philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Meow Wolf announces its Los Angeles venue

... Meow Wolf Los Angeles will be located in a portion of what is currently the Cinemark complex at Howard Hughes L.A. The rest of the multiplex is expected to remain open to moviegoers, according to a spokesperson for the Santa Fe, N.M.-based Meow Wolf. ...

In an interview with The Times, Meow Wolf artists said the Howard Hughes location will play into the space’s theatrical roots. The goal is to turn our city’s most ritualistic experience — that is, the act of going to the movies — into an interactive, art-driven wonderland. ...

Like past Meow Wolf exhibitions, a significant number of installations will come from the local art community. Meow Wolf curator Han Santana-Sayles, 31, a Murrieta native who now resides in Pasadena, will lead the outreach into L.A.’s art world, a process that is in its infancy. A Meow Wolf space is a mix of elaborately designed environments and commissioned works from artists who reside in the host city...

www.latimes.com/travel/story/2024-05-13/meow-wolf-los-angeles-location-2026

AI cameras tested in Cannes ahead of Olympics

... Local authorities say they are using 17 experimental cameras equipped with AI technology that are supposed to "identify events or behaviours deemed suspicious" and help detect abandoned packages, weapons and people in distress.

The Cannes town hall has been asking to implement them since 2019 but has only been given permission thanks to changes in surveillance laws introduced for the Olympics that kick off in Paris in July, according to Mayor David Lisnard.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/ai-cameras-tested-in-cannes-ahead-of-olympics-720486

TikTok Will Start Labeling AI-Generated Content to Combat Misinformation

... TikTok is teaming up with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity [C2PA] and will use their Content Credentials technology. ...

“Our users and our creators are so excited about AI and what it can do for their creativity and their ability to connect with audiences.” Adam Presser, TikTok’s Head of Operations & Trust and Safety told ABC News. “And at the same time, we want to make sure that people have that ability to understand what fact is and what is fiction.” ...

See the full story here: https://time.com/6976614/tiktok-ai-generated-content-misinformation/

LA Film Festival Showcases Rapid Evolution of AI Tools And What They Can Pull Off

An AI film festival held in Los Angeles last week showcased the rapidly developing state of artificial-intelligence tools and the creativity they can exhibit. ...

How to see the films yourself: On May 10, all the films will be available on Runway’s AI Film Festival website. You can check out the 2023 finalists today to compare and see how far filmmakers and AI software has come in the last year. ...

See the full story here: https://laist.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/la-film-festival-showcases-rapid-evolution-of-ai-tools-and-what-they-can-pull-off

STANFORD RESEARCHERS CREATE FIRST-EVER AUGMENTED REALITY 3D HOLOGRAPHIC HEADSET USING ORDINARY GLASSES

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“Our headset appears to the outside world just like an everyday pair of glasses, but what the wearer sees through the lenses is an enriched world overlaid with vibrant, full-color 3D computed imagery,” said Stanford’s Gordon Wetzstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering.

“There is no other augmented reality system out there now with comparable compact form factor, or that matches our 3D image quality,” added Gun-Yeal Lee, a postdoctoral researcher in the Stanford Computational Imaging lab and co-first author of the published paper outlining the team’s efforts. ...

The key, they determined, was improving the 80-year-old holography techniques with the power of 21st-century AI computing to dramatically improve the depth cues of the projected holographic images. ...

“With holography, you also get the full 3D volume in front of each eye increasing the life-like 3D image quality,” said Brian Chao, a doctoral student in the Stanford Computational Imaging lab and also co-author of the paper.

The team also employed modern breakthroughs in nanophotonics and waveguide technologies, which increased the complexity and overall realness of the projected images. ...

Having completed their initial prototype, the team says they can now envision a number of potential applications for their system....

Although more work is expected before the augmented reality headset made from ordinary glasses is commercially available, the Stanford team says their ability to combine modern AI techniques and nanophotonic breakthroughs with 1940s holography is the step that folks in their industry have been waiting for. ...

See the full story here: https://thedebrief.org/stanford-researchers-create-first-ever-augmented-reality-3d-holographic-headset-using-ordinary-glasses/

Academic Success Tip: Infusing AI into Curricular Offerings

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AI as a teaching tool: ...

Sanghoon Park, a professor of teaching and learning at the University of South Florida, created a chatbot that uses AI to provide motivational messages to students in his online class. The chatbot is connected to the online course page and students can receive academic help and emotional support in a few clicks from the bot. ...

AI as a course topic: Other faculty are engaging with technology directly in the classroom, teaching students how to hone and develop their own AI tools and projects. ...

AI in research: ...

Boston University is piloting an initiative to understand how students in a first-year writing course partner with AI in writing and research and to inform program guidelines in the future. The goal is to provide best practices for faculty in teaching ethical and responsible AI use as well as to develop assignments and activities to better teach these concepts.

See the full story here: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/academic-life/2024/05/07/how-professors-are-using-and-teaching-generative-ai

Stanford AI leader Fei-Fei Li building ‘spatial intelligence’ startup

... In describing the startup, one source pointed to a talk Li gave at the TED conference in Vancouver last month, in which she said the cutting edge of research involved algorithms that could plausibly extrapolate what images and text would look like in three-dimensional environments and act upon those predictions, using a concept called "spatial intelligence." ...

Li has lamented a funding gap on AI research between a well-resourced private sector on one side and academics and government labs on the other, calling for a "moonshot mentality" from the U.S. government to invest in scientific applications of the technology and research into its risks.

Her Stanford profile says she is on partial leave from the beginning of 2024 to the end of 2025. Among the research interests listed on her profile are "cognitively inspired AI," computer vision and robotic learning. ...

See the full story here: https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/amp/news/artificial-intelligence/stanford-ai-leader-fei-fei-li-building-spatial-intelligence-startup/109832651

Mice navigating a virtual reality environment reveal that walls, not floors, define space

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This VR environment was a two-dimensional world that could be manipulated to include or exclude various visual elements. By monitoring the activity of these neurons, the scientists could observe how the mice's spatial maps were updated in response to the manipulation within the VR world. ...

The most striking finding centered around the role of visual boundaries. When the VR environment included elevated walls, the place cells and grid cells in the mice's brains fired consistently, indicating stable spatial maps.

However, removing these walls caused the firing patterns of these cells to become erratic, demonstrating a disruption in the animals' ability to navigate. Interestingly, removing cues from the floor of the VR environment had no significant impact. This suggests that the specific form of visual cues plays a crucial role in how animals build and maintain their internal maps. ...

"Our results suggest that the elevated—not flat—boundary plays a crucial role in how animals maintain spatial maps," explains Dr. Chen. "This may explain why, for instance, young childrenstruggle to use flat outlines of shapes for spatial orientation." ...

See the full story here: https://phys.org/news/2024-05-mice-virtual-reality-environment-reveal.html

Sam Altman says helpful agents are poised to become AI’s killer function

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It’s a leap from OpenAI’s current offerings. Its leading applications, like DALL-E, Sora, and ChatGPT (which Altman referred to as “incredibly dumb” compared with what’s coming next), have wowed us with their ability to generate convincing text and surreal videos and images. But they mostly remain tools we use for isolated tasks, and they have limited capacity to learn about us from our conversations with them. 

In the new paradigm, as Altman sees it, the AI will be capable of helping us outside the chat interface and taking real-world tasks off our plates.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/01/1091979/sam-altman-says-helpful-agents-are-poised-to-become-ais-killer-function/

The Last Stock Photographers Await Their Fate Under Generative AI

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Real photos of real things are still in demand, said Paul Hennessy, CEO of stock photography provider Shutterstock, on an earnings call in February. “We are not seeing our customers at any level of scale with a desire to buy, purchase and utilize AI-generated images,” Hennessy said.

The stock-photo companies are hedging their bets, however, by introducing AI tools of their own. Lacking similar options, stock photographers can’t be so sanguine. ...

Antonio Guillem, the photographer behind the internet-famous “distracted boyfriend” stock photo, said he still makes good money from stock that he shoots in his 2,000-square-foot studio outside Barcelona, although he no longer sells the 1,600 licenses a day that he did three years ago. ...

And AI is unlikely to diminish stock photographers’ pay any further because companies including Getty have to keep prices high enough to maintain their own operations, Swift said. 

Getty Images’ 2023 creative revenue, its term for stock sales, declined 1.1% from the year before to $578.7 million. Shutterstock’s subscribers declined 10.8%, although its sales increased. Adobe, which owns a stock photo business as well as products like Photoshop, doesn’t break out the sales of its individual subscription products. ...

All market their AI products as commercially safe, meaning they trained the models on images for which they have the rights, and introduced some form of compensation for those images’ photographers. ...

Adobe is encouraging photographers to use generative AI to create more images and sell more licenses, said Scott Belsky, the company’s chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products. If Adobe sees demand for photos of women in red sweaters, for instance, photographers could use AI to tweak their existing pictures of women in blue and purple sweaters to capitalize. 

Resistance, for Belsky, is futile. ...

“I’m an old tech guy, I’ve been through it a couple of times,” he said. “So I have constantly been looking ahead for the next thing that’s going to crush all my dreams and the stuff that I built.”

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-last-stock-photographers-await-their-fate-under-generative-ai-822d1e6a#