Marvel’s first immersive story for the Apple Vision Pro is the most fun I’ve had on the device
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But I was very intrigued when Marvel announced What If…? – An Immersive Story– partly because it’s a show that instantly evokes mystery, but also because it promises to tap into the full potential of the Vision Pro. Spatial Audio, check. Eye tracking, check. Hand tracking, check.
For the last few days, I’ve jumped into the What If...? Universe, complete with the Marvel Studios opening credits flying around me. That was quite the start. From there, I hit start, and I’m greeted by The Watcher, a being who appears larger than life in my living room and quickly gives me the lowdown. ...
As you progress through the chapters and the full experience, which lasts about an hour, you’ll quickly learn that What If…? An Immersive Story feels like a crossover between a movie and a game. You’re presented with a scenario, maybe a villain plotting to steal something, and then the screen will flip, and you’ll be pulled into that universe. ...
For instance, I was in my living room with The Watcher and Sorcerer Supreme Wong before a portal opened, and it switched from augmented reality to virtual reality. I quickly had to work on learning the mystic arts in this location. Here, I got my first taste of the gestures. I was curious how this experience would onboard for gestures, and the trick is a template that appears, and you place your hands, mimicking them. ...
For now, Marvel Studios x Disney Plus x ILM Immersive, What If…? – An Immersive Story, feels like the tip of the iceberg. It’s a free experience that everyone with a Vision Pro should at least give a go; it’s not super long – which also may be by design for comfort and battery life – but it does feel like a compelling experience. ...
See the full story here: https://www.techradar.com/computing/virtual-reality-augmented-reality/marvels-first-immersive-story-for-the-apple-vision-pro-is-the-most-fun-ive-had-on-the-device
AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once
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A University of Washington team has developed an artificial intelligence system that lets a user wearing headphones look at a person speaking for three to five seconds to “enroll” them. The system, called “Target Speech Hearing,” then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real time even as the listener moves around in noisy places and no longer faces the speaker.
The team presented its findings May 14 in Honolulu at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The code for the proof-of-concept device is available for others to build on. The system is not commercially available. ...
To use the system, a person wearing off-the-shelf headphones fitted with microphones taps a button while directing their head at someone talking. The sound waves from that speaker’s voice then should reach the microphones on both sides of the headset simultaneously; there’s a 16-degree margin of error. The headphones send that signal to an on-board embedded computer, where the team’s machine learning software learns the desired speaker’s vocal patterns. The system latches onto that speaker’s voice and continues to play it back to the listener, even as the pair moves around. The system’s ability to focus on the enrolled voice improves as the speaker keeps talking, giving the system more training data. ...
This work builds on the team’s previous “semantic hearing” research, which allowed users to select specific sound classes — such as birds or voices — that they wanted to hear and canceled other sounds in the environment. ...
See the full story here: https://www.washington.edu/news/2024/05/23/ai-headphones-noise-cancelling-target-speech-hearing
Dr. Ben Goertzel Leverages Photorealistic Generative AI Avatar Technology from Twin Protocol at AI for Good Conference in Switzerland
Dr. Ben Goertzel, Founder of SingularityNET and Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Advisor to Twin Protocol, will launch a video of his avatar addressing visitors to the AI for Good conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Use of the generative AI avatar technology by top AI scientist, Dr. Ben Goertzel, demonstrates the power of secure, ethically engineered AI to foster a culture of continuous knowledge sharing, innovation, and growth.
His avatar is the first of an ongoing series of digital twin modalities Dr. Goertzel and Twin Protocol will unveil over the coming months. Dr. Goertzel’s digital AI avatar is the ideal candidate to deliver insights on the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI) at AI for Good, exploring the ethical implications of AI and the transformative potential of decentralized networks. Dr. Goertzel’s digital AI avatar will also delve into his pioneering research on combining AI with blockchain technology to create a more secure and transparent digital ecosystem. ...
See the full story here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240529028325/en
Magic Leap is Google’s new mystery partner for XR headsets
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What does Google need that Magic Leap can provide?
Google Glass and Magic Leap were both among the biggest technology flops of the past decade — but could their underlying ideas power something worthy and new? We may find out because Google and Magic Leap now have a “multi-faceted strategic technology partnership” designed to “foster the future of the XR ecosystem with unique and innovative product offerings.”
It is not at all clear what the deal involves, but the press release does repeatedly boast about Magic Leap’s optics and manufacturing expertise — expertise that, it claims, produces “highly-precise eyepieces with incredibly high yield rates and quality at scale.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/30/24167283/google-magic-leap-deal-optics-manufacturing
OpenAI Says Russia and China Used Its A.I. in Covert Campaigns
OpenAI said on Thursday that it had identified and disrupted five online campaigns that used its generative artificial intelligence technologies to deceptively manipulate public opinion around the world and influence geopolitics.
The efforts were run by state actors and private companies in Russia, China, Iran and Israel, OpenAI said in a report about covert influence campaigns. The operations used OpenAI’s technology to generate social media posts, translate and edit articles, write headlines and debug computer programs, typically to win support for political campaigns or to swing public opinion in geopolitical conflicts. ...
Like Google, Meta and Microsoft, OpenAI offers online chatbots and other A.I. tools that can write social media posts, generate photorealistic images and write computer programs. In its report, the company said its tools had been used in influence campaigns that researchers had tracked for years, including a Russian campaign called Doppelganger and a Chinese campaign called Spamouflage.
The Doppelganger campaign used OpenAI’s technology to generate anti-Ukraine comments that were posted on X in English, French, German, Italian and Polish, OpenAI said. The company’s tools were also used to translate and edit articles that supported Russia in the war in Ukraine into English and French, and to convert anti-Ukraine news articles into Facebook posts. ...
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/technology/openai-influence-campaigns-report.html?mc_cid=e892866c6a&mc_eid=cf24d7da5b
Washington pushes for new AI rules protecting artists as Hollywood backlash mounts
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"We're going to have to do a national AI bill or the world will not be the same as we know it," Klobuchar said.
"Songwriters, actors, and our incredibly talented creative community deserve the right to own their voice, image, and likeness," added Blackburn, the leading Republican on the bill. ...
"We're going to have to try to figure out some way to create parameters and guardrails. We've seen artists already whose voices have been used after they've passed on. We're also seeing artists being used when they have nothing to do with something that's been put out, and that's terrifying." ...
A draft version of the bill would extend authorization for digital replication to the heirs, executors, or assignees of a deceased person for a period of 70 years, which is modeled after the equivalent term for copyright protection. ...
"It will take very careful drafting to accomplish the goal of addressing these harms without inadvertently chilling legitimate, constitutionally protected uses of technologies to enhance storytelling in our industry," Ben Sheffner, senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association, said on April 30 while testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. ...
See the full story here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/washington-pushes-for-new-ai-rules-protecting-artists-as-hollywood-backlash-mounts-080019112.html
Tech leaders question if society is ready for artificial general intelligence at Vatican conference
Keyun Ruan, chief information security officer at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, posed the question, “Why do we need AGI?” in reference to artificial general intelligence — AI systems that can match or exceed human intelligence across a wide range of situations.
Speaking at a conference on human flourishing and technology in the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences May 23, Ruan said that determining AGI’s purpose and service to humanity is “a broader conversation that we have never really had at a global level.” ...
The development of AGI requires huge monetary investments, “and there is not an equal size of investments and funding in alignment, in ethics, in human flourishing,” she noted. “We want to get the equation balanced before we race into AGI.” ...
Dennis Snower, an economist and president of the Global Solutions Initiative, told Catholic News Service that today “artificial intelligence is driven largely by business interests with a focus on profits and shareholder value, and these don’t align properly with our needs to flourish both individually and socially.” ...
See the full story here: https://thedialog.org/vatican-news/tech-leaders-question-if-society-is-ready-for-artificial-general-intelligence-at-vatican-conference/
How a Decades-Old Technology and a Paper From Meta Created an AI Industry Standard
... Vector databases have been around for decades, but are now emerging as something of an industry standard for AI businesses to use alongside a technique called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG.
When combined, businesses can link their private data with large-language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, allowing the AI to perform data analysis, summarization and other tasks on their data. Without them, AI models are limited to what they have learned from their initial training on public data online, up to a certain point in time, and are more prone to factual errors called “hallucinations.”
New York-based startup Pinecone was an early entrant in the vector database AI space. ...
Vector databases are finding a new use by enterprise and AI developers because they power the RAG technique. Originating from a 2020 paper by an AI research group at Meta Platforms, RAG is commonly used by enterprises to build chatbots for employees to reference company policies, or for customer service and salespeople to pull information from knowledge bases.
Vector databases are different from traditional databases with columns and rows because they are designed to store a massive amount of data as “vectors,” or numerical representations of the raw data. That makes them ideal for RAG, the process where generative AI models pull from large amounts of vector data to improve their responses with the additional information.
RAG vs. fine-tuning
Compared with fine-tuning—a technique used to create a custom AI model based on an existing large language model—RAG is cheaper because it doesn’t require massive amounts of computing power and advanced AI expertise, and is easier and faster for developers to implement. Roughly 80% of enterprises are using RAG, compared with 20% using fine-tuning, Chandrasekaran said. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-decades-old-technology-and-a-paper-from-meta-created-an-ai-industry-standard-354a810e
IMAX Reveals Their Ambitious 6-Year Plan to Expand Across the Globe
- IMAX is expanding globally with plans to double its network of theaters over the next six years, focusing on markets like Australia.
- A new generation of IMAX cameras is in development, with upgrades such as quieter and lighter features to enhance the filmmaker experience.
- IMAX is exploring the potential of live events, including TV series premieres like the one they recently did for a show by Jonathan Nolan, using IMAX cameras for a unique viewing experience.
See the full story here: https://collider.com/imax-global-expansion-plans
IATSE welcomes release of bipartisan U.S. Senate roadmap for AI policy, urges Congressional action
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In the roadmap, on issues key to IATSE workers, the bipartisan working group encourages the relevant Senate committees to:
Ensure that stakeholders – from innovators and employers to civil society, unions, and other workforce perspectives – are consulted as AI is developed and then deployed by end users;
Consider developing legislation to establish a coherent approach to public-facing transparency requirements for AI systems;
Consider federal policy issues related to the data sets used by AI developers to train their models, including data sets that might contain sensitive personal data or are protected by copyright, and evaluate whether there is a need for transparency requirements; and
Review the results of existing and forthcoming reports from the U.S. Copyright Office and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on how AI impacts copyright and intellectual property law, and take action as deemed appropriate to ensure the U.S. continues to lead the world on this front. ...
See the full article here: https://iatse.net/iatse-welcomes-release-of-bipartisan-u-s-senate-roadmap-for-ai-policy-urges-congressional-action/
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