Tag: mobile technology

Federal law may have an unexpected effect on the technology sector

The controversial Affordable Care Act has caused a shift in the insurance and health care landscape of the U.S., but some technology experts suggest that the federal law may have an unexpected effect of pushing people toward embracing wearable technology more readily. The federal law sparked the creation of health insurance exchanges throughout the country and pushed the insurance and health care industries to become more digital, forgoing older methods of record keeping and customer service. The law has spawned the concept of “digital health,” which is gaining more attention on the back of wearable technology’s hype.

Digital health is gaining momentum

The idea of digital health has been examined at several events that have been held in the U.S. over the past few months. During these events, big data is often brought up as a key factor to the continued evolution of health care in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. Big data analytics is changing the way the health care sector operates, and continued ventures into the digital space are making electronic health records more common and improving the efficiency of various services that are rendered to people in many parts of the country.

Wearable devices are becoming more health-oriented

Wearable devices become more prominent in the concept of digital health as people begin to base their lives more on mobile technology. These devices can be used to keep track of vital health information. Smart watches, for instance, can be used to monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and a wide range of other health-related information. The majority of these products are designed to help people take control of their health, but they are not necessarily designed to help people manage what medical issues they may have.

Demand for health-related devices is on the rise

Wearable technology may have a major role to play in the future of health care, but it is difficult to say for certain what they role may be. Currently, the majority of these devices that are being produced by technology firms have to do with entertainment or social networking. Some developers are focusing exclusively on the health care sector, seeing an increasing demand among consumers for useful, health-related electronic products.

Imagination Technologies shows off new PowerVR chipsets.

The semiconductor company has recently previewed its new Wizard series of ray tracing graphics processing units (GPUs), which could eventually result in extremely realistic mobile gaming graphics.

A demonstration video showed what ray tracing technology can do when combined with traditional raster graphics.

The demo of Imagination’s PowerVR ray tracing technology revealed game graphics that had lifelike light reflections and refractions, shadows with high resolution, and glass and plastic materials with realistic translucency. Furthermore, this technology not only produces true-to-life graphics, but it does it at amazing speeds.

“These are the features that ray tracing can improve in terms of mobile gaming,” said Alexandru Voica, the PR specialist at Imagination Technologies. He went on to say that “We’ve taken the Unity 5 game engine and then we did all the work that was required to add ray tracing inside the game engine.”

According to Imagination, greater performance advancements are likely to result from real-world implementations because the GPUs can be incorporated right into SoC (system on a chip) designs. The company’s goal is to implement this technology into the GPUs of consumers, sooner rather than later.

The innovative graphics technology is suitable for mobile gaming.

Ray tracing is a technique used to create an image generated by the computer where the paths of single rays of light are calculated according to the materials that are encountered in the setting. Its effects are particularly clear when viewing a scene that is made up of intricate reflections. This is what allows the technology to produce lifelike graphics.

This method is not new and has been utilized in computer graphics for a long time. However, whereas traditional ray tracing needs substantial processing power, Imagination’s technology is much faster and is being used in real-time applications like video games.

The new Wizard GPUs that have been developed by Imagination Technologies reduce the memory and power needed for real-time ray tracing, which allows it to work for mobile games. The first of its Wizard series GPUs has 128 ALU (arithmetic logic unit) cores and 4 unified shading clusters that deliver as many as 300 million rays every second.

Apple has established a multi-year licensing deal with Imagination Technologies, which provides Apple access to the semiconductor firm’s extensive range of present and upcoming video IP cores and PowerVR graphics. This could prove very beneficial to Apple’s mobile gaming future.