philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Sensorium Sets Fire to the Metaverse by Burning 1 Bln SENSO Tokens

... Founded in 2018, Sensorium Galaxy has been named as one of the leading contenders in the metaverse race, alongside tech giants like Facebook and Epic Games’ Fortnite.

Once launched, Sensorium Galaxy users will be able to explore different virtual worlds, each dedicated to a particular form of entertainment. Top attractions will include exclusive concerts by world-renowned DJs like David Guetta and Armin van Buuren, as well as mindfulness and meditation activities led by reputed practitioners.

See the full story here: https://bitcoinist.com/sensorium-sets-fire-to-the-metaverse-by-burning-1-bln-senso-tokens/

Vuzix announces agreement with Verizon to deliver Augmented Reality experience for sports and gaming

According to Vuzix, the agreement between the two companies will focus on the technology advancement and commercialization aspects of delivering immersive augmented reality training experiences powered by Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband service and edge compute platform and Vuzix Shield smart glasses (pictured above). The agreement will leverage a proof-of-concept program that was completed earlier this year, which demonstrated the power of Verizon’s 5G and edge computing platform to run applications at the edge of the network using Vuzix smart glasses to deliver improved response time, longer battery life and increased computing capacity. 

“By leveraging Verizon’s 5G Edge and ultra-light weight AR smart glasses from Vuzix, we are delivering immersive technology in the field of sports training and fan experience,” said Brian Mecum, Vice President of Device Technology at Verizon.

See the full story here: https://www.auganix.org/vuzix-announces-agreement-with-verizon-to-deliver-augmented-reality-experience-for-sports-and-gaming/

Foreign investors, mature startups redraw New Zealand’s VC funding landscape

... This boost in access to capital can be attributed to a few things. Even as a small country, New Zealand has a reputation for producing global companies, with notable exits like Vend, Seequent, Rocket Lab, Pushpay, Aroa Biosurgery, LanzaTech and Xero garnering the attention of foreign investors — like Founders Fund, Sequoia, Horizons and Aspect Venture Partners — who are either investing into local VC funds or directly into startup rounds. Those exits are providing returns, which investors are putting into other early-stage New Zealand startups to keep the ecosystem healthy and churning. ...

One of the biggest catalysts of the increase in VC investments, however, has been the Elevate NZ Venture Fund, a $300 million fund of funds program that will invest capital into VC firms over the next five years. ...

New Zealand’s government established the New Zealand Capital Growth Partners (NZGCP) in 2002 as an initiative to stimulate the early-stage startup ecosystem. After about 18 years of smaller-scale projects, the entity came up with the Elevate fund, and that might just be what gets today’s New Zealand early-stage startups into the next phase. ...

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/26/new-zealands-maturing-vc-funding-landscape-piques-interest-of-foreign-investors/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter&tpcc=TCdailynewsletter

Remembering the startups we lost in 2021

A look back at startups large and small that didn't make it

... 2021 also largely lacked the kind of blockbuster crashes we saw last year, courtesy of names like Quibi and Essential. But even in a non-pandemic year, keeping a startup afloat is still an enormously difficult task, ...

Loon (2015-2021) ...

Houseparty (2015-2021) ...

Fry’s Electronics ...

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/27/remembering-the-startups-we-lost-in-2021/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter&tpcc=TCdailynewsletter

2021’s Top Stories About AI

Spoiler: A lot of them talked about what's wrong with machine learning today

2. 15 Graphs You Need to See to Understand AI in 2021: 

6. OpenAI's GPT-3 Speaks! (Kindly Disregard Toxic Language):

See the full story here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/artificial-intelligence-2021

VR/AR Association Holds Virtual Summit Dedicated to the Metaverse

During the opening Keynote, “Interoperability Across the Metaverse,” Seek CEO Jon Cheney announced the Seek NFT platform.

“I think, in the future, all of this content is going to be in 3D. When we jump into these different places, they’re going to be in 3D,” said Cheney. “We’re excited today to announce Seek NFT. Mint directly to the NFT platform of your choice directly from Seek.”

Creator Economies in AR and Web3

A number of panel speakers linked the idea of augmented reality and “Web3” as the real way to link digital assets and real-world opportunities.

Value From Virtual Worlds

“The time and effort and resources spent in virtual worlds gives users no real control… virtual worlds lose their relevance when a new virtual world comes out,” SuperWorld co-founder and CEO Hrish Lotlikar said in his panel “A Virtual World That Enhances People’s Real Lives.” “Web3 really solves that… NFTs are really the building blocks of all of this.” ...

“VR is going to be big – even bigger than it is now – but at the end of the day, we are physical beings and we live in a physical world,” said Di Tommaso. “We’re not going to want to spend all of our time with these big glasses on.” ...

Charisma CEO Guy Gadney presented “Characters in the Metaverse” with writing lead Rianna Dearden. Charisma is a platform for “powering conversational characters” built with AI. AI is then digitally embodied through Unreal Engine, Unity, Metahuman, or Ready Player Me. ...

See the full story here: https://arpost.co/2021/12/23/vr-ar-association-virtual-summit-metaverse/

How Judaism can respond to the singular challenge of artificial intelligence

... In my book, Staying Human: A Jewish Theology for the Age of Artificial Intelligence, I show how Jewish tradition espouses the idea of God as everything, the singularity, the network of networks.  ...

Indeed, the danger of the extreme version of the singularity is the levelling of all existence, and the disappearance of the creative and moral space in which individuated beings encounter one another.  ...

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), the French theologian, saw technology as aiming at “absolute efficiency” in human affairs. Halachah is not about efficiency but meaning and relationship in the world of objects. It also brings into play the past, present, and future, which is to be worked towards steadily, not with an eye to conquering the universe but, with reverence, humility, and gratitude, and in the knowledge of our own temporality.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.thejc.com/judaism/all/when-machines-outsmart-humans-5wlWBdfeX2cjjmf0vsEm5j

10 AI Predictions For 2022

4) Powerful new AI tools will be built for video.

...Expect to see a blossoming of AI tools for video in 2022, from video search to video editing to video generation. In the latter category, Synthesia’s $50M Series B raise earlier this month is a (both exciting and unnerving) sign of things to come. ...

5) An NLP model with over 10 trillion parameters will be built.

In 2021, the trillion-parameter barrier was broken by models from Google (1.6 trillion parameters) and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (1.75 trillion parameters).

Expect this hockey-stick growth in the size of large language models to continue next year. There is a good chance that 2022’s largest model will come from OpenAI and be named GPT-4.

6) Collaboration and investment will all but cease between American and Chinese actors in the field of AI.

7) Multiple large cloud/data platforms will announce new synthetic data initiatives.

Getting the right data is the most important and the most challenging part of building AI products today. Synthetic data offers compelling advantages over the status-quo approach of collecting and labeling real-world datasets.

Likely candidates: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Unity Technologies, Scale AI

8) Toronto will establish itself as the most important AI hub in the world outside of Silicon Valley and China.

9) “Responsible AI” will begin to shift from a vague catch-all term to an operationalized set of enterprise practices.

... A growing movement has emerged to advocate for the responsible use of AI, led by researchers like Timnit Gebru, Joy Buolamwini and Cathy O’Neill. 

2022 is the year that this will begin to change, as responsible AI practices and toolkits become productized and operationalized. These products will come both from tech giants (e.g., Microsoft, IBM) and from newer startups (e.g., Parity, Fiddler Labs). Over time, responsible AI practices will shift from “nice-to-have” efforts within forward-thinking organizations to standard practice across industries. 

Regulation will provide an important impetus: see, for instance, the E.U.’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act and New York City’s new law mandating audits for companies that use AI in hiring decisions (the first of its kind)...

10) Reinforcement learning will become an increasingly important and influential AI paradigm.

In reinforcement learning, the AI is not trained on historical real-world data; it is not given the “answer key” and told what to pay attention to, as in supervised learning. Instead, it is allowed to open-endedly explore its environment, learning about the world as it goes, guided only by a particular objective that it seeks to optimize for.

Reinforcement learning powered DeepMind’s landmark AlphaGo triumph. Increasingly, it is being used by researchers and startups at the bleeding edge of AI to unlock unprecedented AI capabilities, from recommendation engines to robotics to autonomous vehicles and beyond.

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2021/12/22/10-ai-predictions-for-2022/?sh=3cdb5e7d482d

Embodying an opposite-sex virtual reality avatar appears to alter perceptions of touch

... Heterosexual individuals tend to find intimate touch from a same-sex virtual avatar to be more pleasant when they are “wearing” a virtual body of the opposite sex, according to new research that used immersive VR technology to induce a body swap illusion among participants. ...

In the study, participants reclined in a chair as they wore an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. They passively observed from a first person perspective as a male or female virtual avatar delivered caresses to their foot, knee, pelvis, chest, head, and hand. The participants were not physically touched. Instead, the caresses were only delivered to the participants’ virtual body. ...

Moreover, we also focused on intimate touch, which would be unethical in normal circumstances.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.psypost.org/2021/12/embodying-an-opposite-sex-virtual-reality-avatar-appears-to-alter-perceptions-of-touch-62254

Research: How AR Filters Impact People’s Self-Image

Abstract: ... New research suggests that AR apps designed to let customers virtually try on makeup or other products can have a significant, negative impact on psychological wellbeing. Moreover, that impact can vary widely depending on the customer. While people with lower baseline levels of self-esteem may feel better about themselves after using an AR filter, those with higher pre-existing self-esteem are more likely to feel worse about themselves after using AR. In light of these findings, the authors offer five strategies to help firms responsibly deploy AR technologies, including avoiding promoting unrealistic beauty standards, proactively educating customers about the potential harms of using AR, and working with regulators and industry leaders to develop a code of ethics to guide development going forward.

See the full story here: https://hbr.org/2021/12/research-how-ar-filters-impact-peoples-self-image