James Earl Jones, the original voice of Darth Vader who has delivered some of the most iconic lines in cinematic history, has officially stepped back from the villainous role.
According to a Friday report by Vanity Fair, the 91-year-old screen legend has permitted Disney and Lucasfilm to use artificial intelligence and archival recordings to re-create his menacing tone in future “Star Wars” projects. Jones was most recently billed as Darth Vader on the Disney+ series “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” which premiered earlier this year.
While working on “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Skywalker Sound editor Matthew Wood and the Ukrainian company Respeecher consulted with Jones to create a sound for Vader that captured his chilling vocal performance from the flagship “Star Wars” trilogy. ...
... To match the resolution limits of the human eye, VR displays need to squeeze between 7,000 and 10,000 pixels into each inch of display, say the authors. For context, the latest smartphone screens manage only around 460 pixels per inch.
Despite the size of that gap, though, there are already clear paths towards closing it. At present, most VR headsets use separate red, green, and blue organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), which are hard to make more compact due to their manufacturing process. But an alternative approach that adds colored filters to white OLEDs could make it possible to achieve 60 PPD.
Relying on filtering has its own challenges, as it reduces the efficiency of the light source, resulting in lower brightness or higher power consumption. But an experimental OLED design known as a “meta-OLED” could get around this trade-off by combing the light source with nanopatterned mirrors that exploit the phenomenon of resonance to emit light only from a particular frequency.
Meta-OLEDS could potentially achieve pixel densities of more than 10,000 PPD, approaching the physical limits set by the wavelength of light. They could also be more efficient and have improved color definition compared to previous generations. However, despite keen interest from display technology companies, the technology is still nascent and likely further away from commercialization. ...
Niantic has released its Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS) for the Web, providing developers access to its augmented reality (AR) tools designed by 8th Wall, it announced on Thursday.
The new platform anchors webAR and virtual content across physical locations by adding depth and realism to immersive experiences anywhere in the world using its AR map, allowing precise, centimetre-level accuracy across global locations, with just a mobile browser and no app required.
It also provides access to 3D meshes of over 100,000 locations for developers to implement in AR scenes, enabling them to build webAR experiences with occlusion and physics for enhanced interactions between the virtual and physical world, the company explained. ...
... Generative AI is powered by a computer program called a diffusion model. In simple terms, a diffusion model destroys and recreates images to find statistical patterns in them. The way it operates is not like natural intelligence.
We cannot predict how well, or even why, an AI like this works. We can only judge whether its outputs look good. ...
Diffusion models perform two sequential processes. They ruin images, then they try to rebuild them. Programmers give the model real images with meanings ascribed by humans: dog, oil painting, banana, sky, 1960s sofa, etc. The model diffuses — that is, moves — them through a long chain of sequential steps. In the ruining sequence, each step slightly alters the image handed to it by the previous step, adding random noise in the form of scattershot meaningless pixels, then handing it off to the next step. Repeated, over and over, this causes the original image to gradually fade into static and its meaning to disappear.
When this process is finished, the model runs it in reverse. Starting with the nearly meaningless noise, it pushes the image back through the series of sequential steps, this time attempting to reduce noise and bring back meaning. At each step, the model’s performance is judged by the probability that the less noisy image created at that step has the same meaning as the original, real image. ...
To produce images that have associated text meanings, words that describe the training images are taken through the noising and de-noising chains along at the same time. In this way, the model is trained not only to produce an image with a high likelihood of meaning, but with a high likelihood of the same descriptive words being associated with it. ...
A set of parameters that produces good images is indistinguishable from a set that creates bad images — or nearly perfect images with some unknown but fatal flaw. Thus, we cannot predict how well, or even why, an AI like this works. We can only judge whether its outputs look good. ...
Towering linguist Noam Chomsky pointed out that a generative model like GPT-3 does not produce words in a meaningful language any differently from how it would produce words in a meaningless or impossible language. ...
... Mehrish, who oversees Mars’ global digital, data and analytics teams, including in AI and machine learning, says efforts with DALL-E are just a tiny part of the massive AI-focused digital transformation journey Mars has been on over the past five years.
“We are about midway through, so we are still on that journey,” said Mehrish, who joined Mars in 2018 after a two-decade career in banking, technology, consulting, strategy and data science. The effort behind both AI and digital transformation at Mars, he explained, came from from outgoing CEO Grant Reid with a focus on agile development, speed and scale.
“It’s a passion project that our new CEO, Poul Weihrauch, is going to continue and build on, so it’s really a top-down mandate and it’s always been a very high priority for the company,” Mehrish said. ...
In 2016, Mars spent $117 million to acquire Whistle, a smart collar startup known as a “Fitbit for dogs.” This past May, Whistle launched Whistle Health, an AI-enabled, data-driven smart device for dogs aimed at preventive care, which a press release said can “translate every dog’s movements into a personalized, holistic wellness index,” including health behaviors like eating, drinking, scratching, licking, sleeping and fitness.
“These are built on huge training sets with machine learning and AI built in that gives you a score that allows you to track your dog’s health and also ties in with a vet,” said Mehrish. ...
In 2021, it announced a digital twin initiative with Microsoft to develop virtual clones of its physical supply chain operations to help simulate scenarios that would be too difficult to test with physical assets. ...
Over the last two years, the company has moved to what it calls a ‘federated center of growth,’ with business segments adding their own data scientists and engineers.
“That’s the second wave, as we go down more and more into the organization and upskill our associates from a bottom-up perspective,” Mehrish said. ...
The Air Force is starting a new organization to field-test unmanned systems and artificial intelligence technologies in the Middle East, the service's top general in the region said.
The small task force, dubbed Detachment 99, will look for cheaper ways to detect Iran's aerial drones, Maj. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, head of 9th Air Force (Air Forces Central), said Monday at the Air Force Association's annual Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Maryland.
"It's a small group of super-empowered airmen that I'm going to provide resources to so they can rapidly innovate and experiment in our literal sandbox that we have in the Middle East," Grynkewich said at the conference. ...
A team of researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston split 34 patients undergoing elective hand surgery into two equal-size groups. One group was given a VR headset and offered a range of relaxing immersive programs to view during surgery, while the other went without. The VR programs included 360-degree views of a peaceful meadow, mountaintop, or forest; guided meditation; or videos played against the backdrop of a starry sky.
The VR group requested significantly lower levels of the sedative propofol—in this case used to numb the pain in the hand— than the non-VR group. They received 125.3 milligrams per hour, in comparison to an average of 750.6 milligrams per hour during the study, described in PLoS ONE. The VR group also left the post-anesthesia recovery unit more quickly, spending an average of 63 minutes versus 75 minutes for the non-VR group. ...
... "Chronic pain is a huge issue and for the FDA to say that this technology has the potential to be a better modality than anything else out there, that provides huge credibility for the VR space as a whole and our approach as a company," Matthew Stoudt, AppliedVR CEO and co-founder told Fierce Healthcare.
AppliedVR's virtual reality platform—which uses goggles and headsets to create an immersive, 3D virtual world—has been aimed at alleviating everything from labor pains during childbirth to the pain from burns to discomfort experienced undergoing infusions for cancer treatment.
In total, AppliedVR works with more than 240 hospitals to provide virtual reality therapy to help ease patients' acute pain after surgery or during hospitalization. The company also is working on clinical trials with Geisinger and Cleveland Clinic to study VR as a replacement for prescription opioids. ...
