SeeSaw Labs

Category: archive

Posted on

Is Artificial Intelligence Right for Your Business?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is something of a lofty, tech buzzword. It’s easy to imagine it as a solution reserved for huge companies using supercomputers to sift through massive stores of data. For example, IBM’s Watson is often what comes to mind when people think about AI.

Further Reaching Than You Think

In truth, AI is very general, and can be applied to many solutions and applications. In fact, you likely experience AI on a daily basis, and may not even know it.

If you shop on Amazon, you’re seeing AI at work producing other suggested purchases. If you use Google Maps, you’re seeing AI at work predicting traffic patterns for route suggestions. If you use Pandora or Spotify, you are seeing AI at work making music selection suggestions. AI is used for speech recognition and natural language processing to help Google Voice, Siri, and Alexa answer your questions.  Job search engines are leveraging AI to help better understand industry specific jargon and acronyms to improve your search results. This list goes on and on….

Easier Than Ever to Integrate

Technology cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are changing the game when it comes to the ability to integrate and leverage AI in your custom software solutions. They all offer specialized AI services that can be readily  integrated and built upon. These well documented, constantly updated tools make enterprise level AI technology accessible to non-enterprise businesses.

How We’re Leveraging This Internally for Estimation

Providing accurate estimates can be a pain point for any business. Combing through past projects to find similar examples and plugging relevant scope information into highly customized excel sheets can be time consuming. Often, the job of estimating is put on more senior members of the team who simply make a “gut estimate” for the sake of time.

Fully automating the estimation process can be challenging though as there are many factors that can be hard to account for (such as desire to work with a new client or a known to be easy client relationship). In this case, simply augmenting the process is of huge value, bringing relevant information to your fingertips and providing easy access to those self-derived formulas that will give you the information you need as an informed starting point.

At SeeSaw Labs, we’ve augmented our own estimation process. A dashboard allows project requirements to be input into a linear-regression, machine learning algorithm which populates a list of our most similar past projects. That information then helps up populate the necessary inputs to generate an estimated range for time, resources, and cost.

What This Means for Your Business

Automating or augmenting your internal processes with AI has never been more straight-forward and cost-effective. For labor intensive, repetitive tasks these cloud provided services can offer tools to abstract away the dirty work from your day-to-day processes or customer journey.

Here are a few examples of practical applications that may be applicable to your business:

  • Customer support or product finding chatbot
  • Categorization of large amounts of data
  • Image and  face recognition in photos and videos
  • Anomaly detection and notification in customer behavior data
  • Size dimensions and weight estimation from photos
  • “Most Similar” matching for cost estimations

 

How We Can Do It For You

The above list goes on and on. We’d love to learn more about your business and help determine whether AI might be beneficial to your bottom line. The most useful solutions are those built specifically to serve your business’s unique process and needs. Let’s chat about AI and how it may fit within your business to alleviate unnecessary tedium, improve an existing product, or simple bring the information you need, right to your fingertips.

How We’re Leveraging This Internally for Estimation

Providing accurate estimates can be a pain point for any business. Combing through past projects to find similar examples and plugging relevant scope information into highly customized excel sheets can be time consuming. Often, the job of estimating is put on more senior members of the team who simply make a “gut estimate” for the sake of time.

Fully automating the estimation process can be challenging though as there are many factors that can be hard to account for (such as desire to work with a new client or a known to be easy client relationship). In this case, simply augmenting the process is of huge value, bringing relevant information to your fingertips and providing easy access to those self-derived formulas that will give you the information you need as an informed starting point.

At SeeSaw Labs, we’ve augmented our own estimation process. A dashboard allows project requirements to be input into a linear-regression, machine learning algorithm which populates a list of our most similar past projects. That information then helps up populate the necessary inputs to generate an estimated range for time, resources, and cost.

How We Can Do It For You

The most useful solutions are those built specifically to serve your business’s unique process and needs. Let’s chat about AI and how it may fit within your business to alleviate unnecessary tedium, improve an existing product, or simple bring the information you need, right to your fingertips.

Posted on

Everyday Wearables and the Future of Augmented Reality

As a greater number of device manufacturers enter the Augmented and Virtual Reality space, some interesting questions and philosophies of adoption are raised.
What can AR wearables do that my phone or watch can’t already do? Will the manufacturers develop the software or create a platform or others to build on? Who will actually wear these things?

We recently stumbled across and a great video from The Verge checking out Vaunt, Intel’s new Smart Glasses. We’re loving their very pragmatic approach to the wearable and see it as a big contender in the space for early adoption. Here’s the video and some our additional thoughts below:

 

Who will actually wear these things?
This is actually one of the most interesting aspects of the Vaunt. Intel’s approach is design first, focusing on breaking the “I look like a dork” barrier that plagued Google Glass. We agree that one of the keys to adoption will be wearables that don’t interfere socially.

What can AR wearables do that my phone can’t already do?
Much like smart watches, the potential here seems to be providing contextually relevant information without the need to visually disengage. Smart watches are great at keeping your phone in your pocket when you receive notifications, but they do still keep you looking at your watch like you need to be getting somewhere. Grocery lists, driving directions, restaurant reviews (of the restaurant you’re currently walking past)…these are pieces of information we’d love to have access to without having to avert our glance.

Will the manufacturers develop the software or create a platform or others to build on?
Intel brings up a great point here too. Much like with early smartphones, it can be difficult to anticipate the advancements that will come from a new platform (who could imagine Uber or Venmo in 2007?). While solid core software will be the key to the primary use cases of initial adoption, an open, easy-to-develop-for (we’re looking at you Apple) platform will be what really advances the field as it grows.

Posted on

SeeSaw Labs Virtual Park

For our latest Lab project, we’ve been working on creating a Virtual Park where we can experiment across multiple platforms. For HTC Vive and Oculus builds, we’ve been working at combining some more advanced interaction methods (like climbing, using objects while teleporting, etc.). For mobile builds where interaction is often constrained by the lack of a controller, we’ve been experimenting with other ways to more naturally transport the user and allow them to explore the space.

The space features elements inspired by some of my recent travels and is a great example of how real life spaces can help shape better virtual ones. One of the most surprising things I’ve learned so far, through the experience of modeling after a real life space, is how incredibly well VR communicates the sense of scale. Anytime I felt myself stuck on a “design decision” a pop into VR mode to explore quickly gave me the insight I needed to answer “where that umbrella should go?” or “how tall should that mountain be?”. In my opinion, one of the most powerful use cases for VR right now is communicating projects of scale and depth. Photos just can’t quite produce the feeling of standing in a canyon or looking over the edge of a bridge—I look forward to expanding more on this concept in future projects.

Update: Check out the experience on Viveport

Posted on

The Traveling VR Developer

When one says “Virtual Reality developer”, you might imagine a large open space, tracking units mounted to the ceiling, and a massive PC with cables strewn everywhere around it…and you’d have been right just a few years ago. Now, super-powerful laptops and compact systems like the HTC Vive make development possible even in some of the most unlikely of locations.

As the VR Lead for SeeSaw Labs, I can’t (and would never want to) take a break from working on our latest Lab; however, summer is made for travel, so on my next domestic trip, I gave it a go and packed everything up into my carry-on suitcase. Surprisingly, I was able to fit the entire setup in just a third of my smallest suitcase. Setting things up in a friend’s small NYC apartment took a little creativity, but was totally doable!

Trial-run under my belt, I’ve spent the past two months traveling and working from Europe; setting everything up has now become a breeze, but here are a few things I’ve learned along the way:

  1. Find a small bag to contain everything within your suitcase. This makes swapping from suitcase to bag to closet to drawer much, much easier without worrying about losing anything
  2. Pack a cloth to clean the lenses inside the headset to protect them.
  3. Invest in cable management (seriously, wrapping the cables around the boxes isn’t a solution).
  4. The Vive Lighthouse mounts make great stands (especially if you put them on top of a bookshelf).
  5. You can clamp the Lighthouse mounts to just about anything. All you need are a few of those small hand clamps you can get at the hardware store
  6. None of the Vive equipment requires a 110 to 220 step up (but don’t forget converters).
  7. Plan for hot weather. AC isn’t really a thing in Europe, so on hot days I had to plan to work early in the morning or at night to avoid running my laptop too hot.

Posted on

SeeSaw’s Virtual Office

SeeSaw Labs is a 100% remote team, meaning its employees and contractors are distributed around the globe. It’s what allows us to find and hire the brightest minds, regardless of their geographic locations. However, obtaining bright minds is only a fraction of what it takes to run a successful company with a fully remote team. Minds must be connected to bring about their full potential and effectiveness. How is this achieved?

– Scheduling? – Easy. Google Calendar!
– Formal communication? – Phone and Email, tried and true!
– Instant messaging? – Slack, Hipchat, Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, etc.
– File sharing? – Dropbox, Google Drive, shipping hard drives via UPS1

Why do software companies bother renting office space at all if these tools are available? Clearly there must be some element missing from this list, or we’d be seeing a lot more realtor signs downtown. We at SeeSaw argue that modern communication tools are brilliant at connecting computers, but fail miserably at connecting _humans_. If you’ve ever been a member of a conference call, you know this pain. If you’ve ever group video chatted with a room full of six people, you know this pain. If you’ve ever been sent a document to ponder in-meeting and wished you could scribble a note in the margin, you know this pain.

There is a staggering amount of silicon between your mind and your associates’ minds in a remote context. Funneling human nature into a microphone is analogous to breathing through a straw; you’ll survive, but the act can hardly be classified as enjoyable. We aim to combat this problem by leveraging cutting edge VR technology to create one of the first virtual offices.

For our first experimentation in networked VR, we built an open structure where we could demo some basic object manipulation. While we loaded our heads and hands in as simple cubes, it was a bit shocking how much life motion tracked objects have (we were actually able to scare each other and share a laugh by teleporting, hiding, and then jumping out from behind cover). To test networked object manipulation we loaded in more cubes which could be picked up, thrown and caught.  This task is especially challenging as it involves the real-time networked position and ownership handoff of the objects.

With our virtual office, your conference call is now a brick-and-mortar2 meeting place, your six person room just became a seven person room, and I now have the ability to physically hand you that TPS report that you’ve been nagging me about. Go ahead, make some comments in the margin with your virtual pen, see if I care.

—

1 We know you’re out there somewhere…and we feel for ya.
2 “vertex-and-texture” meeting place is maybe more accurate, but doesn’t carry nearly the same ring.