When MMA Meets The Virtual World
Virtual Fighting Championship
The concept is exciting: using compatible VR gear, such as HTC Vive Pro, Oculus Rift or Windows Mixed Reality, you can learn your command buttons – jab, cross, hook, uppercut, overhand and backfist. Then you select your character, practice setup and combos, and choose a game mode from VFC Academy, PVP and single player, and start to work up a sweat while playing.
The game aims to use a minimal button approach to virtual reality design, and all actions are triggered by your physical motions. The developers claim that every real-world fighting and martial art move and attack is recognized in the game. Every movement and offensive technique is measured according to its velocity, distance of travel, area of impact, combinational effect to arrive at precise damage done, providing the most sophisticated physical data to the player.
Reviews have been mixed thus far on Steam among those that have taken part in demo modes, but the development team insists the final version will be far more polished and exciting.
MMA Virtual Betting
Fight fans can take part in exciting MMA virtual betting by visiting Unikrn, which initially found fame as a pioneer in the esports sector. The site includes a virtual MMA section, which allows you to enjoy live betting on simulated fights as they unfold.
Streaming in Virtual Reality
The idea has spread across the MMA scene, and ONE Championship started releasing select bouts in VR during the coronavirus lockdown last year. The MMA promotion has now signed a global partnership deal with Facebook to ensure its 25 million-strong social media community can enjoy VR streaming on a regular basis. Rebel FC is also getting involved.
UFC Fan Tokens
UFC is getting involved in the blockchain revolution via a partnership with Chiliz, a blockchain-based fintech firm. The agreement allows you to vote on surveys and polls, and receive UFC fan tokens as a reward. You can collect these tokens, buy them, trade them, or hunt for them in an augmented reality experience similar to Pokemon GO.
The tokens can then be exchanged for “once-in-a-lifetime experiences”, such as getting closer to the biggest UFC stars.
See the full story here: https://mymmanews.com/when-mma-meets-the-virtual-world/
Machines that learn: The origin story of artificial intelligence
Metz shares the origins of AI in 1958, when a Cornell professor successfully taught a computer to learn. The machine was as wide as a kitchen refrigerator, and was fed cards marked with small squares on either the left or right sides. After reading about 50 of them, it began to correctly identify which cards were which – thanks to programming based on the human brain.
Overhyped expectations exceeded the technology of the era, and the study of so-called neural networks capable of replicating human intelligence remained largely fallow in subsequent decades. Even so, by 1991 the technology had advanced to a point that a machine could learn to identify connections on a family tree or drive a Chevy from Pittsburgh to Erie, Pennsylvania.
As interest in AI waxed and waned, early progress in the field came from just a handful of scientists. Metz focuses on Geoffrey Hinton, a British-born Canadian scientist who sold his startup to Google and subsequently won the Turing Award – the Nobel Prize of computing.
The potential is immense. So are the risks, and Metz touches on some of the pitfalls that have already emerged.
For the most part, though, Metz focuses less on the ethics of AI – and its potentially troubling future applications – than he does on how researchers got to the present moment.
See the full story here: https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2021/0323/Machines-that-learn-The-origin-story-of-artificial-intelligence
Niantic announces partnership with Nintendo on new augmented reality ‘Pikmin’ title
Nearly five years after the launch of Pokémon Go, Niantic announcedMonday that they are partnering with Nintendo to co-develop a new title based on the company’s Pikmin franchise.
“The app will include gameplay activities to encourage walking and make walking more delightful,” a press release from Niantic reads.
Pokémon Go has fallen out of headlines but has continued to deliver massive sums to the San Francisco gaming company, eclipsing $1 billion in revenue in 2020. In recent years, Nintendo has sought to build out their presence on mobile gaming platforms with a number of titles playing on some of their biggest franchises, but none of them have reached Pokémon Go’s level of success.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/22/niantic-announces-partnership-with-nintendo-on-new-augmented-reality-pikmin-title/
Flex Logix has two paths to making a lot of money challenging Nvidia in AI
The programmable chip company scores $55 million in venture backing, bringing its total haul to $82 million.
Flex's "NMAX" technology is based on what's known as an "eFPGA," a kind of programmable chip consisting of tons of identical compute elements, called multiplier-accumulators, that perform the matrix multiplications that are the fundamental task in neural networks. The multiplier-accumulators make up a "systolic array," a kind of logic mesh, surrounded by lots of SRAM memory.
The chip is aimed at the "edge," meaning, devices outside the data center, such as self-driving cars or IoT gadgets.
See the full story here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/flex-logix-has-two-paths-to-making-a-lot-of-money-challenging-nvidia-in-ai/
Virtual Land Prices are Booming, and Now There’s a Fund for That
Republic Real Estate, a firm that’s raising money to buy distressed condos in the physical world, is launching an invite-only fund next week aimed at investors seeking to buy virtual land. The venture plans to purchase parcels across several online “metaverses” and develop them into virtual hotels, stores and other uses, with the goal of increasing their value among cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
The minimum investment in the Republic Realm Digital Real Estate Fund is $25,000.
This year through March 15, the average price paid per parcel in Decentraland was $2,703 -- more than triple what it was in 2020, according to NonFungible.com, which tracks the sales. Land prices quadrupled in the metaverse called Cryptovoxels, from $821 a parcel last year to $3,895 in the first two and half months of 2021.
See the full story here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-19/virtual-land-prices-are-booming-and-now-there-s-a-fund-for-that
AMC Looks to Virtual Reality to Help Curb Suicides
Two bases in Air Mobility Command are using virtual reality to teach Airmen how to talk to someone who might be suicidal.
AFICC expedited its Small Business Innovation Research program, and within 60 days of the contract being built it awarded Moth+Flame a contract for headsets to be evaluated at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to an AMC release.
Using the VR headsets, an Airman talks with another Airman in distress in a simulated scenario, asking questions such as, “Do you have a gun in the house?” and “Are you thinking about harming yourself?”
“Actually going through the process of talking to someone with thoughts of suicide is much different than sitting through a PowerPoint presentation,” said Kaitlyn Woodruff, the AFICC contracting officer assigned to the training program, in the release. “It impacts you emotionally and takes the fear out of talking to someone thinking about suicide.”
The contract covers 50 headsets and four training scenarios at the two bases, though only one scenario is currently under evaluation.
See the full story here: https://www.airforcemag.com/amc-looks-to-virtual-reality-to-help-curb-suicides/
