philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Khronos Group enters cooperation agreement with the Haptics Industry Forum to bring Haptics to the Metaverse

 The Khronos Group and the Haptics Industry Forum (HIF) have entered into a cooperative liaison agreement to foster synergy between the two organizations to encourage the integration of advanced haptics functionality into the Khronos OpenXR open standard for portable augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), to enable broad availability of haptics in the metaverse and beyond.

According to the Khronos Group, the agreement will see HIF and Khronos collaborate with a shared goal to enable broad, cross-platform access to next-generation haptic feedback in XR applications, enabling rich multisensory experiences to reach beyond 3D visuals for the eyes and spatial audio for the ears – and include expressive haptics for touch. ...

See the full story here: https://www.auganix.org/the-khronos-group-enters-cooperation-agreement-with-the-haptics-industry-forum-to-bring-haptics-to-the-metaverse/

Marshall Van Alstyne: Free Speech, Platforms, the Fake News Problem

... How should a platform or a society address the problem of fake news? The spread of misinformation is ancient, complex, yet ubiquitous in media concerning elections, vaccinations, and global climate policy.  After examining key attributes of “fake news” and of current solutions, this article presents design tradeoffs for curbing fake news. The challenges are not restricted to truth or to scale alone. Surprisingly, there exist boundary cases when a just society is better served by a mechanism that allows lies to pass, even as there are alternate boundary cases when a just society should put friction on truth.  Harm reflects an interplay of lies, decision error, scale, and externalities.  Using mechanism design, this article then proposes three tiers of solutions: (1) those that are legal and business model compatible, so firms should adopt them (2) those that are legal but not business model compatible, so firms need compulsion to adopt them, and (3) those that require changes to bad law. ...

See the full story here: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/event/marshall-van-alstyne-free-speech-platforms-the-fake-news-problem/

What makes an NFT project successful?

Once you understand the vibe, this is when you are ready to invest or even create an NFT. Then you look at the framework:

THE TEAM: Are they “Doxxed”? Meaning are they known, do we know their identities? Do we know their personalities? Do we know their background?Are they committed on the long run to the project? Are there any Legal documentation?

THE PROJECT: Does the project have a Roadmap? Do we have utility? Do we have art? Is there any intrinsic value?

THE COMMUNITY: Do we have a community that is active and working on making the project a success? Do we have a committed group of people? Check Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook?

THE TECH: Check the Technology, which smart contract are they using, on which network?

THE LEGAL: Check if there is a company, if there are contracts, if there are commitments and lockup periods for the founders. Do they have a trademark, or intellectual property.

1. Founder Agreement
2. IP Assignment agreement 
3. Non-Compete — Confidentiality 
4. Employment agreements with Lockups linked to KPIs
5. Investment Agreement
5. Public Wallet — Public Repository Agreement
6. Financial Audit — AML — Custodian Agreement

These are the main components you look for in an NFT project. Stay tuned as we dig deeper into NFTs.

See the full story here: https://akylles.medium.com/what-makes-an-nft-project-successful-8a4af939c3f4

Artificial intelligence is already upending geopolitics

First, developments in AI will shift the balance of power between nations.  ...

In September 2017, Vladimir Putin told a group of schoolchildren: “whoever becomes the leader [in AI] will become the ruler of the world.” While the U.S. currently leads in AI, China’s tech companies are progressing rapidly and are arguably superior in the development and application of specific areas of research such as facial recognition software.

Second, AI will empower a new set of geopolitical players beyond nation states.  ...

Third, AI will open possibilities for new forms of conflict. ...

Such forms of conflict will prove hard to manage prompting a complete rethink of arms control instruments not suited to grapple with weapons of coercion. Current arms control negotiations need the adversaries to clearly perceive each other’s capabilities and their military necessity, but while nuclear bombs, for example, are limited in their development and application, almost anything is possible with AI, as capabilities can develop both quickly and opaquely. ...

The only way to mitigate AI’s geopolitical risks and provide the agile and comprehensive oversight it will require, is through open dialogue about its benefits, limitations and complexities. The G20 is a potential venue, or a new international governance mechanism could be created to involve the private sector and other key stakeholders.

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/06/artificial-intelligence-is-already-upending-geopolitics/

Snapchat: 92% of Gen Z want to use AR for shopping

• Ninety-two percent of Gen Z consumers want to use augmented reality tools for e-commerce, according to Snapchat's survey of 16,000 users in 16 markets, conducted by Global Crowd DNA. Gen Zers are more likely than millennials and Gen X to buy a product that they first experienced using AR, per the report.
• Sixty percent of Gen Z consumers said that AR experiences feel more personal and over half of Gen Z would be more likely to pay attention to an ad that uses AR.

See the full story here: https://www.retaildive.com/news/snapchat-92-of-gen-z-want-to-use-ar-for-shopping/621656/

NFTs Are a Privacy and Security Nightmare

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Another way to describe it is as a low-privacy environment that gives, among others, law enforcement access to the transaction history of the entire network—as was the case when the US Department of Justice arrested two individuals accused of stealing $4.5 billion worth of cryptocurrency. Said assistant attorney general Kenneth A. Polite Jr. at the time, “Today, federal law enforcement demonstrates once again that we can follow money through the blockchain.”

Crypto wallets may be pseudonymous, but many exchanges have Know Your Customer protocols and collect tons of other data on users. Moreover, transactions necessarily require sharing your wallet with another party. As software engineer Molly White wrote, once someone knows your wallet address, privacy can be difficult, if not impossible to maintain: “Imagine if, when you Venmoed your Tinder date for your half of the meal, they could now see every other transaction you’d ever made—and not just on Venmo, but the ones you made with your credit card, bank transfer, or other apps, and with no option to set the visibility of the transfer to ‘private.’” ...

This means that, if a user ties an NFT to any part of their online or IRL identity—say by using an NFT as a profile picture on Twitter or maintaining a profile on an NFT marketplace—it becomes trivially easy to find out what else their wallet has been up to. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-privacy-security-nightmare/

Niantic makes another acquisition, absorbing AR studio NZXR

Just a month after its last acquisition of the WebAR development platform 8th Wall, Niantic announced its purchase of New Zealand-based augmented reality studio NZXR today. These strategic acquisitions are part of Niantic’s overarching plan to build what it calls a “real-world metaverse,” which is dependent on AR rather than VR. ...

“When John Hanke, Niantic’s CEO, wrote ‘the metaverse is a dystopian nightmare‘ it resonated with us far more than any of the metaverse hype pieces published before or since,” NZXR wrote. “A better world is not given. It’s going to take a lot of work and Niantic has demonstrated to us that they’re willing to put in the effort.” ...

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/05/niantic-makes-another-acquisition-absorbing-ar-studio-nzxr/

The Perils of Using Quotations to Authenticate NLG Content

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Old News and Fake Facts

Natural Language Generation (NLG) models are capable of producing convincing and plausible output because they have learned semantic architecture, rather than more abstractly assimilating the actual history, science, economics, or any other topic on which they might be required to opine, which are effectively entangled as ‘passengers’ in the source data.

The factual accuracy of the information that NLG models generate assumes that the input on which they are trained is in itself reliable and up-to-date, which presents an extraordinary burden in terms of pre-processing and further human-based verification – a costly stumbling block that the NLP research sector is currently addressing on many fronts. ...

The real danger of obtaining quotes from default GPT-3 (for instance) is that it sometimes produces correct quotes, leading to a false confidence in this facet of its capabilities...

GopherCite

Hoping to address this general shortcoming in NLG models, Google’s DeepMind recently proposed GopherCite, a 280-billion parameter model that’s capable of citing specific and accurate evidence in support of its generated responses to prompts. ...

Quoting Falsehoods

However, when tested against Oxford University’s TruthfulQA benchmark, GopherCite’s responses were rarely scored as truthful, in comparison to the human-curated ‘correct’ answers.

The authors suggest that this is because the concept of ‘supported answers’ does not in any objective way help to define truth in itself, since the usefulness of source quotes may be compromised by other factors, such as the possibility that the author of the quote is themselves ‘hallucinating’ (i.e. writing about fictional worlds, producing advertising content, or otherwise fantasticating inauthentic material. ...

See the full story here: https://www.unite.ai/the-perils-of-using-quotations-to-authenticate-nlg-content/

Dubai Police officer named among 30 leading Arab artificial intelligence experts

UAE - Engineer Dr Major Issa Ibrahim Basaeed, head of artificial intelligence applications and emerging technologies at the General Department of Artificial Intelligence in Dubai Police, has been recognised among the region’s top 30 leading Arab experts in AI by MIT Technology Review Arabia. ...

The list’s final evaluation produced 30 experts — 12 women and 18 men — from across the region, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Oman, Lebanon, Bahrain and Tunisia. ...

See the full story here: https://www.zawya.com/en/legal/dubai-police-officer-named-among-30-leading-arab-artificial-intelligence-experts-e4uq8fyt

How Domo powers partner analytics at Sony Interactive Entertainment

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Objectives

What Sony set out to do with its analytics program was to deliver actionable indicators that, when coupled with the correct levers, would ensure that players are kept engaged with relevant and timely content. ...

We wanted to provide a single focus data delivery platform for all of our partners and realize and unlock the value of partner and PlayStation data through innovative data-led initiatives. With the changing paradigm around content creation, namely the free-to-play and games-as-a-service business models that have emerged, we needed an offering that can both meet the demands for low latency insights, as well as into our content performance. Our analytics tools become a key component of the wider PlayStation partner program, which aims to make PlayStation not only the best place to play, but also the best place to develop and publish content. ...

https://diginomica.com/how-domo-powers-partner-analytics-sony-interactive-entertainment