Lagotronics Project – GameChanger-XS
The GameChanger-XS is a turnkey attraction concept developed specifically for Family Entertainment Centers (FECs), museums and other leisure facilities that have only limited space for new attractions. The GameChanger-XS is the smallest possible version of the GameChanger and can be installed in an area measuring just 36 m2. Although this attraction is very compact, a high hourly capacity of 225 people can be achieved.
GameChanger-XS specifications:
- Ride system: rotating disc
- Number of sections: 4
- Number of media scenes (2D or 3D): 3
- Number of players/scene: 2
- Number of seats: 8
- Interactive shooters: 8
- Ride time: 128 seconds
- Load/unload time: 25 seconds
- Capacity (THC): 225 visitors/hour
Advantages:
- Suitable for very small spaces (36 m2 and above)
- High capacity
- Complete dark ride experience (turnkey solution)
- Modular system with numerous customised options
- Different configurations possible, with higher capacity
- Various storylines and games available
See the full story here: https://www.lagotronicsprojects.com/en/products-technologies/gamechanger-xs
INTERVIEWS Vahid Behzadan, Director of Secured and Assured Intelligent Learning (SAIL) Lab – Interview Series
Vahid is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at the University of New Haven. He is also director of the Secure and Assured Intelligent Learning (SAIL) Lab
His research interests include safety and security of intelligent systems, psychological modeling of AI safety problems, security of complex adaptive systems, game theory, multi-agent systems, and cyber-security.
You have an extensive background in cybersecurity and keeping AI safe. Can you share your journey in how you became attracted to both fields?
My research trajectory has been fueled by two core interests of mine: finding out how things break, and learning about the mechanics of the human mind. ...
You recently led an effort to propose the modeling of AI safety problems as psychopathological disorders. Could you explain what this is?
This project addresses the rapidly growing complexity of AI agents and systems: it is already very difficult to diagnose, predict, and control unsafe behaviors of reinforcement learningagents in non-trivial settings by simply looking at their low-level configurations. In this work, we emphasize the need for higher-level abstractions in investigating such problems. Inspired by the scientific approaches to behavioral problems in humans, we propose psychopathology as a useful high-level abstraction for modeling and analyzing emergent deleterious behaviors in AI and AGI. ...
One of the areas you closely follow is counterterrorism. Do you have concerns with terrorists taking over AI or AGI systems?
...One of the main problems with AI-enabled weaponry is in the difficulty of controlling the underlying technology: AI is at the forefront of open-source research, and anyone with access to the internet and consumer-grade hardware can develop harmful AI systems. I suspect that the emergence of autonomous weapons is inevitable, and believe that there will soon be a need for new technological solutions to counter such weapons. This can result in a cat-and-mouse cycle that fuels the evolution of AI-enabled weapons, which may give rise to serious existential risks in the long-term.
What can we do to keep AI systems safe from these adversarial agents?
...training machine learning agents in adversarial settings can improve their resilience and robustness against evasion and policy manipulation attacks (e.g., see my paper titled “Whatever Does Not Kill Deep Reinforcement Learning, Makes it Stronger“). Another solution is to directly account for the risk of adversarial attacks in the architecture of the agent (e.g., Bayesian approaches to risk modeling). There is however a major gap in this area, and it’s the need for universal metrics and methodologies for evaluating the robustness of AI agents against adversarial attacks. Current solutions are mostly ad hoc, and fail to provide general measures of resilience against all types of attacks.
See the full long interview here: https://www.unite.ai/vahid-behzadan-director-of-secured-and-assured-intelligent-learning-sail-lab-interview-series/
Nadal makes winning start as tennis returns in virtual world
Claycourt king Rafa Nadal suffered a fake injury, several players 'froze' and one match vanished into thin air as the Virtual Madrid Open made its debut on Monday.
With professional tennis tours closed down until mid July at the earliest because of the coronavirus pandemic, an esports version of the claycourt event is being staged online.
Thirty two of the world's best players have swapped their rackets for Playstation controllers, courts for sofas, to contest the four-day event designed to offer players, and fans, some action during the lockdown.
Nadal claimed he was a computer game novice during an Instagram chat with Andy Murray last week, but the Spaniard showed impressive fingerwork to beat young Canadian Denis Shapovalov in his opening round-robin match on a digital representation of the Spanish capital's Manolo Santana Stadium.
...
Nadal, five times a champion of the real Madrid Open that should have been played this week, then pulled out of his exhibition match against YouTube star DjMariio.
The 33-year-old warrior, who can go toe-to-toe with Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer for hours, was said to have tweaked his back.
Andy Murray, tipped by Lopez as a pre-tournament favourite, got into the spirit of things too -- grunting loudly after every 'virtual' shot as he beat Frenchman Benoit Paire.
See the full story here: https://wkzo.com/news/articles/2020/apr/27/bad-back-rules-nadal-out-of-virtual-reality-charity-match/1011529/
Changing reality: VR finds its moment with actors, artists and experiences that change the game
The Sunday LA Times dedicated most of the Calendar section to immersive media stories.
Opinion Research Paper – The Ethics of Realism in Virtual and Augmented Reality
An international group of researchers, with the participation of Mel Slater, director of Event Lab in the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Barcelona (UB), has published a new paper in the journal Frontiers in Virtual Reality reflecting on potential ethical problems of mass spread of virtual and augmented reality. Researchers warn about the dangers that might arise as these technologies becomes more and more realistic and urge for new research to address these scenarios.
Other participants in the study are representatives of major companies and institutions such as BBC R&D, Digital Catapult, Dimension /Hammerhead VR, Facebook London, NESTA, Jigsaw -part of Google-, Magic Leap, Microsoft Research, and University College London.
Download the paper here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2020.00001/full
Limits between reality and virtual experiences
In order to reflect about potential dangers of virtual and augmented reality the working group set out to consider possible worst-case scenarios and possible areas of research to address these. They concentrated mainly on problems that might arise as XR becomes more and more realistic. As virtual reality becomes more real people may find it difficult to distinguish between reality and virtual reality. For example, remembering virtual events as if they had been real, and failing to distinguish over time events that really happened and those that happened in virtual reality.
Researchers also highlighted another potential problem with an ultrarealistic experience: we don't know what are the after effects and mental consequences of using virtual reality - for example in extreme violent games - and of the real-world transition from virtual reality.
Some other issues they warn against were data privacy and the dangers of identity impersonation and fake news. "People (e.g., politicians) could be shown to carry out actions in virtual reality that they never did in reality. Although the same is true with just video, in virtual reality it is more powerful because it seems to happen life-sized in the same space in which you are located. It happens in front of you, not through a screen," said Slater.
A regulatory regime similar to cinema
Given these ethical challenges, researchers highlighted that there is essentially no data that can help in addressing them. So, besides the potential problems, some important research questions are outlined in the paper,...
See the full story here: https://www.ub.edu/web/ub/en/menu_eines/noticies/2020/04/032.html
and here https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/uob-vaa042720.php
Travis Scott Destroys ‘Fortnite’ All-Time Record With 12.3 Million Live Viewers
Rapper Travis Scott has grabbed the “Fortnite” crown for drawing the biggest live audience in the hit game’s history on Thursday night.
Over 12.3 million concurrent “Fortnite” players participated live in Scott’s “Astronomical” virtual performance, an all-time record, according to Epic Games. The prodigious turnout, no doubt, was helped by stay-at-home quarantine conditions in many parts of the world, as well as the promise of the premiere of a new track by Scott. The previous all-time high for concurrent viewers in “Fortnite” also was a music act: Over 10.7 million live fans logged in for Marshmello’s virtual performance in February 2019.
To put Scott’s “Fortnite” figure into perspective, Fox’s airing of top-rated TV show “The Masked Singer” this week drew 7.9 million total viewers, although that was only in the U.S. while Scott’s “Fortnite” appearance was available worldwide. At the same time, the concurrent viewership number reported by Epic Games for Scott’s virtual concert does not include additional views on Twitch and YouTube.
Scott’s roughly 15-minute “Fortnite” performance premiered at 7 p.m. ET on Thursday, April 23. The event included a rendition of fan-favorite “Highest in the Room” as well as a preview of “The Scotts,” a new collaboration with Kid Cudi (ahead of the full song dropping at midnight ET).
See the full story here: https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/travis-scott-fortnite-record-viewers-live-1234589033/
He Helped Build Facebook Messenger. Now He’s Building an Army of Voters
He started listening to a lot of nonfiction audiobooks about inequality, devouring a veritable syllabus of influential progressive texts: The New Jim Crow, Evicted, Give Us the Ballot, Saving Capitalism, and so on. He became fixated on how unfair modern American life was—how few people had access to the kind of privilege, for example, that allowed someone like him to take time off from work without having to worry about money.
Eventually, he explained, he landed on political campaigns and organizing technology, where “the demands and goals are similar to Messenger: How do I bring my friends onto this?” Last fall he joined Mobilize America, the leading events platform for Democratic and progressive campaigns. Now instead of trying to maximize how much time users spend on Facebook, his job is to make it easier for volunteers to help Democrats win elections on the digital side—which, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, is going to be the only side that matters for a while.
“Platforms like Facebook are built to get you to engage on Facebook; they're not built to get you into the offline world, doing things for a particular organization.”
“Your traditional Democratic voters are people who go to protests and volunteer, whereas your Republican voters are more likely to look for the organization and leadership of a candidate or campaign,” he says. “There aren't as many nonprofits driving organizing and things like that on the right.”
See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/former-facebook-engineer-mobilize-democrats-election-2020/