Sports stars are among the most photographed people on the planet today. Their on-field performance, style, gestures, and facial expressions are almost continuously captured digitally for fans, the media, commercial use, and, ultimately, posterity.

It’s not unusual for thousands of pictures to be shot from all angles at any professional encounter nowadays. So, a typical season is likely to produce virtual mountains of images for major clubs and competitions in most sports.

Now, professional baseball in Japan is turning to artificial intelligence and the cloud to handle the magnitude of what has been a laborious and time-consuming task – photo management.

Sports photos can have immediate, lasting, and lucrative value – but only if they are kept in well organized and cataloged collections that can be accessed efficiently. IMAGE WORKS – a service of iconic Japanese photo giant, Fujifilm – manages the Nippon Professional Baseball’s (NPB) cloud-based Content Images Center (CIC).

Here curators sort images, identify players in each image and tag those images with that information. It sounds simple, but the volume of imagery now being produced is huge. The usual way of managing this is simply not keeping up.

To understand why let’s look at the special place baseball holds in modern Japan where it has been a wildly popular game since the 1930s. While its rules differ slightly from those of America’s favorite pastime, the NPB is to Japan is what Major League Baseball (MLB) is to the United States. The NPB consists of two top professional leagues: the Central League and the Pacific League. Each has six teams, and each holds 146 games a season, playing on most days of the week from March to October. Each league then holds its own playoffs, which are followed by the seven-game Nippon Series Championship between the two league champions – in a spectacle similar to that of World Series in the United States.

There is a steady deluge of images from across the country for much of the year with about 3,000 images shot at each game. After the crowds have left the stadiums, curators from each team typically select about 300 photographs. They then spend around four hours manually identifying and tagging player information to each picture.

That sort of timing can be a problem in our fast-paced world. Demand for images is usually at its highest in realtime or near realtime – that is, during or immediately after, each game. Fans and media can quickly lose interest in content from a past game once a new one begins. So, not only is the job of player image identification massive, it needs to be done fast.

Now AI has stepped up to the plate. Developers from Fujifilm and Microsoft Japan have devised a solution: an automatic player name-tagging function that identifies and tags images much faster than people can, and in greater volumes.

Since June 2018, it has been in a trial that has focused on just five baseball teams – including Hiroshima Toyo Carp, which has won the Central League championship eight times, and the Nippon Series three times. The trial was such a success, the function will be used for all NPB teams in the 2019 season.

Its photo analysis capabilities are based on pre-trained AI from Microsoft Cognitive Services and a deep learning framework from the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit. Specifically, facial recognition using the Microsoft Cognitive Services Face API is combined with a unique determination model built on the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit.

This enables the classification of images into four types—batting, pitching, fielding, and base running. Often, it can also determine a player’s name when his face is not visible in an angled or side shot. Azure Durable Functions and Automatic Player Name Tagging, and a final manual check by people has reduced overall processing time from the traditional four hours to just 30 minutes.

Through its developmental stages, Microsoft Japan provided a ResNet neural network model from Microsoft Research, its research and development arm. It also held several hackathons with Fujifilm Software, which is the developer of IMAGE WORKS. Repeated verification exercises saw player recognition accuracy rates jump to over 90%.

“With the power of Azure and deep learning, we have been able to create an AI solution that makes of our photo service so much more efficient and faster. And, that is good for our customers,” said Riki Sato, Team Leader of the Advanced Solution Group at IMAGE WORKS. His colleague Daichi Hayata hailed the collaboration between IMAGE WORKS team and Microsoft Japan. “This was the first time we have dealt with deep learning, and we could do it with basic knowledge,” he said.

Fujifilm Imaging Systems now has plans to widen its use to amateur baseball leagues and then other sports. It might also be applied to the content needs outside the sports world. And, it is looking at the use of video analysis through Azure Video Indexer.

Microsoft Japan is committed to helping companies and organization embrace digital transformation with AI and is considering how to use this combination of pre-trained AI and a customizable deep learning framework in other fields, such as medicine.

Following her Nintendo Labo collaboration with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots (see video above), American singer, songwriter and actress Ariana Grande appears to have acquired her very own Switch. The only problem is, she had to sort out a few things before she could enjoy Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with a friend who was in another location.

Taking to Instagram, Ariana asked her 123 million followers how she could play Mario Kart online with a friend:

“does anybody know how to playmario kart with a friend from different locations onnintendo switch? pls dm me it’s urgent. thank u so much.”

She obviously worked out friend codes needed to be exchanged and a Nintendo Switch Online subscription was required in order to get the race up and running. After this was solved, she posted the following picture acknowledging the “crazy” powers of modern technology:

Machine learning and statistics are playing a pivotal role in finding the truth in human rights cases around the world – and serving as a voice for victims, Patrick Ball, director of Research for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, told the audience at Open Source Summit Europe.

Ball began his keynote, “Digital Echoes: Understanding Mass Violence with Data and Statistics,” with background on his career, which started in 1991 in El Salvador, building databases. While working with truth commissions from El Salvador to South Africa to East Timor, with international criminal tribunals as well as local groups searching for lost family members, he said, “one of the things that we work with every single time is trying to figure out what the truth means.”

In the course of the work, “we’re always facing people who apologize for mass violence. They tell us grotesque lies that they use to attempt to excuse this violence. They deny that it happened. They blame the victims. This is common, of course, in our world today.”

Human rights campaigns “speak with the moral voice of the victims,’’ he said. Therefore, it is critical that statistics, including machine learning, are accurate, Ball said.

He gave three examples of when statistics and machine learning proved to be useful, and where they failed.

Learn more and watch the complete presentation at The Linux Foundation

As new technologies, tools, and platforms spring to life in augmented and virtual reality, a new era of XR design and artistry is unfolding. Today, we announce the release of a project that empowers creators to spend less time explaining, editing, and re-doing XR creations, and more time being creative. Sketch 360, a Microsoft Garage project, is a UWP app  enables designers and artists to sketch and prototype 360 degree VR scenes–now available for free download in the Microsoft Store.

Innovation from Passion

The Microsoft Garage empowers employees to channel their passions into innovations that can, in turn, inspire and enable customers. Creative Experience Engineer Michael Scherotter has been nurturing a passion for using artistry to capture his adventures in traditional journals for over 30 years. “I love to travel and I’ve always found sketching such a great way to capture the essence of a place. Last year, it occurred to me that I might be able to pair my software skills with my love of sketching to build a richer, digital tool to capture the interesting places I’ve visited.”

Michael found it hard to sketch scenes in a classic or even digital notebook and crafted a new tool that would allow him to create digital, panoramic sketches viewable in all directions. “It’s very difficult to freehand draw in 360. You need to draw straight lines curved and you can’t see how your creation turns out until you’ve finished the whole thing.”

While Michael was originally inspired to build Sketch 360 to make the experience of sketching 360 environments more natural, he also quickly realized it may have other creative applications as well. “Sketch 360 is a game changer for designers working in XR,” according to Mike Pell, the Lead Designer for the Microsoft Garage and a big proponent of the possibilities for designers in XR. “This tool unlocks a whole new way to do rapid prototyping to fuel those experiences.”

Create and Prototype VR Scenes in 360 Degrees

As designers create and collaborate on 360 degree scenes, sketching provides a quick way to convey the vision of an end-product to a developer or other team member, paving the way to quickly create multiple directions on a design or make tweaks before moving on to the labor-intensive work of 3D modeling. With Sketch 360, a design team can align on the vision for a VR environment and save hours in changes and re-dos. In addition to VR design, Sketch 360 can be used in a variety of sketching scenarios. “I actually got my start in design at architecture school,” adds Michael. “I can see this being a great tool for architects looking for a digital canvas that brings their ideas to life.” With guided gridlines and a dual, ink/finished product interface, Sketch 360 can be useful both to designers, architects, and game creators prototyping early versions of a finished product as well as the casual user leveraging the canvas to sketch interior decorating vision or even artists using sketch as their medium.

“Sketch 360 is another really exciting tool for designers, just like Microsoft Maquette will be for in-device rapid creation,” shared Tom Mignone, a Program Manager on the Mixed Reality User Experience team and a contributor to another 3D project and Garage Wall of Famer, 3D Models in Office. “We want to empower creators to be more productive with Windows Mixed Reality and this Garage project joins a group of experiences all aimed at that.” Microsoft Maquette is a mixed reality tool for creating immersive prototypes using a PC VR headset. While Maquette strives to make spatial prototyping fast and easy with a focus on 3D objects, Sketch 360 focuses on the setting around those objects. Designers can use these two, complementary experiences to prototype both the environment of a VR experience and the elements within it. Maquette and Sketch 360 are compatible with mutiple PC VR setups including Windows Mixed Reality, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive.

Key Features

• Trace along embedded, equirectangular gridlines designed for 360 degree scenes
• See your design come to life with a side-by-side, dual interface
• Create designs in a variety of thicknesses and in any of 30 colors, powered by Windows Ink
• Use pen or touch to make your masterpiece, best on Surface with the Surface Pen
• Adjust the settings for your preferred drawing experience including sketching on the right or left pane, changing gridline opacity and canvas color
• Export your creations as JPEGs with 360 metadata that immersive experience sites like Facebook and Kuula enable or embed in full websites (HTML, CSS, JS, JPEG)
• Tilt and rotate in senor-enabled devices
• Import Sketch 360 files to edit and collaborate on a design
• Work offline or on-the-go, works great on Surface Book 2 or Surface Go
• Created with ease using Windows Ink APIs

Best with Surface

Sketch 360 is powered by Windows Ink and best with Surface Pen. And inspired by sketching while traveling, Sketch 360 is designed around the active, on-the-go designer who uses a Surface Go or Surface Book 2 as their digital canvas.

Try Sketch 360 and Share Your Creations with Us

Sketch 360 is available for free download at the Microsoft Store worldwide. Designers and creators can provide feedback on the experience and share their VR and 360 sketch creations with the Garage by tagging @MSFTGarage and #Sketch360 on Twitter and Instagram.

You might recall how Everspace has been in development for the Switch eShop for some time now. In case you forgot, it was originally released by ROCKFISH Games in 2017 and is a beautiful single player space sim with roguelike features.

If you’ve been wondering when this game running on the Unreal Engine was going to land on the Switch, according to an Everspace: Stellar Edition listing over on the eShop, the space exploration title will be arriving next month on 11th December for $39.99. Below is the official eShop description:

EVERSPACE™ is an action-focused single-player space shooter, combining roguelike elements with top-notch visuals and a captivating story. It takes you on a challenging journey through an ever-changing, beautifully crafted universe full of surprises. Your skills, experience, and talent for improvisation will be tested continuously as you piece together the puzzle of your existence through encounters with interesting characters, each having their own unique part of the story to tell.

During an interview in March, ROCKFISH Games CEO and co-founder Michael Schade said the developer’s mobile background had been very helpful during the development process – with the team able to produce a super smooth game that also looked stunning in handheld mode.

Will you be travelling to the stars when this game arrives on Switch in December? Leave a comment below.

Meteorfall: Journey quickly became one of our favourite card games after it was released in February this year. Since then it’s had countless patches and two major content updates, the most recent of which was in September.

All of this has been for free, and developer Slothwerk is getting ready to add yet more content in a new update coming this December.

Titled ‘The Queen of Shadow’, this new patch is modest but adds some interesting twists to keep the game fresh. Firstly, it adds a new skin ‘Rose, Queen of Shadow’. Not just cosmetic, this new visage also comes with a changed start deck, with 10 new cards added to Rose’s loot table:

• Corruption
• Bewitch
• Acolyte’s Hood
• Enfeeble
• Helm of the Bat King
• Devil’s Bargain
• Soul Chalice
• Feedback
• Amulet of Cosmic Horrors
• Dark Presence

The update also comes with tweaks – a big-fix for Mining Pick and an few UI revisions. The full patch-notes (for all the patches to the game to date, as it happens) can be read here, such as they are.

Are you still enjoying Meteorfall? Will this update make you go back? Let us know!