of Byond’s open beta phase, the company plans on scaling up the usage of their immersive-reality content-creation platform.
Byond is now inviting businesses in the travel, media and entertainment industries to create their first immersive experience and publish it using their Immersive Suite.
Byond has offices in Los Angeles, Israel and Korea and provides unique VR-creation solutions worldwide.
Information taken from www.prweb.com.
Security protection
The new Quad9 Domain Name System (DNS) service, IBM Security, Packet Clearing House and the Global Cyber Alliance recently launched a free service designed to give consumers and businesses added privacy and security protection as they access the Internet. The new Quad9 DNS service helps protects users from accessing millions of malicious Internet sites known to steal personal information, infect users with ransomware and malware or conduct fraudulent activity.
Businesses and consumers can safeguard their online privacy as the Quad9 DNS (9.9.9.9) service is engineered to not store, correlate or otherwise leverage any personally identifiable information (PII) from its users. In contrast, other DNS services often capture information about the websites consumers visit, devices they use and where they live for marketing or other purposes.
Quad9 provides an automated security solution at a time when it is needed most by consumers. Recent polling of consumers across the US, UK, France and Germany found that just 27% of consumers think they are capable of staying ahead of the latest online threats, and only 14% have ever changed the DNS settings on their computer.
To take advantage of the security and privacy of Quad9, users simply need to reconfigure a single setting on their devices to use 9.9.9.9 as their DNS server.
The protections delivered via Quad9 cover not only traditional PCs and laptops, but can also be extended to Internet-connected devices (TVs, DVRs) or Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, such as smart thermostats and connected home appliances. These devices often do not receive important security updates and are also difficult to secure with traditional antivirus tools, yet remain connected to the Internet, leaving them vulnerable to hackers.
How Quad9 works
With the launch of Quad9, consumers and businesses have a way of protecting themselves that is both effective and affordable with minimal configuration changes. Quad9 makes using security-threat intelligence a hands-off effort and is designed to give users “automated immunity” from known Internet threats by automatically blocking access to known malicious websites.
Every website has a unique numerical address, known as an IP address. To make it easier to navigate the Internet, those numeric addresses are translated to company names or words we can remember, understand and search. Quad9 helps translate those numeric addresses into the URLs we are all familiar with, while adding in a layer of security and privacy before users land on the Web address.
Whenever a Quad9 user clicks on a website link or types an address into a Web browser, Quad9 checks the site against IBM X-Force’s threat intelligence database of more than 40 billion analyzed Web pages and images. The service also taps feeds from 18 additional threat intelligence partners.
Information taken from www.prnewswire.com.