Category: Uncategorized

Categories
Uncategorized

EON Reality Grant

GRANT PROGRAM

for more info and to access the application form click here

I. PURPOSE

Grant Guarantee Program for Post-Pandemic Recovery Assistance
EON Reality’s grant program provides academic institutions and governmental organizations with support to fund the launch of new XR programs in the post-pandemic world. Based on decades of experience working with governments and intergovernmental agencies, EON Reality helps to identify and locate grants to cover a significant amount of the cost of a new XR Center for qualifying partners. The EON Reality Inc (EON) Grants Program is intended to provide support for the following purposes:

  • Post Pandemic Recovery
  • XR Deployment at Scale
  • Social Development
  • Localized Content creation

II. ELIGIBILITY

Only invited candidates are eligible for the EON Grant Guarantee Program. The Program has been developed for organizations that are seeking XR based EdTech solutions at Scale and lack funding to launch organization wide rollouts of XR programs in the post-pandemic world.

III. HOW DOES IT WORK?

If the Application is approved, EON Learn of Life issues a Certificate of Approval and EON Reality and the Applicant sign an Offer Letter to set up an EON-XR Center as follows:

  • EON Reality delivers the EON-XR platform for up to 5000 students and 750 work/internships upfront as per the EON-XR Center equipment list.
  • EON guarantees 100% of the EON-XR Center funding, 78% with an EON Co investment and 22% with a Donation Guarantee from EON Reality Learn for Life.
  • In conjunction with EON Reality’s delivery of EON-XR platform, the Applicant pays a one-time Grant Guarantee Fee of 1% of the EON-XR Center value ($254,122).
  • Once the Offer Letter is signed, EON and the Applicant aim to secure an additional grant of $6.7 million of which $1.3 million will be provided to the Applicant as a cash grant to expand the XR operation and the balance covers the donation guarantee amount.

IV. GRANT PROCESS

Only applications received by April 30th, 2021 will be considered. The seven steps grant procedure is as follows:

  1. Introduction Meeting – Introduction of the EON-XR Center Grant Guarantee Program (GGP).
  2. Application Submission – Submission of Online Application, there are no financial obligations, binding commitments, or any liabilities with submitting the application.
  3. Committee Determination – All applications are reviewed by the GGP Committee and subject to determination within 10 days after receipt.
  4. Certificate of Approval – If the application is approved, a Certificate is issued for an amount between $5-25 million USD to establish an EON-XR center for up to 5000 students and 750 work/internships based on the merits of the Application.
  5. XR Solution Meeting – Deep Dive EON-XR Platform demonstration for XR deployment at scale.
  6. Offer Letter – After being approved, the Applicant receives the Offer Letter. The Applicant has up to 45 days to approve or decline the Offer Letter and Grant Guarantee.
  7. Delivery and Implementation Plan – EON delivers the EON-XR Center along with the pedagogical and technical XR experts and start implementing the Academic EON-XR Program.

The Certificate of Approval is valid for 60 days. If the Offer Letter is not signed by both parties within 60 days, the Certificate of Approval expires, and the grant is repatriated to the Learn for Life Foundation for the next Applicant.

V. REVIEW AND AWARD

The Grant Guarantee Program Committee, consisting of EON’s Advisory members, will determine the overall quality of each Grant application. Applications will be evaluated in accordance with the criteria outlined below. Additional consideration will be given to the Applicant’s potential for carrying out the project, the time commitment, and the adequacy of the justifications presented.

All applications will be forwarded to the Grant Guarantee Program Committee for final approval and be reviewed within 10 days after receipt. If recommended for approval, it will be assigned a score by the Committee which will determine the amount to be received (within a range of $5-25 million USD) based on the merits of the application.

There are no financial obligations, binding commitments, or any liabilities with submitting the application. If your organization gets approved, you will receive a certificate which is valid for 2 months. During this time, you can approve or decline the offer letter and grant. After receiving your application, EON Reality will take time to go through the agreement with you.

For additional information, contact:
EON Reality Inc.
18 Technology Drive, Suite 110
Irvine, CA 92618
United States
949.460.2000
dan@eonreality.com

VI. EVALUATION CRITERIA

Once your application is admissible and eligible, EON’s Grant Guarantee Program Committee follow the below evaluation criteria during the evaluation.
Proposals are evaluated and scored against selection and award criteria – organization excellence, Post pandemic Recovery impact, quality and quantity of the XR Deployment at Scale, Social Development & focus on creation of job opportunities for youth and build entrepreneurship opportunities in digital economy and Localized Content creation.

VII. SCORES

The Grant Guarantee Program Committee will score each award criterion on a scale from 0 to 5 (half point scores may be given):
0 – Proposal fails to address the criterion
1 – Poor. The criterion is inadequately addressed or there are serious inherent weaknesses.
2 – Fair. The proposal broadly addresses the criterion, but there are significant weaknesses.
3 – Good. The proposal addresses the criterion well, but a number of shortcomings are present.
4 – Very good. The proposal addresses the criterion very well, but a small number of shortcomings are present.
5 – Excellent. The proposal successfully addresses all relevant aspects of the criterion. Any shortcomings are minor.

Categories
Events Uncategorized

UCLA Tech Fair Brief Recap

TechFair 2019 Graphic Banner Image

 

Tech Fair graphic banner

On October 23rd, the UC Learning Centers hosted the annual tech fair for students who were interested in playing with equipment relating to AR/VR. It was also a great opportunity to expose them to various use cases and to encourage them to explore different careers options within STEM. The following are some shots taken at the fair as students trickled in to connect with various booths and play with the demoes.

A crowd of students gather around two virtual reality headset demoes
A crowd of students gather around two virtual reality headset demoes
A group of students huddled around the UCLA Makerspace Booth

A group of students huddled around the UCLA Makerspace Booth
UCLA Makerspace booth with the Oculus Rift demoes in the background.

UCLA Makerspace booth with the Oculus Rift demoes in the background.
Students waiting in line in front of the DJ's stage to have their portraits digitally drawn in real-time.

Students waiting in line in front of the DJ’s stage to have their portraits digitally drawn in real-time.
Closer shot of students using the Oculus Quests.

Closer shot of students using the Oculus Quests.
UCLA Makerspace booth with the Oculus Rift demoes in the background.

UCLA Makerspace booth with the Oculus Rift demoes in the background.

Previous
Next

Along with Makerspace, UCLA Esports, Bird, and other vendors, there was a dedicated booth to showcase Augmented Reality in which Anthony Caldwell (the Manager and Resident Technologist at the Scholarly Innovation Lab in YRL) deployed using Vectorworks. Many of the students were wowed by the ease of use as we showed them how to easily upload a 3D model created through Vectoworks into the cloud where it takes anywhere from 10 – 30 seconds of construction until it appear on your IPAD through their dedicated app. 

More companies are finding it lucrative and time-saving to invest in integrated features that lower the entry level to immersive experiences. It’s important for students to learn about the ever-changing technological space. Tools like those presented allow users to spend more time creating and scoping the content rather than wrestling with the interface itself.

Categories
Uncategorized

The Laboratory of Neuromodulation & Neuroimaging: Your Brain’s Never Looked so Good

At some point I’m going to sound like a broken record when I keep saying how amazing the experiences of each of these visits are. There are only so many superlatives that can be thrown around until they start to lose their meaning. Before that happens, however, we should reserve some for Dr Nanthia Suthana’s lab, because it was an amazing tour with a remarkably generous host and obliging postdocs, each ready to engage with visitors to discuss their work and their equipment. (To say that they were incredibly knowledgeable about everything would be to state the obvious.)

One of Dr Suthana’s research labs.

Visitors are immediately struck by the large, open space surrounded by 24 infrared base stations placed throughout the room. These sensors are integrated with all of the VR equipment in the space, and are used to not only set virtual boundaries, but are also meant to track markers. They are capable of sub-millimeter motion tracking, so don’t move. Or do move, depending on what they need.

The light grey balls on the top of the headset are the kinds of markers that the infrared base stations are tracking. These markers bounce back the infrared signals that are then picked up by the base stations to keep track of the subject’s movement. Entire motion tracking suits are in the space to allow for even greater motion capturing.

The entire space boasts an impressive amount of hardware. Some of it includes:

  • 24 OptiTrack base stations
  • A Magic Leap AR headset
  • Microsoft Hololens
  • HTV Vive complete with a Tobii eye tracking attachment
  • Samsung VR Headset with SMI eye tracking
  • Motion capture suits of various sizes
  • Eva Artec Scanner and automatic rotating platform
  • BioPac – state of the art biometric measurements
  • ANT Neuro eego sport 64 channel mobile EEG system 
They also have this eye tracking headset from Pupil Labs, made to look even goofier because the goof in the picture doesn’t know why WordPress is flipping his photo and can’t seem to figure out how to rotate the damn thing. (For the record, I’ve since figured it out but I’m leaving this as is because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to call myself a goof.)

So what do they do with all this stuff? Well, a whole hell of a lot as it turns out. For starters, the Vive headset station is a great example of cross-campus collaboration. The environments created for the Vive are for educational purposes. Yea, you guessed it, they’re teaching folks about the brain.

This particular program was design by Dr Rebecca Allen, professor of 3D media art whose work centers around creative expression in virtual and augmented reality. In this screenshot you can see that I’ve already taken apart different pieces of the brain, each part named as though scientists picked random words from a Latin dictionary.

Here I have detached yet another chunk from the brain. The model was quite large, and I was able to virtually place my head in the middle of the brain, using the controllers to highlight different sections of the brain. They claimed that by this time the person would have died from all the missing parts of their brain, but I’m not too sure.

The Magic Leap was probably my favorite experience. I’d never really done AR before, and this was probably one of the best environments in which to do it. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have 24 OptiTrack base stations at home. The 18 that I have just don’t seem to cut it.

Here I am, wearing the Magic Leap, deftly and bravely defending everyone from attacking robots while they just chit-chat in blissful ignorance of the imminent danger all around them. Let me just say that if you’re an alien robot climbing out of the walls you better watch your ass – I’m a crack shot.


In addition to various AR environments that I got to experience with the Magic Leap, the most impressive thing about the lab is the research that they are conducting.

Patients with epilepsy are sometimes given an implant that resides within the skull, on the brain, with wires that go into the brain itself. Now, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m not a neuroscientist – I don’t even know if I spelled that correctly. But from what I could gather, these wires are meant to stimulate the brain in such a way as to alleviate epileptic episodes.

That’s all well and good, but these implants were traditionally just one-way streets. Nowadays, many implants are of a new, recently-FDA-approved, variety. These implants perform the same functions as the aforementioned ones (that is, if I got that right in the first place), but are a two-way street. They can be connected to from the outside, and they can send data about what’s going on inside the brain. Again, not a neuroscientist, but basically these wires send electric signals into the brain but also can read and send out information about what’s going on deep inside the brain.

The idea is that by reading these epilepsy implants while subjects are engaging in various VR environments, Dr Suthana and her researchers can monitor brain activity when a person is up and about, engaged instead of lying in a coffin getting an MRI scan. Here’s Cory Inman, Post-Doc in the lab, wearing the AR headset to shoot robots or pet penguins.

Some of the environments developed for this implant research revolve around memory. I, of course, passed the test with flying colors but I don’t remember what my score was.

Subjects would wear special caps that could read the information being sent by the implant’s wires that were deep in the brain. The wires were in the hippocampus or hippopotamus or something to study memory as subjects engaged in an AR environment designed to test their memory.

Special thanks to Cory Inman, PostDoc researcher, Diane Villaroman the resident programmer analyst, and Sonja Hiller, research assistant and lab manager.

Definitely some interesting research going on here, and if you can think of some kind of partnership or research project, don’t email me, email Dr Suthana.

css.php