PhilNote; This sounds like incredible hardware, and our friend Andrew Shulkind was the driving force.
... The resulting Big Sky camera fea-tures an 18K sensor that measures 77.5mm x 75.6mm (3.05"x2.98"); the system is capable of capturing images at 120 fps and transfer-ring data at 60 gigabytes per second. ...
An additional complication was that the audience’s natural vision inside the Sphere places the most important part of the image in the lower quarter of the screen; this is the most comfortable viewing angle, one that doesn’t require craning your neck to look up. There is still a considerable amount of image above the audience’s head, though — so, when a typical scene is shot, the camera must be con-stantly tilted at 55 degrees to capture an angle of view that fills the entire screen, with the “center” of the action framed through the lower edge of the lens. ...
For Sphere, the team had to create a 165-degree-horizontal-angle-of-view fisheye lens with an edge-to-edge performance exceeding 60-percent MTF at 100 line-pairs — an extraordinary feat for any photographic lens. The result is a lens the size of a dinner plate, ...
The Sphere Immersive Sound system, developed in partnership with the German company Holoplot, involves 167,000 speakers that direct sound to the audience like a laser beam — and with nearly the same precision. The system not only delivers delay-free and echo-free sound to all seats, but it can also create wholly immersive 3D audio by placing a sound in any position in 3D space. ...
Further, the system can deliver an entirely different soundtrack, in various languages, to different positions in the theater. So, within a small group of seats, one viewer can listen to a French soundtrack while the neighboring viewer hears English — both in perfect sync with the picture. ...
Sphere currently has 10 Big Sky cameras, and there are more coming. ...
Our goal is to use this technology to take people to new places they haven’t been before and make them feel as if they had been,” Shulkind concludes. “For movies, 4K is good enough. With Sphere, good enough isn’t good enough anymore.”
This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI
What’s happening: A new tool lets artists make invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.
Why it matters: The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless.
How it works: Nightshade exploits a security vulnerability in generative AI models, one arising from the fact that they are trained on vast amounts of data—in this case, images that have been hoovered from the internet. Poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning, for example, that images of hats are cakes, and images of handbags are toasters. And it’s almost impossible to defend against this sort of attack currently.
... When Bennett begins to connect the evolution of the human brain to where we are in the development of artificial intelligence is when the book, for this reader, gets more interesting. Why can’t machines truly learn? Even ChatGPT, which every industry seems to be embracing these days, can’t “learn things sequentially,” writes Bennett. “They learn things all at once and then stop learning.” We’ve trained ChatGPT using the entire contents of the Internet, but the software can’t learn new things because of the risk that it will forget old things, or learn the wrong things. ...
... he does end his book with a challenge. Evolution gave us our magnificent human brain, he writes, and now that we are in a position to play god and create a new form of intelligence, we must first decide on our goal — are we destined to spread out across the cosmos? Or will we fail, victims of pride or climate change or something yet unseen, just another branch on the evolutionary tree, which will grow on without humans and perhaps never add a limb called “Artificial Intelligence?” ...
Summary: Researchers have created a groundbreaking non-contact technology to simulate cold sensations in virtual reality, maintaining consistent skin temperatures.
By combining cold airflow and light, they induce cold sensations without actual temperature shifts. This breakthrough provides a novel approach to simulating persistent thermal experiences in VR environments, enhancing the user’s immersion.
The technology holds the promise of revolutionizing VR experiences by providing instantaneous and sustained thermal sensations....
The technology employs a combination of cold air flow and a light source to instantly switch between a quick cold and a gentle warm stimulus, inducing a cold sensation while maintaining the skin temperature fluctuations close to zero. ...
... Looking at dominant digital mediums in 2023, honing in on Gaming and Streaming seems inevitable, and comparing the two is becoming essential. Notably, gamers entwine themselves within the fabric of the studios and creations they adore. They gladly spend money on experiences from studios they love, even if the product releases to mediocre reviews. On the contrary, streaming platforms, hubs of passive entertainment consumption, navigate through a maze of precarious consumer loyalties, where even titans like Disney+ can witness millions of subscribers being snapped away due to alterations in content offerings. ...
Charting a Course Toward Subscriber Loyalty
The path toward establishing staunch viewer loyalty in streaming begins with forging a bidirectional interaction model akin to what’s seen in the gaming industry. Streaming platforms can potentially revolutionize the viewer experience by purposefully crafting communities around content and amplifying viewer involvement instead of canceling many of their shows before they even get off the ground. How will viewers find an affinity and create a sense of creative ownership over a product if they assume it’ll be canceled before watching it? Creating dedicated forums, interactive live sessions with content creators, or hosting virtual events might be the catalyst to transform passive viewers into an engaged community. ...
By unraveling the strands of deep-rooted loyalty among gamers, streaming platforms have an opportune moment to reimagine their engagement strategies and content creation paradigms. Lessons derived from gaming—direct consumer involvement, community-building, long-term support for underperforming projects, and strategic content development—can illuminate a path towards mitigating the inconsistent subscription trends and establishing a steadfast viewer base for streaming platforms.
They call it Q-Day: the day when a quantum computer, one more powerful than any yet built, could shatter the world of privacy and security as we know it. ...
...it would fundamentally undermine the encryption protocols that governments and corporations have relied on for decades. ...
Today, the most powerful quantum device uses 433 “qubits,” as the quantum equivalent of transistors are called. That figure would probably need to reach into the tens of thousands, perhaps even the millions, before today’s encryption systems would fall. ...
But within the U.S. cybersecurity community, the threat is seen as real and urgent. China, Russia and the United States are all racing to develop the technology before their geopolitical rivals do, though it is difficult to know who is ahead because some of the gains are shrouded in secrecy. ...
On the American side, the possibility that an adversary could win that race has set in motion a yearslong effort to develop a new generation of encryption systems, ones that even a powerful quantum computer would be unable to break. ...
Judging in part by past migrations, officials estimated that even after settling on a new generation of algorithms, it could take another 10 to 15 years to implement them widely. ...
Many of the most promising submissions are built on lattices, a mathematical concept involving grids of points in various repeating shapes, like squares or hexagons, but projected into dimensions far beyond what humans can visualize. As the number of dimensions increases, problems such as finding the shortest distance between two given points grow exponentially harder, overcoming even a quantum computer’s computational strengths. ...
The size of American companies like Apple, Google and Amazon, with their control over large swaths of internet traffic, also means that a few players could get large parts of the transition done relatively nimbly. ...
But strategists caution that the way an adversary might behaveafter achieving a major breakthrough makes the threat unlike any the defense community has faced. Seizing on advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, a rival country may keep its advances secret rather than demonstrating them, to quietly break into as many troves of data as possible. ...
A recent study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology indicates that spacious natural landscapes can enhance feelings of selflessness, connectedness, and boost positive emotions. The research, conducted using immersive virtual reality technology, found that participants felt a diminished sense of body boundaries, leading to increased selflessness. ...
The study involved 80 participants, primarily students, who were invited to explore virtual natural environments created by the researchers.
The participants were divided into four groups, each experiencing a different combination of spaciousness and nature type. Some explored dense natural landscapes, while others ventured into spacious ones. Additionally, the researchers considered two types of nature settings: tended and wild. The tended landscapes featured signs of human intervention, such as paths, while the wild ones remained untouched by human hands. ...
Moreover, the study demonstrates the value of virtual reality technology in providing immersive nature experiences, particularly for those who may have limited access to wide open spaces. Virtual reality could help to bridge the gap between urban living and the natural world, offering opportunities for relaxation, stress reduction, and emotional well-being. ...
The top-scoring model scores only 54 out of 100. No major foundation model developer is close to providing adequate transparency, revealing a fundamental lack of transparency in the AI industry.
The mean score is a just 37%. Yet, 82 of the indicators are satisfied by at least one developer, meaning that developers can significantly improve transparency by adopting best practices from their competitors.
Open foundation model developers lead the way. Two of the three open foundation model developers get the two highest scores. Both allow their model weights to be downloaded. Stability AI, the third open foundation model developer, is a close fourth, behind OpenAI.
... Ultimately, the most unassailable takes came from the speakers who took pains not to have a take, such as DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg. “I don’t believe the people who are sure it’s going to go very well, and I don’t believe the people who are sure it’s going to go very, very badly,” he said. ...
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, ended his TED AI talk by saying he expects that the potential for AI to go badly wrong would result in “people [starting] to work in unprecedented collaborative ways out of their own self-interest.” I can’t quite tell whether that sentiment is utopian or dystopian. ...
I won’t try to convince you to stop worrying about what could be ahead—some of it, I worry about myself—but any analysis that fails to consider the ways AI is already a boon to humanity is incomplete. ...
At TED AI 2023, experts debate whether we’ve created “the new electricity”
... University of Southern California professor Phebe Vayanos also spoke about the need to prevent AI-powered decisions from disadvantaging marginalized communities. ...
Boeree spoke about the so-called "Moloch problem," a well-known parable in some AI communities, which pulls from the Biblical story of Moloch as a metaphor of sacrificing long-term consequences for short-term gain. She spoke about the unhealthy competition that comes from "crappy incentives," as she put it, that drive AI companies to rapidly and perhaps recklessly seek advanced systems because everyone else is doing it. Her talk earned one of the rare standing ovations of the day. ...
Aviv Regev, executive vice president at Genentech Research and Early Development, talked about the promise of using AI for drug discovery. Judging by audience reactions, these medical moments felt like cathartic vindication of AI as a positive force in society amid prevalent nervousness and skepticism over AI's potentially negative impacts. ...
So then, if TED AI 2023 might conclude one thing, it's that AI technology plus human ingenuity may replace a human working alone. ...
