AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?
“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network”–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.
Indeed. Humans have developed unique dialects for everything from trading pork bellies on the floor of the Mercantile Exchange to hunting down terrorists as Seal Team Six–simply because humans sometimes perform better by not abiding to normal language conventions.
The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another.
Microsoft was more interested in human-to-computer speech. Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all also focusing incredible energies on developing conversational personalities for human consumption. They’re the next wave of user interface, like the mouse and keyboard for the AI era.
As Dauphin points out, machines might not think as you or I do, but tokens allow them to exchange incredibly complex thoughts through the simplest of symbols. The way I think about it is with algebra: If A + B = C, the “A” could encapsulate almost anything.
“Getting the data into a format that makes sense for machine learning is a huge undertaking right now and is more art than science. English is a very convoluted and complicated language and not at all amicable for machine learning.”
See the full story here: https://www.fastcodesign.com/90132632/ai-is-inventing-its-own-perfect-languages-should-we-let-it
MIT’s glasses-free home 3D tech could make help 3D movies more popular
... the MIT CSAIL research team behind this new tech created Home3D, a conversion algorithm that can run in real-time on a GPU like those found in the Xbox One or PlayStation 4, eliminating the format compatibility issue.
Home3D also allows viewers to customize the depth effect depending on their comfort level, and it combines both phase-based rendering and depth image-based rendering techniques for a method that doesn’t sacrifice all that much resolution while still being able to accurately render 3D even for scenes with significant depth, where the left-eye and right-eye images are considerably different from one another.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/12/mits-glasses-free-home-3d-tech-could-make-help-3d-movies-more-popular/
The four waves of augmented reality (that Apple owns)
Let’s start by defining them:
- Mobile AR software: AR software that works on standard smartphones/tablets, like Apple ARKit for iOS and Facebook’s Camera Effects Platform.
- Mobile AR hardware: dedicated smartphone/tablet AR hardware and software, like Google Tango phones.
- Tethered smartglasses: AR smartglasses requiring a smartphone/tablet or PC host, like Meta smartglasses.
- Standalone smartglasses: Self-contained AR smartglasses with no host, like Microsoft HoloLens (which they call mixed reality).
See the full, lengthy story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/18/the-four-waves-of-augmented-reality-that-apple-owns/
Augmented reality startup Blippar hopes to turn your face into a digital billboard
The latest product from augmented reality startup Blippar has a simple, if somewhat unnerving, pitch: what if you could turn your face into a digital billboard?
The company’s new Halos feature allows you to do exactly that. You scan your likeness with the Blippar app and it saves a version of you on its servers. You can then fill out some personal tidbits, like your favorite music or latest tweets, and anyone who “blipps” you in future (i.e., scans your face with the app) will see this information as a halo of bubbles floating around your head.
“[It’s] your unique way to express yourself,” Blippar CEO Ambarish Mitra tells The Verge. “Your face is like your billboard — we recognize human beings by their faces — and this is like a digital manifestation of that.”
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/19/15989648/blippar-facial-recognition-billboards-ar
Mortenson Creates First-of-Its-Kind Augmented Reality App for Construction Visualization
After pioneering the use of virtual design in construction, Mortenson Construction has developed a first-of-its-kind augmented reality (AR) mobile app to help the University of Washington community see its future CSE2 computer science building well before its doors open to students in January 2019. Users can experience the buildings exterior in AR, and can then teleport inside for an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience. (PRNewsfoto/Mortenson)
In addition to serving as an immersive public engagement tool, AR carries the promise of reimagining the construction site. In this spirit, Mortenson was also among the first companies of any kind to partner with AR smart-helmet maker DAQRI to test AR construction applications last year. AR headsets and goggles have the future potential to provide crews with just-in-time instruction, projections of an installation layout on a concrete slab, or a data overlay that shows how each building system has been performing over time.
See the full story here: http://www.crossroadstoday.com/story/35914842/mortenson-creates-first-of-its-kind-augmented-reality-app-for-construction-visualization
Assisted living tries virtual reality to help seniors with dementia
It consists of a headphones and a headset powered by a specially programmed cellphone. The user sits in an office swivel chair under the supervision of a staff member trained by MyndVR. Slowly twirling the chair and moving the head create the panoramic effect.
“The hurdles are far less than we thought, and the unintended benefits are starting to be more than we anticipated,” said Brickler, who plans to lease the equipment to senior-care residences across the Sunbelt, where many older people live.
Our plan is to essentially be the Netflix of VR for seniors,” MyndVR CEO and co-founder Chris Brickler, 45, said on a visit to kick off the trial last week at Encore at Avalon Park.
See the full story here: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/health/aging/os-virtual-reality-dementia-20170711-story.html
WaveOptics raises £12m to make augmented reality mainstream
"WaveOptics is reinventing the AR market by developing a series of new AR display tech that enables a wider field of view and brighter full colour images - a unique combination in today’s market," said the startup's chairman Martin Harriman.
Previous investors before this series B include fellow AR startup Blippar and was part of the Pitch@Palace startup event.
See the full story here: http://www.cityam.com/268580/waveoptics-raises-12m-make-augmented-reality-mainstream
Mira Prism aims to turn the iPhone into a mini-HoloLens for $99
Apple's imminent wave of iPhone augmented reality works on your phone's screen, using its camera to inject characters into the real world. But AR headsets are out there too, bringing that idea to life in front of your eyes. One of them costs less than you think.
The Mira Prism, coming later in 2017, is a simple headband visor that uses your iPhone to reflect 3D images right in front of your face for about $100 (roughly £75 or AU$125).
It looks like a fancy giant sun visor or a futuristic welder's mask, and it easily fits over my head. Holding a little remote, I can point at floating cartoon planets hovering near my desk.
The Los Angeles-based company, Mira, is founded by Ben Taft, Matt Stern and Montana Reed. All three are former students of USC's Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation. Mira already has funding from Will.i.am and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, among others.
The Prism uses an iPhone (sorry, no Android version for now), which pops into the headband using elastic, snapping into place. A large mirrored visor reflects the phone's stereoscopic images, turning them into floating three-dimensional, but virtual, objects. I got a demonstration at CNET's offices, and the 3D images felt convincing enough. Polygonal planets spread around me and I controlled a rocket ship using a long elastic tether that I extended and retracted using a handheld wand-remote. I made the ship take off and land on the table, with the help of an included round cardboard marker.