How Tupac and Thanos led to Douglas, the most impressively humanlike A.I. yet
According to Roble, the team first and foremost envisions Douglas as a visual way of interacting with existing complex and powerful conversational agents that have been created. Beneath Douglas’ photo-real avatar, the studio’s digital human is built on a blend of three of those agents: Google’s popular Dialogflow suite for creating chatbots, an assistant-type agent (similar to Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri); and a powerful conversational A.I. agent (similar to the GPT-3 project) used to produce humanlike, predictive (and reactive) conversational text.
The combination of all three agents gives Douglas the ability to carry on conversations that are both informative and fluid, with discussion of one topic often segueing into related areas of interest.
See the full story here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/douglas-digital-domain-artificial-intelligence-human/
Holographic Display Improvements Poised to Enhance Virtual and Augmented Reality
“Although we’ve recently seen tremendous progress in machine-learning driven computer-generated holography, these algorithms are fundamentally limited by the underlying hardware,” said Kim. “We co-designed a new hardware configuration and a new algorithm to overcome some of these limitations and demonstrate state-of-the-art results.”
Boosting quality Holographic displays have the potential to outperform other 3D display technologies used for virtual and augmented reality by enabling more compact displays, improving the user’s ability to focus their eyes at different distances and offering the ability to adjust for users who wear corrective lenses. However, the technology hasn’t yet achieved the image quality of more conventional technologies.
“Augmented and virtual reality systems are poised to have a transformative impact on our society by providing a seamless interface between a user and the digital world,” said research team member Jonghyun Kim from technology company NVIDIA and Stanford University. “Holographic displays could overcome some of the biggest remaining challenges for these systems by improving the user experience and enabling more compact devices.”
See the full story here: https://scitechdaily.com/holographic-display-improvements-poised-to-enhance-virtual-and-augmented-reality/
Sotheby’s and Saatchi Art show augmented reality’s growing usefulness to art world
Sotheby’s auctioned off Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel for $92.2 million on Thursday. But before it did, the auction house gave everyone the chance to virtually hang the artwork on their walls.
Thanks to an Instagram filter Sotheby’s created with Poplar Studio, a creative platform that builds 3D and AR experiences, users could see what the Old Master painting would look like in their living rooms. The filter is available to Sotheby’s 1.3 million Instagram followers.
The filter was used 145,000 times, and was videoed or photographed 4,300 times, as of Thursday evening. The post announcing the sale currently has an engagement of 1.07%, which is slightly higher than what is considered an average engagement rate.
...But Sotheby’s filter is part of the art world’s broader embrace of the technology especially amid the ongoing pandemic keeping prospective art buyers home. Home art print suppliers including Saatchi Art and Etsy introduced in-app AR art viewings in 2018 and 2019, respectively, hoping to drive sales, and both made significant improvements to their app user experience this year as consumer interest in art skyrocketed.
See the full story here: https://digiday.com/media/sothebys-and-saatchi-augmented-reality/
Virtual Reality Film ‘Namoo’ Releases New Trailer Ahead of Sundance Premiere
Baobab Studios has released the trailer for its new virtual reality experience film “Namoo” ahead of its Sundance premiere.
“Namoo,” which means “tree” in Korean, will be premiering as part of Sundance’s New Frontiers. The feature is written and directed by Erick Oh, who previously worked on “Heart” and “How to Eat Your Apple.”
The film is brought to life through virtual reality and celebrates a grandfather’s passing. It follows the journey of a budding artist — and his tree of life — from start to end.
See the full story here: https://variety.com/2021/artisans/markets-festivals/namoo-trailer-virtual-reality-film-1234894602/
Men Wear Suits, Women Wear Bikinis: Image Generating Algorithms Learn Biases ‘Automatically’
The algorithms also picked up on racial biases linking Black people to weapons
See the full story here: https://onezero.medium.com/men-wear-suits-women-wear-bikinis-image-generating-algorithms-learn-biases-automatically-eee3d8a56f2e
A metalens for virtual and augmented reality
In 2018, the Capasso’s team developed achromatic, aberration-free metalenses that work across the entire visible spectrum of light. But these lenses were only tens of microns in diameter, too small for practical use in VR and augmented reality systems.
Now, the researchers have developed a two-millimeter achromatic metalenses that can focus RGB (red, blue, green) colors without aberrations and developed a miniaturized display for virtual and augmented reality applications.
The research is published in Science Advances.
“This state-of-the-art lens opens a path to a new type of virtual reality platform and overcomes the bottleneck that has slowed the progress of new optical device,” said Capasso, the senior author of the paper.
“Using new physics and a new design principle, we have developed a flat lens to replace the bulky lenses of today’s optical devices,” said Zhaoyi Li, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and first author of the paper. “This is the largest RGB-achromatic metalens to date and is a proof of concept that these lenses can be scaled up to centimeter size, mass produced, and integrated in commercial platforms.”
...In a VR or AR platform, the metalens would sit directly in front of the eye, and the display would sit within the focal plane of the metalens. The patterns scanned by the display are focused onto the retina, where the virtual image forms, with the help of the metalens. To the human eye, the image appears as part of the landscape in the AR mode, some distance from our actual eyes.
...
Next, the team aims to scale up the lens even further, making it compatible with current large-scale fabrication techniques for mass production at a low cost.
The Harvard Office of Technology Development has protected the intellectual property relating to this project and is exploring commercialization opportunities.
See the full story here: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/01/metalens-virtual-and-augmented-reality
Disinfection robot developed to halt COVID-19 spread
A team of USC master’s students created a disinfection robot called LASER-D to use on COVID-19 prevention. See video.
Said master’s student Ruiqi Wang: “This is the first time I worked on a team of complete strangers. It was pretty hard to bond without any face-to-face interactions, but our shared and ambitious goal helped us to bond. We ended up being a really great team.”
Even remotely, students were exposed to skill areas they counted themselves novices in. Anthony Nguyen worked on the simulation software and robot’s operating system. He said he felt like with a big vision and time constraints, they had to hit the ground running as a team. “As a mechanical engineering student, I had no background in C++ coding or anything like that. I was lucky—there was open source code and a lot of resources I could use to learn. The project relied on a lot of coding—we had to use what was available and then engineer further solutions.”
New MIT Study Says Artificial Intelligence (AI) Can Help Us Map Consciousness
According to The Next Web, the team was able to observe patterns formed by the brain neurons that help us consider what other people could be feeling and thinking. In short, they are trying to track empathy in real-time, as it happens.
If expanded, this research could play an instrumental role in researching mental illness and social anxiety disorders. It can even be helpful in developing targeted, personalised treatments for people on the autism spectrum disorder.
But the most fascinating aspect of the study is it could finally offer some insight into understanding consciousness.
See the full story here: https://thenextweb.com/neural/2021/01/27/new-mit-brain-research-shows-how-ai-could-help-us-understand-consciousness/
and here: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-01-scientists-individual-neurons-responsible-complex.html
THERE’S NOW A VIRTUAL REALITY MUSEUM DEDICATED TO VEGAN MILK
A virtual reality pop-up museum that is dedicated to the history and future of plant-based milk is launching for the month of February. Milk Futurewill allow visitors to experience a multi-room, interactive virtual-reality exhibition featuring profiles on prominent plant-based milk innovators, such as Califia Farms and Miyoko’s Creamery, facts and figures about the environmental impacts of dairy farming, as well as photography from participating animal sanctuaries in the United States, Canada, England, and Israel. Special events will include “Doctors Talk Dairy: A Conversation About Dairy and Your Health” in partnership with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a dairy-free cook-off, and a milk mixology workshop.
See the full story here: https://vegnews.com/2021/1/virtual-reality-museum-vegan-milk
Virtual reality and simulation see an uptick during the pandemic
As the health crises forces engineers, designers, and researchers to build and simulate physical worlds to test their designs, the big question for a growing number of executive decision-makers is whether these changes are here to stay — and what their implications might be.
Richard Kerris, an industry general manager for media and entertainment at Nvidia, said he’s seen an uptick in use of Omniverse, Nvidia’s cloud platform designed to support design workflows and real-time coordination. Omniverse, which Nvidia announced during its GTC 2020 keynote event, launched in open beta in October after a yearlong early access program in which Ericsson, Foster + Partners, ILM, and over 40 other companies evaluated the platform and provided feedback to the Nvidia engineering team.
Christoph Fleischmann, the founder of Arthur Technologies, said he’s seen “huge adoption” of his company’s virtual reality technologies that provide virtual office spaces allowing teams to meet and manage work.
“I think that in 20 years, we’ll tell our children that this is how we lived and how we made decisions, but it’ll sound barbaric to them — that geography dictated so much about our life,” Fleischmann said. “While I think there’s one way of looking at this in a really dystopian way — that we’re submitting ourselves to the matrix — I think the very, very positive way of seeing that is that you just make the landscape of opportunities really flat around the world, and you allow anyone to work with anyone in these virtual spaces. You can physically be wherever you want with your loved ones, or are at the beach.”
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/28/virtual-reality-and-simulation-see-an-uptick-during-the-pandemic/