Ex-Disney CEO Bob Iger’s next step: Investing in a metaverse start-up run by a 29-year-old
... The start-up says its goal is to “create a universal avatar system that can be used across an open metaverse.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/14/ex-disney-ceo-bob-iger-on-why-hes-investing-in-the-metaverse-genies.html
Business schools look to AI and VR to enhance digital courses
... Betty Vandenbosch, chief content officer at online learning platform Coursera, which hosts MBAs from several business schools, studies learners to find out which teaching techniques work best. She argues that the concept of the “sage on stage” is outdated, and points to the iMBA offered by the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: although it can have up to 4,000 students, they are still able to build connections with peers and faculty, and receive vital feedback. She also cites the online MBA offered by Australia’s Macquarie University, which allows students to take the course in blocks that “stack up”, reducing the risk that they will feel overwhelmed. “The beauty of that is you have stop-off points if you need them,” she says. ...
Such courses will be enhanced, she thinks, by artificial intelligence systems that know when to “nudge” learners. “Folks do best when they learn every day or every couple of days,” Vandenbosch says. “Nudges say: ‘Hey, maybe you should get back to it’.” ...
In any case, she adds, technology is only one of the factors that make for a good course. “It’s the tech, the team behind its creation, and the faculty.”
See the full story here: https://www.ft.com/content/25aa54ff-21ec-4639-b0ea-37d24e50560e
Augmented reality’s half-decade of stagnation
... Few startups have been publicly subjected to corporate humiliation quite as drastically as augmented reality goggles maker Magic Leap has been in recent years. It’s a saga that has slowed the progress of an industry — hyped as the inevitable successor to mobile phones — to a crawl. ...
The headlining feature of the device is its expanded field of view, which now nearly doubles the visual area inside the glasses where digital content can be displayed. It’s an impressive feat and makes the headset a clear improvement over its predecessor. ...
“In the space we’re going after … it’s really just us and Microsoft,” Johnson concedes.
As Microsoft seems to run into hiccups with its multibillion-dollar military contract, and reports say is perhaps even losing interest in launching a new version of HoloLens, it’s clear that Magic Leap is in a lonely position. ...
“I still don’t understand what the consumer scenarios are that get you outside of gaming which is a small and contained niche. … What are those scenarios? Certainly for me, it’s not notification glasses; I don’t need more things distracting me. But, I’m excited to see what Apple thinks it is.”
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/13/augmented-realitys-half-decade-of-stagnation/
Malta launches Marija, the country’s first Virtual Citizen, a World’s first
PhilNote: New Zealand did a government-sponsored AI assistant for public information 2-3 years ago. David Usher is a canadian rockstar and AI thought leader.
VisitMalta has today launched the first-ever Virtual Citizen at a conference organised by the Ministry for Tourism and Consumer Protection on the Digital Tourism Roadmap 2030. Marija will bring together, in perfect synergy, the infinite possibilities of artificial intelligence, incorporating them with a new immersive experience allowing everyone to access a wealth of information about Malta. Marija is an interactive AI-powered virtual being ready to help all tourists who want to learn more about Malta's rich history and everything happening on the Maltese Islands. ...
AI is the future of storytelling, and Malta is at the forefront of it all," says David Usher, President of Reimagine.AI. ...
See the full story here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/malta-launches-marija-the-countrys-first-virtual-citizen-a-worlds-first-301500155.html
Defining Cinematic Research – SCA’s research labs are innovating creative, multidisciplinary approaches to problem-solving societal issues.
Research programs define the norm for engineering, medical, and biomedical departments at top-ranked universities, but people are often surprised to find out that the world’s best film school also has a robust research focus. In fact, SCA currently has eleven research institutes that work on innovative applications of cinematic media technologies. The investment of resources going toward SCA research sometimes yields benefits in the form of specific products or technologies, but more often than not, the goal is to leverage the means of cinematic media to solve other problems, such as enabling underrepresented communities to make their voices heard about the gentrification of LA neighborhoods or imagining the office of the future. ...
More recently, Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center mentee Max Orozco, who graduated from USC Iovine and Young Academy in 2020, invented Ready Teddy, a plug-and-play VR "pre-flight" program designed to lessen anxiety in sick kids by exposing them to the sights and sounds of an MRI machine before they undergo an actual radiology examination.
The School of Cinematic Arts also has a direct conduit to industry through its Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), a think tank that counts some of the biggest entertainment, technology, and consumer electronics companies as board members. Founded to facilitate conversations and collaboration around the industry conversion from analogue to digital, ETC now facilitates proof-of-concept projects around innovations like VR/AR, cloud computing, and virtual production, recently producing a white paper about best production practices that emerged from creating during the COVID-19 pandemic. ...
See the full story here: https://cinema.usc.edu/news/article.cfm?id=61581
The Future of Work is Not Corporate — It’s DAOs and Crypto Networks
... Increasingly, traditional corporations have “orbital stakeholders,” or participants that blur the line between internal and external members of the organization. ...
The model of a company having strict boundaries between internal and external may have made sense in the Industrial Age, but in the Information Age, this model leads to misaligned incentives and unsustainable extraction. ...
Crypto networks create better alignment between participants, and DAOs will be the coordination layer for this new world. ...
A DAO is an internet-native organization with core functions that are automated by smart contracts, and with people who do the things that automation cannot (e.g., marketing, software development). In practice, not all DAOs are decentralized or autonomous, so it is best to think of DAOs as internet-based organizations that are collectively owned and controlled by its members. ...
The structure of a DAO is inherently open and accountable, a forcing function to share value with the participants who create it. Otherwise, other DAOs will out-compete them or their participants will leave for other opportunities. ...
In fact, the best DAOs have been the ones that have rewarded their participants, serving as the basis of the Ownership Economy. This emergent positive-sum dynamic is the foundation of the x-to-earn trend that will shape the future of work. ...
The openness of these crypto economies will allow people to participate in several DAOs and crypto-networks, mixing and matching different income streams and ownership returns (remember, the best DAOs are distributing ownership to their participants through their own native token). ...
In this new future of work, jobs will be more transient and dynamic — switching costs between jobs will be lower, opportunities will be more visible, work will be reduced down into more atomic units, and the entire world will be unified under a single workforce with access to all opportunities. ...
Learn-to-earn
Learn-to-earn is a new education model in which instead of paying to learn, a person is actually compensated for demonstrating that they have learned something. This is possible when the skill, knowledge, or information that a person learns adds value to a network, and that network is therefore willing to subsidize the learning. ...
On-chain reputation systems will capture our actions that occur on blockchains: our contributions to DAOs, our governance voting history, our token holdings, and more. Ultimately, reputation systems will use these on-chain actions to make predictions about how we will act in the future to make determinations about who is trustworthy, credible, and aligned. On-chain reputations will replace the way companies currently use credentials, resumes, and interview processes. ...
... for these reputation systems to become viable, we will need much stronger decentralized identifier solutions (e.g., Ceramic / IDX) and identity management. ...
Disconnectedness
On one hand, DAOs allow people to choose how they work and associate with communities where they are value-aligned. On the other hand, by reducing much of work into atomic units and purely financial incentives for actions, we risk reducing people’s meaning to purely financial rewards. We risk turning work into discrete, meaningless tasks, where labor is reduced down to a commodity service. ...
See the full article here: https://future.a16z.com/the-future-of-work-daos-crypto-networks/
Metaverse Virtual Being Startup Inworld AI Raises $10M
Inworld AI offers a platform for creating virtual beings; their look, sound, and personality. Using the menu seen above, Inworld’s clients can generate a virtual being and embed an AI within that can converse with people using natural language and learn through interaction to perform better. Inworld envisions populating metaverse worlds, games, and branded content with its virtual beings. The multimodal beings will be compatible with major virtual reality and game engines when the platform comes out in the next couple of months.
“Similar to how Unity and Unreal allow developers to create visually compelling environments, the Inworld AI platform is designed to help build virtual characters with high configurability to create a more engaging and memorable user experience,” Inworld AI CEO Ilya Gelfenbeyn said. ...
METAVERSE MOGULS
The metaverse and virtual beings to populate it are among the most significant conversational AI shifts of the last few years. Inworld’s raise is part of an accelerating pipeline of products and startup funding. Virtual being developer Neosapience raised $21.5 million last month to boost its Typecast product for the metaverse. Soul Machines raised a massive $70 million for the same broad concept, right as Korean video game giant Krafton came out with its own hyperrealistic virtual friends and game show hosts for the metaverse. Those followed last year’s rapid-fire funding and product news, including Hour One, Veritone, DeepBrain. The growing number of metaverse platforms are only increasing demand, as Meta’s eponymous platform, Baidu’s XiRang, and Nvidia’s Omniverse attest. ...
See the full story here: https://voicebot.ai/2022/03/08/metaverse-virtual-being-startup-inworld-ai-raises-10m/https://voicebot.ai/2022/03/08/metaverse-virtual-being-startup-inworld-ai-raises-10m/
Credit Suisse Strategist Says We’re Witnessing Birth of a New World Monetary Order
... Pozsar marks the end of the current monetary regime as the day the G7 nations seized Russia's foreign exchange reserves following the latter's invasion of Ukraine. What had previously been thought of as risk-free became risk-free no more as non-existent credit risk was instantly substituted for very real confiscation risk. ...
Pozsar concluded his note with a comment about bitcoin (BTC). He expects it to benefit, but only "if it still exists."
See the full story here: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/08/credit-suisse-strategist-says-were-witnessing-birth-of-a-new-world-monetary-order/?fbclid=IwAR3NF2mO6faSP3lyPekeNiIsMOaAUYMXnAxqSupMUN8YoN3cdargD5cdz3U
