... The Iowa resident said he tried to tell the female player how to mute or ghost others but she couldn't hear him among all the screaming users crowding around her and making sexual comments.
"That's the part that got to me. Just seeing other people have such an awful time," Young said. "I dropped off the game pretty hard after that experience. It just wasn't fun anymore."
As for Smith, she thinks Echo VR should have a strike system, a way to identify players by pointing at them, or features to make the avatars look different so everyone doesn't look like the same robot.
"Companies need to step up and come up with new ways to moderate and help us," she said, "because we're the ones getting harassed."
... Now real estate billionaire Frank McCourt has committed $250 million to fund Project Liberty, which he hopes will restyle the web as a platform owned by the public. Of that amount, McCourt — former owner of the L.A. Dodgers — earmarked $25 million to create a decentralized social networking protocol that aims to reinvent the model for consumer data governance online. ...
However, WSJ suggests the path to such a result is “unclear.” This is due less to technological impediments than consumers’ own social behaviors. “Social-media companies optimize their networks to keep users there. Would a decentralized social network be as sticky? Plus, blockchain technology tends to make the web run more slowly and expensively,” WSJ reports. Woodham told WSJ that the pitch isn’t as much about earning potential as avoiding exploitation. ...
Tapestri in November debuted an app that pays consumers up to $15 per month cash in exchange for their anonymized location history, which is then resold to brands. Black consumers who download their datadata from Amazon, Google Maps, Netflix, Uber and YouTube can then be paid for it by Streamlytics, whose Clture app makes it available to brands after anonymizing.
Anima, an augmented reality startup, wants to build a bridge between the physical world and the metaverse. And it thinks a global treasure hunt for NFTs, floating in virtual space, is the way to do it.
Last week, Anima launched PHASE MN:01 Mirror, a collection of 8,888 unique augmented reality NFTs created with street artist Demsky. Unlike most headline-grabbing NFTs of late, which are only visible as image files, Mirror AR NFTs will interact with the real world through smartphone camera filters, a la Pokémon Go or the real-world Bitcoin-hunting game created by the same developer. ...
What makes these digital artworks unique is how they will change upon interaction with the physical world. New owners of Mirror NFTs—built on Ethereum using Palm—will be dropped coordinates to 10 still-secret locations around the globe; traveling to these locations and placing their NFTs in these landscapes will permanently alter these NFTs visually, audibly, and in their composition on the blockchain. Each Mirror NFT can be altered up to eight times and, if resold, will retain these changes. ...
The first thing I had to do before stepping into the metaverse was create my avatar. The panel was loaded with options to customize my hair and eye color, clothing, and even accessories. My avatar came wearing a pretty atrocious outfit, so of course, I had to change it up.
Start exploring
After spending too much time deciding on the perfect outfit (a light pink shirt with some overalls to escape the New York winter weather), I was finally dropped into Genesis Plaza, a starting point within Decentraland. This was definitely the most crowded area of the platform that I saw, and other avatars popped up to my left and right as I took in my surroundings. When an avatar got close to mine, I could hear a human voice saying something unintelligible.
Harvard University on Tuesday launched the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, a new University-wide initiative standing at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, seeking fundamental principles that underlie both human and machine intelligence. The fruits of discoveries will flow in both directions, enhancing understanding of how humans think, perceive the world around them, make decisions, and learn, thereby advancing the rapidly evolving field of AI.
The institute will be funded by a $500 million gift from Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, which was announced Tuesday by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The gift will support 10 new faculty appointments, significant new computing infrastructure, and resources to allow students to flow between labs in pursuit of ideas and knowledge.
VOICE Summit 2021, a conference highlighting the latest in artificial intelligence and voice technology, will kick off this evening in Crystal City.
This is the first major tech event to relocate to National Landing — collectively, the Crystal City, Pentagon City and Potomac Yard neighborhoods — since Amazon announced it would build its second headquarters in Arlington in 2018, according to Arlington Economic Development.
The two-day event will be virtual and in-person at the Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel (2800 S. Potomac Ave). The event will feature keynotes, fireside chats, panels and breakout “conversations” that allow the audience to play an active role in the discussion.
The actual news here is that Japanese telecom giant KDDI has partnered with a firm named Mawari (which means something along the lines of “surroundings” in Japanese) to create a virtual assistant you can “see” through the window of your smartphone in augmented reality, one who might automatically pop up to give you directions and interact if you point your phone at a real-world location. (You’ll also see walking directions and indoor maps in the video, but those simply appear to be packaged together as part of the proof of concept.)
If you peek the video atop this post, you can see it’s not that much more advanced than, say, Pokémon Go. But behind the scenes, the partners claim that KDDI’s 5G network, Amazon’s low-latency AWS Wavelength edge computing nodes, and a proprietary codec from Mawari combine to let “digital humans” stream to your phone in real time instead of running natively on your phone’s chip.
Once configured, the system allows the elderly person to say “Alexa, call for help,” if they’re ever in need of emergency assistance. A trained agent on the other end will then be able to dispatch the police, the fire department or an ambulance to their location, much like what’s possible with some home security systems. However, the Alexa Together system can also work with third-party devices from Assistive Technology Service (ATS) and Vayyar to detect if the customer may be in need of emergency assistance from a fall and proactively help.
Vayyar Care is a wall-mounted sensor that is able to identify when a fall has happened, while SkyAngelCare by ATS is a fall-detection pendant that aging customers wear around their neck. Both can detect a fall — the latter if the customer presses a help button on their pendant. Amazon says more device makers will be added to Alexa Together in time.
The subscription service is offering an expansive six-month free trial to allow customers to determine if the solution is a good fit for them. And existing Alexa Care Hub customers will also now receive a free year of Alexa Together starting today until December 7, 2022.
