HTC Device Can Translate Lip Movement Into Virtual Realty
The Vive Facial Tracker can capture up to 38 facial gestures and render them in real-time in VR. However, the accessory will be limited to the Vive Pro VR headset series.
See the full story here: https://www.pcmag.com/news/smile-youre-in-vr-htc-device-can-translate-lip-movement-into-virtual-realty
iQIYI Ushers in Next-Generation of Entertainment with Launch of China’s First Extended Reality (XR) Cloud Show
iQIYI Inc. (NASDAQ: IQ) ("iQIYI" or the "Company"), an innovative, market-leading online entertainment service in China, is pleased to announce that it has launched Cloud Show, China's first interactive, immersive, online, virtual performance product. Cloud Show features both real and virtual scenes enabled by multiple audiovisual technologies to deliver users a unique and fresh extended reality (XR) entertainment experience.
XR technology will be used throughout the whole process of the live-streamed concert, rendering an immersive virtual stage performance. The quality of the scenes will be further enhanced by augmented reality (AR)-enabled virtual front scenes, the use of multiple XR virtual machine positions, and film and television-grade equipment.
Meanwhile, viewers will have the freedom to enjoy the performance in their own unique way by switching among multiple different camera angles.
See the full story here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iqiyi-ushers-in-next-generation-of-entertainment-with-launch-of-chinas-first-extended-reality-xr-cloud-show-301243046.html
Study Suggests Deepfakes Fool Top Facial Recognition Tech
VentureBeat reports that, “in a paper published on the preprint server Arvix.org, researchers at Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea demonstrate that APIs from Microsoft and Amazon can be fooled with commonly used deepfake-generating methods.” More specifically, Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services “was fooled by up to 78 percent of the deepfakes the coauthors fed it.”
Amazon Rekognition mistook a deepfake for a celebrity 68.7 percent of the time. The researchers concluded that its study “can shed light on better designing robust web-based APIs, as well as appropriate defense mechanisms, which are urgently needed to fight against malicious use of deepfakes.”
The researchers also warned that, “voice and video deepfake technologies can be combined to create multimodal deepfakes and used to carry out more powerful and realistic phishing attacks … [and] if the commercial APIs fail to filter the deepfakes on social media, it will allow the propagation of false information and harm innocent individuals.”
See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/study-suggests-deepfakes-fool-top-facial-recognition-tech/
and here: https://venturebeat.com/2021/03/05/study-warns-deepfakes-can-fool-facial-recognition/
The Whales of NBA Top Shot Made a Fortune Buying LeBron Highlights
The most popular and perhaps most confounding NFT market is NBA Top Shot. It has minted unlikely millionaires and left many scratching their heads as it processed more than $250 million in sales from 100,000 buyers over the last month alone.
The peculiar but lucrative subculture of Top Shot reminds others of a similar hit from the same company, Dapper Labs, in which people collected virtual cats instead of NBA highlights. CryptoKitties was a fad that was mostly forgotten after a few crazy weeks in 2017.
Now the idea is roaring back in part because Top Shot is built for a different audience: the average NBA fan. Dapper Labs cut deals to give the league and its players a slice of every transaction—the company takes a 5% fee—with the goal of reaching casual basketball consumers and not just blockchain evangelists. It’s working. Instead of swapping jerseys after games, NBA players are exchanging Top Shot moments.
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nba-top-shot-nft-crypto-digital-collectibles-11615266042
Makers of ‘kid’s first virtual world’ Animal Jam targets Gen Z teens with Fer.al debut
Before kids graduate to the expansive virtual worlds in games like Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite, they often get their start in online social gaming with a game like Animal Jam. Here, kids learn to personalize their avatar, explore a world, chat with other players and trade items in a safe environment with parental controls. Today, the company behind this popular title, WildWorks, is launching a new game, Fer.al, which builds on Animal Jam’s legacy while catering to a slightly older crowd of Gen Z teens.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/08/makers-of-kids-first-virtual-world-animal-jam-targets-gen-z-teens-with-fer-al-debut/
Deloitte launches AI institute in Canada
Deloitte on Wednesday launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-focused initiative to help foster research and AI adoption across industries, according to a report from BetaKit.
Dubbed the Deloitte AI Institute, the initiative first launched in the US in summer 2020. Since then, the initiative has expanded to China, Germany, the UK, and now Canada.
The Canadian program will host virtual events to educate organizations on AI, and connect them with an ecosystem of partners that can help them adopt and scale AI applications. The virtual institute will include AI partners such as academics, research institutions, and AI firms.
See the full story here: https://www.consulting.ca/news/2159/deloitte-launches-ai-institute-in-canada
The web is full of information trapped in unsearchable audio. Podz has a fix
Right now, the world is drowning in podcasts. In February 2018, there were an estimated 500,000 active podcasts in existence. Today, that number is in excess of 1.7 million, with a total of more than 43 million episodes. And yet, for all that, podcast discoverability is, to put it nicely, horrendous.
This is where a new startup enters the picture. Podz, co-founded by a team who first met while working at Yahoo, seeks to find a way to solve the findability conundrum that besets today’s podcasts. More than that, though, it’s got far grander, far more significant designs: To do for the world’s audio archives what Google has done for search. Namely, to organize it and make it universally accessible and useful.
In an attempt to “fix” podcast discoverability, Podz has created an A.I. trained on 100,000 hours of audio, which scours through the most popular 5,000 podcasts (that’s the overwhelming majority of podcasts most people listen to) and creates the most engaging 60-second sample snippets to populate an audio news feed.
What Podz really wants to do — and, if it can pull it off, this is a multibillion dollar idea — is to make the audio space as searchable as the text space.
Right now, this is “fly before you walk” stuff for a startup — albeit a well-funded one, with investors including Katie Couric and Paris Hilton.
See the full story here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/audio-internet-podcasts-search-podz/
Napa Valley College students take up a challenge from NASA
A team of ambitious student software designers at Napa Valley College has entered NASA’s Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students (SUITS) challenge where they will design an augmented reality user interface for the spacesuits used in the next mission to the moon.
NVC is one of 19 colleges around the country that have been accepted by NASA to participate. NVC is one of only two community colleges participating; all the other schools are four-year universities, including Columbia University in New York and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
The project gives the students access to a HololenLens 2, a $3,500 augmented reality headset developed and sold by Microsoft Because of its cost, the Hololens is often only used in business applications, but the SUITS program made it available to the students for this program.
See the full story here: https://napavalleyregister.com/napa-valley-college-students-take-up-a-challenge-from-nasa/article_a18fcab8-20f7-5c94-938d-167f95785a17.html
Oakland University establishes Augmented Reality Center to educate students on the applications of AR in manufacturing
Oakland University (Michigan) has recently announced that it has joined forces with the College for Creative Studies and a coalition of regional industry partners to establish an augmented reality center (ARC) at Oakland University’s School of Engineering and Computer Science.
The ARC will introduce students to cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) technology and provide unique opportunities for these students to work alongside expert faculty and industry partners in applying the technology to various aspects of manufacturing.
Oakland University noted that AR technology will play a key role in the future of manufacturing thanks to its ability to merge the physical world with digital data, enabling new and better ways to interact with machines and creating more cost effective and efficient solutions for companies. By training students to use the technology, the University hopes that it will help to prepare them for successful careers in the rapidly growing field following graduation.
Founding industry partners include ABB Inc., AM General, Continental, General Motors, Hirotec America, KUKA Robotics, Magna International, MAHLE Industries, Rave Computer, Siemens, and US Military Ground Vehicle Systems.
Epic Games is also providing support through its Epic MegaGrants Program, a USD $100 million initiative designed to service and assist game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing outstanding work with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community. The University did not disclose a dollar amount for the support that Epic will be providing however.
See the full story here: https://www.auganix.org/oakland-university-establishes-augmented-reality-center-to-educate-students-on-the-applications-of-ar-in-manufacturing/
