Category: Featured News

The VR and AR technology spot will be launched to let staff, students and industry partners use the tech.

Australia’s Deakin University has now announced its intentions to launch what will be an Interactive Digital Centre Hub, located in Melbourne, which will focus on virtual and augmented reality technologies.

The hub is expected to open at some point in the first half of 2016, though a specific date hasn’t been released.

The idea behind this hub is to provide a place where industry partners, students and staff members can come together and get their hands on some of the very latest in virtual and augmented reality technology. The hub is being opened in partnership with EON Reality. In total, more than $10 million (USD) has been invested into the creation of this new facility. Once it is up and running it will be the very first center that is dedicated exclusively to VR and AR tech within the greater Asian region.

Deakin University chose to open its augmented reality hub as it already boasts a strong research group.

With a strong set of researchers already in place among its staff and students, Deakin University decided it would be a good investment to provide a location in which VR and AR technology could be studied. This way, it will become easier for these researchers to work with the industry itself, and it will also open up a world of new forms of educational courses and programs that focus on this type of mobile technology.

Among the courses that are already slated to start along with the hub includes a new Bachelor of IT Virtual Reality Major, in addition to a Virtual Reality Graduate Diploma and a Masters in IT specialization in Virtual Reality. Those new offerings are set to begin as of July 2016.

Among the hub features that are attracting the most attention include a multi-user high res immersive 3D dome. That feature will be used primarily for outreach programs.

Professor Trevor Day, the pro vice chancellor of the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment at Deakin, described the benefit of the virtual and augmented reality hub, saying “Deakin University’s commitment to innovation will take another leap forward thanks to this exciting new partnership with EON Reality Inc and perfectly matches the Federal Government’s new Innovation Strategy.”

The social network has warned some of its users of the chance for state-sponsored hackers accessing their data.

Twitter has now released an alert for some of the users of its social network, cautioning them of a certain online and mobile security issue that may have involved state-sponsored hackers attempting to access sensitive data from within their accounts.

This is the first time the company has issued this type of warning to any of its users.

Within the mobile security and online privacy notice, it indicated that as of that time, there had not been any indication that would suggest that the hackers had actually managed to access any of the sensitive information from within a “small group of accounts” that had been targeted during the attempts. That said, the letter didn’t provide any more information about the attack, nor did it suggest any potential suspects that were being sought as a part of the company’s investigation into this issue.

This mobile security and privacy notice is only the latest among several data breach concerns from state-sponsored organizations.

Twitter is far from alone in the threat it has faced by way of cyberattacks. Many companies, government agencies and media outlets have all seen their fair share of data breaches from hackers. Several news sites have now been reporting on the warning that Twitter has issued. Among them, one was actually a recipient of the notice. It was a company called Coldhak, which is a nonprofit organization based in Winnipeg, Canada.

That company’s notice explained that the cyber attackers could potentially have been seeking to breach mobile security or online privacy barriers in order to gain access to information such as IP addresses, email addresses and/or telephone numbers. That organization’s own Twitter account (@coldhakca) has since retweeted a several reports from other people who have also claimed to have received the notification from Twitter.

Neither Coldhak nor any of the other users have given any indication as to why they may have been targeted for this type of cyberattack. One of the directors of the nonprofit, Colin Childs, said that despite having received the notice from Twitter, his organization has detected “no noticeable impact of this attack.” Facebook and Google have also issued their own versions of notifications to let users know when state-sponsored attacks have targeted their accounts.