Kevin Williams: LBVR is not dead, it is rising again
... the reality of LBE VR post-COVID is a nuanced one. The industry has always had hygiene at the top of our needs, as with the bowling industry (shoes), the go-kart (helmets), and the 3D theater (glasses) regarding cleaning. The LBE VR scene is pushing the use of UV-C to great effect, and our cleaning protocols (such as the HOLOGATE Standard) are deployed to keep guests safe. Protocols that some in other industries are now copying.
...To be frank I look forward to seeing how the Quest 2 deals in a Standalone market that will have competition next year from the new Sony PSVR2, along with Pico, Panasonic, and Samsung Standalone systems without walled gardens. We will get to see if a closed ecosystem against an open development market will work, and how much the Facebook login issues will impact buying habits.
The VOID was already in difficulties before COVID lockdown. it seems like with AMC and other big entertainment operations the debt was magnified when the ticket tap was turned off for a period. ... Once we know the situation with regards to Disney support of the VOID, and if the rumors are true, then we will know if they are going to survive.
What is your outlook for LBE VR in 5 years?
I envisage that LBE VR will be less about VR. The move towards more XR platforms in our sector has gained momentum, the use of new project mapping systems that can generate an immersive environment with a level of image quality far surpassing the current and future headsets is a strong draw, and also offer unencumbered immersion.
What are your future plans instead?
As a specialist consultancy in this sector, I am working with investors on these new Location-Based entertainment venue concepts. I am working with developers of new LBE XR hardware to be deployed into the market. I am working on a new media service to get the message out to the industry, and also trying to hunt down the next generation of immersive technology. It’s not a matter of “instead”, it’s a continuation of business.
See the full story here: https://www.virtualrealitypulse.com/edition/daily-amazon-apple-2020-10-13?open-article-id=14662405&article-title=kevin-williams--lbvr-is-not-dead--it-is-rising-again&blog-domain=skarredghost.com&blog-title=the-ghost-howls
Whisper announces $35M Series B to change hearing aids with AI and subscription model
[PhilNote: the business model price is outrageously high relative to the competition.]
Today, the company emerged from stealth with a new hearing aid built from the ground up. It uses artificial intelligence to learn and adjust in an automated way to different hearing situations like a noisy restaurant or watching TV. And you don't pay thousands of dollars up front, you pay a monthly fee on a three-year subscription, and you get free software updates along the way.
The technology they've built consists of three main components. For starters you have the hearing aids themselves that fit on the ear, along with a pocket-sized external box that they call the Whisper Brain, which the company says, "works wirelessly with the earpieces to enable a proprietary AI-based Sound Separation Engine," and finally there is a smart phone app to update the software on the system.
Whisper offers these hearing aids on a subscription basis for $179 per month on a three-year contract, which includes all of the hardware, the software updates, on-going support from the hearing care pro, a three-year loss and damage insurance and an industry-standard equipment warranty. They are offering an introductory price of $139 per month for a limited time.
At $179 per month, it comes to a total of $6,444 over the three-year period to essentially rent the aids. At the end of the subscription, customers can renew and get updated hardware or give the hardware back. They do not own the hearing aids.
It's worth noting that other hearing aid companies also use AI in their hearing aids, including Widex and Starkey, neither of which require an external hub. Many hearing aid companies also offer a variety of payment and subscription plans, but Whisper is an attempt to offer a different approach to hearing aids.
See the full story here https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/whisper-announces-35m-series-b-160051724.html
Microsoft says its AI can describe images ‘as well as people do’
In 2016, Google said its artificial intelligence could caption images almost as well as humans, with 94 percent accuracy. Now Microsoft says it’s gone even further: Its researchers have built an AI system that’s even more accurate than humans — so much so that it now sits at the top of the leaderboard for the nocaps image captioning benchmark.
It’s not unusual to see companies tout their AI research innovations, but it’s far rarer for those discoveries to be quickly deployed to shipping products. Xuedong Huang, CTO of Azure AI cognitive services, pushed to integrate it into Azure quickly because of the potential benefits for users.
But while beating a benchmark is significant, the real test for Microsoft’s new model will be how it functions in the real world. According to Boyd, Seeing AI developer Saqib Shaik, who also pushes for greater accessibility at Microsoft as a blind person himself, describes it as a dramatic improvement over their previous offering.
See the full story here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/microsoft-azure-ai-image-captions-humans-150040200.html
Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50
It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time—much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player. “Maybe that’s why we can’t travel faster than the speed of light, because if we could, we’d be able to get to another galaxy,” said Nice, the show’s co-host, prompting Tyson to gleefully interrupt. “Before they can program it,” the astrophysicist said, delighting at the thought. “So the programmer put in that limit.”
Such conversations may seem flippant. But ever since Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford wrote a seminal paper about the simulation argument in 2003, philosophers, physicists, technologists and, yes, comedians have been grappling with the idea of our reality being a simulacrum.
See the full story here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/
Virtual reality experience open at the Ark Encounter; ‘A Flood of Reality’ is state-of-the-art immersive
Guests are ushered back almost 4,500 years in history to see Noah and his crew building the ark, watch the animals entering the massive ship, experience the flood’s dramatic beginning, ride in the Ark as it floats on the ocean and see the ship perched at rest on the mountains of Ararat.
See the full story here: https://www.nkytribune.com/2020/10/vitrual-reality-experience-open-at-the-ark-encounter-a-flood-of-reality-is-state-of-the-art-immersive/
When AI hurts people, who is held responsible?
“Where society decides that AI is too beneficial to set aside, we will likely need a new regulatory paradigm to compensate the victims of AI’s use, and it should be one divorced from the need to find fault. This could be strict liability, it could be broad insurance, or it could be ex ante regulation,” the paper reads.
Secrecy in the AI industry is a major hurdle when it comes to accountability. Negligence law typically evolves over time to reflect common definitions of what constitutes reasonable behavior on the part of, for example, a doctor or driver accused of negligence. But corporate secrecy is likely to keep common occurrences that result in injury hidden from the public. As with Big Tobacco, some of that information may come into public view through whistleblowers, but a lack of transparency leaves people exposed in the interim. And AI’s rapid development threatens to overwhelm the pace of changes to negligence or tort law, exacerbating the situation.
“As a result of the secrecy, we know little of what individual companies have learned about the errors and vulnerabilities in their products. Under these circumstances, it is impossible for the public to come to any conclusions about what kinds of failures are reasonable or not,” the paper states.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2020/10/12/when-ai-hurts-people-who-is-held-responsible/
Inside the strange new world of being a deepfake actor
To bring the experiment to life, they chose an equally provocative subject: they would create an alternative history of the 1969 Apollo moon landing. Before the launch, US president Richard Nixon’s speechwriters had prepared two versions of his national address—one designated “In Event of Moon Disaster,” in case things didn’t go as planned. The real Nixon, fortunately, never had to deliver it. But a deepfake Nixon could.
So Panetta, the creative director at MIT's Center for Virtuality, and Burgund, a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, partnered up with two AI companies. Canny AI would handle the deepfake video, and Respeecher would prepare the deepfake audio. With all the technical components in place, they just needed one last thing: an actor who would supply the performance.
“We needed to find somebody who was willing to do this, because it’s a little bit of a weird ask,” Burgund says. “Somebody who was more flexible in their thinking about what an actor is and does.”
For the visuals, Canny AI specializes in video dialogue replacement, which uses an actor’s mouth movements to manipulate someone else’s mouth in existing footage. The actor, in other words, serves as a puppeteer, never to be seen in the final product. The person’s appearance, gender, age, and ethnicity don’t really matter.
But for the audio, Respeecher, which transmutes one voice into another, said it’d be easier to work with an actor who had a similar register and accent to Nixon’s.
In some ways, there’s little difference between deepfake acting and CGI acting, or perhaps voice acting for a cartoon. Your likeness doesn’t make it into the final production, but the result still has your signature and interpretation. But deepfake casting can also go the other direction, with an person's face swapped into someone else’s performance.
While professionalized deepfakes have pushed the boundaries of art and creativity, their existence also raises tricky ethical questions. There are currently no real guidelines on how to label deepfakes, for example, or where the line falls between satire and misinformation.
See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/09/1009850/ai-deepfake-acting/?fbclid=IwAR371cqMtwsHj5wQ94RuubXQyIr1QzPAl-fDLdvBfGjAV4_fGI01WrL8D6o