The Infinite, the world’s largest virtual reality experience, has opened in Montreal (PHOTOS)
It's a chance to see the view that only astronauts can experience: The Infinite, the world's largest virtual reality experience to date, has opened in Montreal at the Arsenal Contemporary Art gallery in Griffintown.
Told through a combination of virtual reality, augmented reality and projections, the experience takes users on an immersive, hour-long trip aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
All told, it's an hour-long experience that includes 35 minutes of free-roaming VR—where you can physically walk through the space with a VR headset on—spread out over 12,500 square feet of rooms. That's a big deal, as most virtual reality means standing in one place or sitting in a chair; walking around makes it that much more unique.
Starting with a blast off sequence room, people equip themselves with VR headsets and are able to freely roam a room with other people in the same room. A huge 3D rendering of the space station can be explored, and users can choose to touch orbs in VR that activate stories from astronauts. You won't be bumping into anyone as you walk; people actually show up on your headset.
Afterwards, they're guided into a room—still wearing a VR headset—to sit and look at the Earth from orbit with footage that was taken from the ISS. "People will feel like they are walking in Space, seeing the planet and finally having that experience of the overview effect in a very physical and emotional way," says Felix Lajeunesse, co-Founder of Felix & Paul Studios, which was a contributor to collecting the 250 hours of footage that make up the whole experience.
Walking through mirrored corridors, user will 'land' in a room showing a trippy, digital room-sized artwork formed by an LED ceiling and mirrored floor by Ryoji Ikeda called The Universe within the Universe, a piece that was created exclusively for the experience.
See the full story here: https://www.timeout.com/montreal/news/the-infinite-the-worlds-largest-virtual-reality-experience-has-opened-in-montreal-photos-072121
Teleport Anywhere in the World With PORTL’s High-Tech Hologram Machine
The device is a sleek rectangular box featuring a high-resolution flat-screen monitor. From across the room, a studio kit features a camera, lighting, and white backdrop setup. Appearing in front of the camera holoports a person — in this demonstration, across the room — rendering their 7-foot telepresence on the PORTL Epic.
“There’s an audience-facing camera that’s embedded in every single PORTL that sees the audience you’re being beamed in front of so that the person being beamed in who is being materialized will be able to see through the return-feed camera,” Nussbaum said.
The company also has PORTL Mini in the works, a device for home use that’s one-fifth the size of the Epic model.
“It should be for everybody, so that’s what my purpose was when I developed these,” Nussbaum said. “Eventually, PORTLs are going in the home. This is the future of broadcast and communication.”
See the full story here: https://hypebeast.com/2021/7/portl-hologram-teleportation-machine-how-it-works-watch
Snap Spectacles Used to Turn Spoken Word Poetry into an Augmented Reality Experience
New York-based poet and computer programmer Zach Lieberman managed to get his hands on a pair of Spectacles and decided to translate his words into immersive elements using Lens Studio.
The results of the experiment can be seen in a new video posted on Monday which shows Lieberman walking around New York City as his Spectacles smartglasses simultaneously deliver audio and visual presentations of his poetry.
See the full story here: https://next.reality.news/news/snap-spectacles-used-turn-spoken-word-poetry-into-augmented-reality-experience-0384810/
Snap buys another company to make AR shopping a reality
Snap is making a big bet on AR shopping.
The parent company of Snapchat has bought Vertebrae, a company that lets brands create and manage 3D versions of their goods. Vertebrae’s 50-person team will keep developing the platform for existing and new clients, according to a Snap spokesperson. The idea is that a company can easily upload visuals and other information about an item into Vertebrae and have a 3D version made for shoppers to access, and potentially buy directly, within Snapchat.
When you piece together Vertebrae with Snap’s other shopping-related acquisitions and features, including Fit Analytics and Screenshop, it’s easier to get a sense of its ambitions to be a shopping destination. For brands, the company is setting up a self-service system to easily upload and manage AR versions of their goods that people can discover in Snapchat. For Snapchat users, imagine being able to scan just about anything in the real world and turn it into a virtual object that you can manipulate, resize, and then buy without leaving the app.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/19/22583827/snap-vertebrae-snapchat-ar-shopping-startup-3d-assets
HaptX raises another $12M for high-tech gloves, relocates HQ back to Seattle
The company just landed $12 million from existing investors including Verizon Ventures, Mason Avenue Investments, Taylor Frigon Capital Partners, and Upheaval Investments. Total funding to date is $31 million.
Founded in 2012 and previously known as AxonVR, the company’s tech promises to deliver realistic touch feedback to users reaching out for objects in VR, thanks to microfluidics in the glove system that physically and precisely displace the skin on a user’s hands and fingers.
The gloves work with a VR headset and tracker, connected to a central control box, and let users move through virtual environments and feel virtual objects with their hands.
The company is also moving its headquarters to back the Seattle area, where it originally launched before moving to California and will open a new 15,000 square-foot space. The 25-person operation will maintain two offices in Redmond, Wash., and San Luis Obispo, Calif.
See the full story here: https://www.geekwire.com/2021/haptx-raises-another-12m-high-tech-gloves-relocates-hq-back-seattle/
Think, fight, feel: how video game artificial intelligence is evolving
[PhilNote: this is primarily an article about diversity.]
In May, as part of an otherwise unremarkable corporate strategy meeting, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida made an interesting announcement. The company’s artificial intelligence research division, Sony AI, would be collaborating with PlayStation developers to create intelligent computer-controlled characters. “By leveraging reinforcement learning,” he wrote, “we are developing game AI agents that can be a player’s in-game opponent or collaboration partner.”
...The recent Watch Dogs: Legion generates life stories, relationships and daily routines for every London citizen you interact with – so if you save a character’s life one day, their best mate may well join you the next. The experimental text adventure AI Dungeon uses OpenAI’s natural language modeller GPT-3 to create new emergent narrative experiences.
...The emphasis on diverse data is important, because it highlights a misconception about AI: that it is somehow objective because it is the result of computation. ...
AI engineers have as much responsibility to the player as the writers and designers. They create part of the experience, and they have a huge capacity to harm. We’ve seen recently how AI Dungeon is generating stories that are potentially traumatic for the player, without warning.” ...
“Having a diverse team is absolutely necessary for ensuring more design angles are being considered, but I think it’s important not to fetishise underrepresented and marginalised individuals as the solutions to problems that often have very deep roots in company and industry practices,” says Phillips. “It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on folks who often have less job security, clout and resources to educate their peers (and supervisors) about issues that can be very personal. This is what is popularly called an “add diversity and stir” approach, where companies bring in “diverse” individuals and expect them to initiate change without any corresponding changes to the workplace....
See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/jul/19/video-gaming-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-evolving
Virtex Stadium – the First “True” Virtual Reality Stadium for Esports Launches Soon
How Will Users Experience Events in the Virtual Stadium?
The concept envisioned and developed by Virtex is simple: esports fans should be able to experience events as if they were happening in real life. They will be able to get together with their friends, go to the center of the stadium, and see the action in 3D.
Alternately, users can watch the games as a hologram in the Lobby of the virtual reality stadium. This area is designed as a shared, free movement social space, where users’ holograms can interact with each other and comment on the esports event.
The First Glimpse at the Virtual Reality Stadium
At the moment, the Virtex team is putting together the last details before announcing the first titles available in the virtual stadium. What we know so far is that the stadium will support a maximum of 200 users per server and that there will be as many servers as necessary for the entire audience.
The Open Beta version of Virtex Stadium will be launched later this year on Oculus PC-VR and SteamVR.
See the full story here: https://arpost.co/2021/07/16/virtex-virtual-reality-stadium-esports/
OpenAI disbands its robotics research team
OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubik’s Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available.
“So it turns out that we can make a gigantic progress whenever we have access to data. And I kept all of our machinery unsupervised, [using] reinforcement learning — [it] work[s] extremely well. There [are] actually plenty of domains that are very, very rich with data. And ultimately that was holding us back in terms of robotics,” Zaremba said. “The decision [to disband the robotics team] was quite hard for me. But I got the realization some time ago that actually, that’s for the best from the perspective of the company.”
...Brockman and Altman in particular believe AGI will be able to master more fields than any one person, chiefly by identifying complex cross-disciplinary connections that elude human experts. Furthermore, they predict that responsibly deployed AGI — in other words, AGI deployed in “close collaboration” with researchers in relevant fields, like social science — might help solve longstanding challenges in climate change, health care, and education.
...OpenAI’s move away from robotics might be a reflection of the economic realities the company faces. DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned AI research lab, has undergone a similar shift in recent years as R&D costs mount, moving away from prestige projects in favor of work with commercial applications, like protein shape prediction.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2021/07/16/openai-disbands-its-robotics-research-team/
Building ethical A.I. products can put businesses at a competitive advantage
A competitive advantage
Building trusted and ethical AI systems and the governance around them could potentially become a competitive strength for companies, according to Hiroaki Kitano, president and CEO at Sony Computer Science Laboratories.
For Norwegian telecommunication giant Telenor, ethical AI is “responsible business in the making,” according to Ieva Martinkenaite, a vice president at Telenor Research. She pointed out that many of the next-generation telecommunication networks will be driven by AI-embedded software and that technology will be crucial for new growth opportunities.
That requires a set of global rules and trust principles built around AI that are followed not only by the telecom companies, but also by global vendors that they outsource parts of their operations to, according to Martinkenaite. Vendors may include stakeholders like equipment providers, software firms and service assurance companies, he added.
See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/15/building-ethical-ai-products-can-put-businesses-at-competitive-advantage.html
Looking Glass 8K Holographic Display Is Absolutely Massive
This past December, the company launched the Looking Glass Portrait, its first-ever “portrait-orientated” 3D display engineered specifically to display people and characters. This was followed by the reveal of a cloud-based conversion service that transforms standard 2D images into 3D holograms within a matter of seconds.
Today, the company revealed the latest additions to its next-generation lineup, the Looking Glass 4K Gen2 and Looking Glass 8K Gen2. These second-gen displays feature a new “blockless” design, resulting in thinner, lighter hardware as well as improved optics designed to reduce ambient reflections and improve group viewability.
The Looking Glass 4K Gen2 features a solid 15.6” display. Like the Looking Glass Portrait, the 4K Gen2 can run in standalone mode, removing the need for a tethered PC. The Looking Glass 8K Gen2, on the other hand, boasts a massive 32” display, making it “the largest available holographic interface on the market” according to the company.
The Looking Glass 4K Gen2 features a price tag of $3,000. Those interested in the Looking Glass 8K Gen2 can pick one up for $17,500 ($15,000 for a limited time). Both products are available for preorder and will begin shipping this Fall.
