The quartet spent five weeks with A/V wizards at Industrial Light and Magic, who have used advanced motion capture techniques to create virtual copies of the band that behave accurately in every way, from their dancing to their eye movements. Artificial intelligence (AI) routines were then used to “de-age” the performers, similarly to how it has been done in movies such as Star Wars and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman.
The digital Abba performance – named Abba Voyage – will take place at a physical location in London, with the audience buying tickets to the show and taking their place in the audience just as if they were going to see the group perform in their 1970s heyday. But other performers have experimented with making their shows entirely digital. Boy band BTS attracted a world-record 1.33 million paying viewers to a live-streamed concert earlier this year. Then, Ariana Grande took the logical next step of closing the loop between a digital show in front of a live audience and a live show in front of a digital audience. During a performance in which she used the video game Fortnite as a venue, both the star herself and the audience were present as digital avatars.
While we know AI will be used to recreate a young-looking Abba, we can speculate that the next step could potentially go even further by recreating something of their personalities and behavior. It isn’t a huge leap to imagine they could use language processing and voice recognition to respond to song requests from the audience and, perhaps one day, even hold a conversation.
Taiwanese cinema shows no signs of slowing down, and the country recently embarked on a new chapter in its film history. Since 2020, the Taiwan Creative Content Agency, an intermediary organization supervised by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, has invested in the nation’s future by encouraging artists to explore the use of extended reality (XR) innovations — such as augmented reality and virtual reality used to enhance our understanding of real or artificial environments around us — as well as mixed-reality technologies.
“XR is a new medium, everyone is exploring its creative possibilities,” says TAICCA chairperson Ting Hsiao-ching. “There are ways to produce and present new and innovative art forms in XR. And today it’s accessible to everyone. In Taiwan we have a lot of technological advantages due to our national hardware and software resources, creative studios and artists… We have a freedom of creation that helps us promote immersive projects.”
With the launch of commercial 5G high-speed mobile networks, Taiwan’s heavyweight status in the IT hardware supply chain, plus the emergence of progressive young filmmakers within its borders, Taiwan is undoubtedly well-positioned to lead the latest generation of tech-based creativity.
Using digital technology, a researcher has unravelled the secrets of the use of perspective by the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck, a technique previously believed to be specific to the Italian Renaissance artists.
The history of lines is anything but linear. The importance of proportions and depth in artistic representation has fluctuated widely from one century and culture to the next. During the Renaissance, the geometric precision of perspective became an essential feature of painting and fresco work, not to mention sculpture and architecture.
While Brunelleschi was already using a wooden panel with an eyehole by about 1420, Van Eyck nonetheless remains one of the pioneers in the use of optical systems to depict perspective and take human stereoscopic vision into account. This approach can be considered a forerunner of augmented reality, and would be simplified 70 years later by Leonardo da Vinci.
Makana Chock, David J. Levidow Professor of Communications in the Newhouse School, has been awarded a $75,000 research grant from Facebook Reality Labs to explore the impacts of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) on bystander privacy.
Chock will work with Se Jung Kim, a doctoral student in Newhouse’s mass communications program. They will focus on two countries with disparate cultural norms—the U.S. and South Korea—to examine the impact of cultural differences on privacy concerns and ultimately inform the design of AR/VR technology.
Chock developed her proposal, “AR/VR recording: Cultural differences in perceptions of bystander privacy,” in response to Facebook’s request for proposals on responsible innovation in AR/VR: “Consider Everyone.”
Chock says the “ubiquitous and covert nature” of AR/VR recording poses the threat of serious privacy violations as bystanders are captured without permission. At the same time, different societies often have different concepts of bystander privacy, and those differences are reflected in the way image recording is regulated.
The three-part study will begin with an online survey conducted in both countries to assess potential differences in bystanders’ privacy perceptions and concerns and identify additional concerns of targeted immigrant groups. The team will then conduct a series of in-depth interviews with a subset of survey participants to provide additional qualitative data about cultural differences in bystander privacy concerns. Finally, they will facilitate a series of focus groups comprised of U.S. and South Korean users in a multi-user social VR environment in order to determine if the cultural differences seen in “real world” public spaces also apply in social VR spaces.
There are, in fact, several metaverses out there. These are virtual worlds such as Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, and The Sandbox. Accessed through VR (virtual reality) headsets, these platforms are made not only for exploring but for spending money and making a living.
Rowell discovered the NFT (non-fungible tokens or unique digital artefacts verified by blockchain technology) art scene early this year and was soon putting her work on platforms like Open Sea, which she says is great for beginners, and Foundation, which is invite-only.
Rowell submitted a piece of art to imnotArt, a gallery that also has space in both Cryptovoxels and real-world Chicago.
Visit
This writer paid a visit to the imnotArt gallery on Cryptovoxels. It’s located in the popular Vibes neighbourhood on the corner of Popular Avenue and Ideal Close. A good place to invest? Only if you have a bulging digital wallet. No 3 Truthful Gardens, for example, is prime real estate but it will set you back 5.5 Ethereum or $18,336.62.
“To understand the economics of the metaverse you need to begin by understanding why people would want to spend their time in these virtual spaces. The Celts didn’t arrive in Ireland and think ‘we’d love an art gallery here’. It’s better to figure out what would make people enjoy being in these worlds and build an economy around that,” reflects Dowling.
But one needs to be cautious of a money-first mindset: ...
“If you visit the Decentraland homepage the first thing you see is messaging all about their currency, Manna. But when you visit, say, the tourist website for Barbados the selling point isn’t ‘come for our currency, the Barbados dollar’.”
Metaverse
He suspects that Gen Z will be more willing to spend time and money in the metaverse given that they are growing up with Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite, all of which The Sandbox has elements. Investing in these items and experiences in these worlds might seem like a frippery to many adults but not to a younger generation.
“Our vision is that we deliver the types of spaces needed for specific tasks rather than pushing people towards spending all their time in VR spaces,” he adds.
“I don’t think we should get caught up too much in the concept of the metaverse and what it means for the future. We’re more concerned with what value our tech can offer right now, today,” says Cosgrove.
AI research and development has focused on only a few sectors, ones that are having a net negative impact for humanity, MIT economistDaron Acemogluargues in “Redesigning AI,” a Boston Review book.
“Our current trajectory automates work to an excessive degree while refusing to invest in human productivity; further advances will displace workers and fail to create new opportunities,” Acemoglu writes. AI also threatens “democracy and individual freedoms,” he writes.
Acemoglu’s lead essay in “Redesigning AI” is followed by short responses from AI researchers, labor advocates, economists, philosophers, and ethicists. They discuss economic inequality, possible futures for workers, and what could happen next in AI.
In the excerpt below, Acemoglu explains why the path we’re on is not set and why the reflexive refrain of “But the market …” doesn’t hold up in the face of basic economics.
It can help us protect their privacy and freedom, too. Plenty of academic research shows how emerging technologies — differential privacy, adversarial neural cryptography, secure multiparty computation, and homomorphic encryption, to name a few — can protect privacy and detect security threats and snooping, but this research is still marginal to commercial products and services.
...Ordinary market forces — which fail to take account of externalities — may therefore deter the types of technologies that have the greatest social value.
... This same reasoning is even more compelling when new products produce noneconomic costs and benefits. Consider surveillance technologies. The demand for surveillance from repressive (and even some democratic-looking) governments may be great, generating plenty of financial incentives for firms and researchers to invest in facial recognition and snooping technologies. But the erosion of liberties is a notable noneconomic cost that it is often not taken into account. ...
Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, better known as Rhett & Link, founders of creator-led content studio Mythical Entertainment and hosts of the most popular daily show on the Internet, "Good Mythical Morning," will use Veritone MARVEL.ai to create, manage, license and monetize their own hyper-realistic synthetic voices.
Veritone MARVEL.ai’s synthetic voice technology will enable Rhett & Link to level-up their content value by localizing its popular shows, developing new monetization channels and leveraging their branded voices to create new content opportunities.
"I cannot wait to hear my own synthetic voice speaking French," Rhett said. Added Link, "The possibilities for new content creation and connection with viewers beyond our core English-speaking audiences are endless."
September 1, 2021 –iQIYI Inc., a China-based online entertainment and video service, has recently launched its latest flagship virtual reality (VR) headset, the ‘QIYU 3’, as the company looks to further strengthen its premium VR digital entertainment ecosystem. The launch marks yet another China-based company potentially looking to take a bite out of Facebook’s share of the standalone VR device market, with even the name of iQIYI’s new headset (QIYU 3 or 奇遇3 in Chinese, which translates to ‘Adventure 3’) striking a resemblance to Oculus’ Quest brand.
As the company’s flagship VR product, features of the QIYU 3 headset include:
A dual-screen design that consists of two RGB LCDs, giving the device a resolution of 4320*2160 and true 4K+ level in native resolution. The refresh rate can also reach 90Hz with the support of two built-in display driver chips, according to iQIYI;
Powered by Qualcomm Technologies’ Snapdragon XR2 platform, which is designed exclusively for VR / AR;
8GB DDR4 RAM;
A proprietary Q-Light-powered 6DoF interactive system that enables head-hand 6DoF spatial positioning and a millimeter-level positioning precision for controllers;
QIYU 3 is supported by continuous pupillary distance adjustment technology with an indication precision of up to 1mm. The pupillary distance can be adjusted from 58mm to 72mm;
QIYU 3 also features iQUT future cinema, which the company states “provides users with a 2,000-inch screen, equivalent to the size of 20 80-inch TVs.”
QIYU 3 will also be able to offer a wide range of the latest films and TV shows by tapping into iQIYI’s massive content library. Furthermore, iQIYI will provide QIYU 3 with 4K 3D movies and 8K videos at 60fps with a bitrate of 13M, according to the company.
The whole thing started over a a substance called Vantablack. Developed first at the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory and manufactured by Surrey NanoSystems , the substance isn’t so much a color as it something of a blackhole. It absorbs 99.965 percent of visible light and literally traps it until it dissipates into heat. In fact, it’s not even technically a pigment. It’s a lab grown series of nano-tubes. The substance has lots of practical scientific applications, like keeping light out of telescopes for example. Though, someone realized it might have artistic purposes as well, and a slightly altered version was developed (just ever so less “black” and known as Vantablack S-VIS).
The color was then licensed exclusively for artistic purposes to the studios of Anish Kapoor. Meaning that effectively he was the only artist in the entire world who could use it. It’s slightly ironic considering some of Kapoor’s most famed work is with reflective materials (indeed they’re prime art selfie destinations).
As a way of sticking it to Kapoor, he developed a line of pigments including the world’s “pinkest pink” and “glitteriest glitter” and said they were available for any artist in the entire world to use… except Kapoor.
Well, as it turned out Semple did actually team up with scientists to create a black that may not be the “blackest black” but is still pretty damn black as far as practical art supplies are concerned. He calls it “black 2.0” and it does create the neat visual trick of rendering objects coated in it flat.
Surrey NanoSystems recently announced that they created another very black-black called VBx1. Unlike the fragile Vantablack, it is “a solid coating that is far more tolerant.”
“90% of podcasts don’t get past episode 3. That’s 1.8 million who quit. Of the 200,000 left, 90% will quit after 20 episodes. That’s another 180,000 gone. To be in the top 1% of podcasts in the world you only need to publish 21 episodes.”
When you practice an underrated side hustle for a year, you’re already ahead of most people who will quit after doing it three times. When a tiny side hustle and long-term thinking are combined, it’s possible to quit working a normal job sooner than you think.
