You finally managed to get everyone together in one place. Friends you haven’t seen for ages, scattered around the world, smile and talk to each other across a table – a virtual table, in a virtual world, seen through a virtual reality headset. This is the future of socialising, according to Facebook.

The social network announced several new products at its F8 Developer Conference in San Jose this week, with a strong focus on virtual and augmented reality.

Facebook Spaces, its new VR app, lets you chat with friends in a 3D virtual environment. It’s the first real glimpse of how Facebook plans to make virtual reality a social tool after buying Oculus VR in 2014.

“VR is a technology that gives us something no other technology has before – a magical feeling of presence, the sense that we’re really there together even when we’re apart,” said head of social VR Rachel Franklin as she announced the app.

Cartoon you

To create this feeling, Facebook Spaces lets you customise a cartoon avatar to represent you in the virtual world based on one of your Facebook photos. You can bring multiple people into the virtual space at the same time and chat as you usually would, using Oculus Touch controllers to move your avatar’s arms.

The VR app also draws on the wealth of content connected to your Facebook profile. You can overlay 360 images or videos from your Facebook feed onto the virtual space to plunge you and your avatar friends into a personalised environment, and flick through 2D photos with them.

Friends who don’t have Oculus Rift- and the headset is pretty expensive at around £500 – can be added to the conversation through video chat on Facebook Messenger. There’s also an MS Paint-style drawing tool so you can doodle in the air, though the focus of the app is on just hanging out and chatting.

This kind of social VR is essentially a “fancier version of Skype”, says , a social neuroscientist at University College London. VR offers an advantage over video messaging, she says, because it can let us more easily communicate using nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and gestures.

Wooden

But consumer headsets don’t capture motion or expressions well enough to make it look realistic in the virtual world. “Without capturing faces, you get VR characters which look very wooden and people often don’t like them,” says Hamilton.

In addition to virtual reality, Facebook is banking on augmented reality playing a role in our future communications. While its new AR tools are little more than Snapchat-like filters for your smartphone camera, the company clearly envisages a transition to wearable AR devices. “We want glasses, eventually contact lenses, that look and feel normal but let us overlay all kinds of information and digital objects on top of the real world,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the conference.

With developments in AI, augmented reality will ultimately be so good that you won’t be able to tell augmented visuals from reality, says at the University of Southern California.

But there needs to be a hardware revolution before social VR and AR can become mainstream, he says. Headsets are still expensive and uncomfortable, and cause some users to feel dizzy or nauseous. “Until this has been solved, I find it hard to believe that the content would be so good and so engaging that people would want to use it on a daily basis,” says Li.

And it remains to be seen how much social value these tools can really provide. At one rather poignant moment in the conference, Zuckerberg demonstrated using AR to add a second coffee cup into an image of a dining table – “so it doesn’t look like you’re having breakfast alone”.

Augmented reality has so far often been delivered through a wearable device: Microsoft’s HoloLens uses a headset, and the much-hyped Florida-based start-up Magic Leap is expected to launch its AR headset later this year. In February, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hinted that the company is interested in developing AR eyewear alongside its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. “The goal is to make VR and AR what we all want it to be: glasses small enough to take anywhere,” he .

AR for anyone

Yi Yeting’s bones hurt. It feels, he says, like ants are eating him from the inside out. Yeting has leukaemia, caused by exposure to benzene, a carcinogen, while working at a container company. He has already been to hospital 28 times for chemotherapy treatments when we see him there once again, putting on a brave face as his wife and son visit.

Yi’s story is one of many in Complicit, a documentary by Heather White and Lynn Zhang that premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London recently. The film gives a voice to factory workers exposed to toxic chemicals while making smartphones and other electronics in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

Xiao Ya is another victim. One of hundreds of millions of Chinese “migrant workers” who left her rural home to seek a better life in the city, she came to Guangzhou as a teenager, entranced by a place she imagined as a paradise.

She began work on a smartphone production line, spending 15-hour shifts in a poorly ventilated space wiping phone screens to polish them. Xiao was poisoned by n-hexane, a solvent used as a cleaning agent that can cause nerve damage and paralysis. She and her sick co-workers didn’t know about the dangers of the chemicals they were using until they were hospitalised.

The filmmakers found subjects simply by walking into hospitals near the electronics factories. Others were directed to them by Yi, who is also an activist, campaigning against the use of benzene and n-hexane and helping sick workers get compensation to cover their medical care.

Occupational disease

This is not easy, as it requires sick workers to have an official diagnosis of occupational disease – which companies are naturally loath to admit to. One worker says that when he sought an occupational disease diagnosis, company officials accompanied him to the health authorities, carrying a bag of money.

Often, says White, workers simply don’t know where to turn when they fall ill. They are young and don’t know their rights. “A lot of them are just bought bus tickets by their employer to ship them back to their village,” she says.

In a crucial scene in the film a woman – who did not want to appear on camera for fear of losing her job or medical insurance – reveals a rare piece of paperwork: a document from health authorities that explicitly states she has an occupational disease caused by exposure to benzene.

The sickness and struggle takes its toll. The young workers came to the city to improve their lot, and for many leaving is not an option. Shang Jiaojiao, poisoned by n-hexane like Xiao Ya, recalls that even when she found herself in hospital and unable to walk, she wouldn’t tell her mother. She sobs as she explains that she left home so as not to be a burden on her family, and now that’s exactly what she has become.

We see 26-year-old Ming Kunpeng, who has leukaemia after being exposed to benzene, sit silently on his hospital bed next to his father. Doesn’t he want to go home, asks his father. His grandmother would like to see him.  Ming later kills himself, aged 27.

Meanwhile, those fighting for their rights face brutality from the Chinese system. Protestors are arrested and activist organisations have their offices raided. Yi’s group is forced to move location several times.

“Those who are the most vulnerable and in need of resources and support from society are those who are the targets of the crackdown the government is waging,” says White. “They’re basically doing the work for the corporations.”
This, she says, is why consumers need to step up. There has already been positive action, with Samsung announcing an $85 million compensation fund for workers with occupational illnesses including leukaemia and lymphoma. Apple, meanwhile, banned benzene and n-hexane “in all final assembly manufacturing processes” from 2014. But Complicit reveals that this is not enough.

“When you have global subcontracting and outsourcing with such arms-length relationships between suppliers, subcontractors and brands, it’s very easy for the brands to look the other way,” says White. “There’s no accountability and no legal liability for what’s happening with their workforce.”

Western consumers can use their voice, she says, to bolster campaigners’ efforts and force major brands to take responsibility. “I definitely think things can change, and the pressure needs to be sustained.”

At the end of the film, we learn that Xiao Ya is out of hospital after three years and has returned home. Yi has left his job for health reasons, after still more chemotherapy.

Yi’s dedication is a guiding thread through the film and acts as a call to arms to viewers. We see him advising other workers even in his hospital pyjamas, and giving speeches to international conferences remotely when he is barred from travel.

The filmmakers remind us of an Apple advertising slogan: “The people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Complicit by Heather White and Lynn Zhang, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, London

A HELMET display promises to give bikers eyes in the back of their head.

John Hale, founder of the , decided to make a better rear-view system for motorcyclists after too many close calls on his own bike. Mirrors didn’t show enough detail behind him, and distracted him from looking ahead.

“The inherent problem with motorcycles is that the mirrors just do not work very well,” Hale says. “You’ve got a very small reflected image and, because of the position of the mirrors, mostly you’re seeing your elbows.”

Zona puts a small backlit display into motorcycle helmets. An adjustable arm lets riders place it just below or above their eye, in their peripheral vision. A rear-facing camera on the back of the bike streams live video via Wi-Fi to a helmet-mounted receiver. The images are processed and stabilised before they reach the display, with accelerometers and gyroscopes to accommodate for the bike’s movements.

One glance at the display gives the rider a wide view of the road behind them. Although the screen is just next to the user’s face, Zona’s optics fool the eye into focusing at a more comfortable distance of around 3 metres. The system also stores the footage so it can be examined after an accident, for example.

Hale says the display, which was unveiled at a motorcycle show last month, has garnered interest from a broad range of motorcyclists, including scooter riders and touring bikers.

“The screen is next to the user’s face, but the optics allow the eye to focus at a comfortable distance”

A device that fits into any helmet is likely to appeal to motorcyclists more than previous attempts at smart helmets, says at Coventry University, UK. But he says Zona-using bikers should still check their mirrors and do the “lifesaver” check, turning their heads to check blind spots. “I’d see this as perhaps an additional resource,” he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Helmet vision could avert bike crashes”

A £1 million engineering prize has been awarded to the creators of digital imaging technology now used in everything from medical sensors to smartphone cameras.

The winners of the 2017 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering were announced at a ceremony at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London on Wednesday, and are , , Nobukazu Teranishi, and . They worked on three technologies that made the cameras we use today possible.

Smith worked with Willard Boyle, now deceased, to develop the charged couple device (CCD) at Bell Labs in the US in the 1970s. Tompsett then realised this could have applications as an image sensor. CCD sensors were used in early digital cameras, and work by producing electrical signals when they detect light.

Teranishi invented the pinned photodiode (PPD) in 1980, while at the NEC Corporation in Japan. The PPD is a type of semiconductor that made it possible to capture images of higher quality.

The following decade, Fossum and his team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked on  complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor technology. Originally developed to make cameras used on spacecraft smaller and lighter, CMOS sensors require much less power than CCD sensors. This has led to the development of small cameras in smartphones and even “pill cameras” that can image the inside of the body when swallowed.

Trillions of devices

Speaking at a press conference before the award ceremony, Tompsett said that the strangest application he had heard of for the image sensing technology came from a group who wanted to insert a camera into the uterus of a sheep, “to observe ovulation or something”. Fossum said he had never imagined the technology becoming popular for taking selfies or “silly cat videos”.

Together, the winners’ contributions to image sensors have “truly transformed the way we look at the world,” said Christopher Snowden, chairman of the award’s judging panel, noting that “there are “literally trillions of these devices in the world today.”

Fossum, who is currently working on image sensors that count individual photons, says the technology will continue to develop to capture images of even higher quality and make more and more applications possible.

“A key purpose of ElliQ is to act as an easy interface to access existing services such as social media”