Google has announced new experimental features for developers to use on the Lenovo Mirage Solo, which is a Daydream virtual reality headset. It added new APIs to support positional controller tracking with six degrees of freedom (6DoF), which enables users to move their hands more naturally in VR.
It also added see-through mode, which enables users to see what is in front of them in the physical world while wearing a headset.
Finally, it added the ability to open any Android app on the headset so that users can use their favorite games and tools in VR. Developers will be able to add VR support to existing 2D applications.
Yubico launches the YubiKey 5 Series
Hardware security key provider Yubico has announced the launch of the YubiKey 5 Series, which are multi-protocol security keys that support FIDO2/WebAuthn. According to the company, this will enable organizations to replace password-based authentication with hardware-based authentication, which is stronger.
“Innovation is core to all we do, from the launch of the original YubiKey ten years ago, to the concept of one authentication device across multiple services, and today as we are accelerating into the passwordless era,” said Stina Ehrensvard, CEO and founder of Yubico. “The YubiKey 5 Series can deliver single-factor, two-factor, or multi-factor secure login, supporting many different uses cases on different platforms for different verticals with a variety of authentication scenarios.”
Spring Framework 5.1 now generally available
Spring Framework 5.1 has now entered general availability. The framework requires JDK 8 or higher, and supports JDK 11 as its next long-term support release. This version contains initial refinements for GraalVM compatibility and it integrates with Reactor Californium and Hibernate ORM 5.3.
The core container adds functional bean definition refinements for both Java and Kotlin. Its internal reflection use is now optimized for improved startup time and uses less heap memory.
Kindred launches open-source reinforcement learning toolkit
Kindred has announced the launch of SenseAct, which is an open-source toolkit for creating reinforcement learning tasks on physical robots. It was designed with the goal of providing robotics developers and research with a consistent interface that controls for time delays, which is a factor that simulation environments aren’t hindered by.
“This initial release focuses on tasks that explore timing, control frequency, action representation, partial observation, and sparse reward. We intend to update SenseAct as we define new tasks to reflect challenges in developing efficient, general, intuitive behaviors for our current and future products,” said James Bergstra, head of AI research at Kindred
