philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Niantic announces major updates to its augmented reality platforms for developers

... ARDK allows developers to build immersive and imaginative AR applications that use cameras on mobile devices and headsets to change what users can see. Augmented reality blends what’s visible, through the camera, with additional added computer graphics overlaid on it that tracks and follows the movement of the user as if it’s part of the world and can interact with the user’s gestures and actions.

With Lightship ARDK 3.0, Unity developers will be able to add Niantic’s AR features onto Unity’s own AR Foundation extended reality developer library. AR Foundation is an AR engine that includes core features from across the augmented reality ecosystem such as device tracking, plane tracking, point clouds, anchors and similar. With the addition of ARDK’s capabilities, Lightship developers will be able to add Niantic’s own semantic segmentation, occlusion, meshing, mapping and other features. ...

To celebrate this, Niantic released its first mixed reality experience powered by 8th Wall recently called “Wol,” an artificial intelligence-enabled owl that transforms a space into a redwood forest and will then talk to the user. ...

See the full story here: https://siliconangle.com/2023/06/01/niantic-announces-major-updates-augmented-reality-platforms-developers/

Zuckerberg unveils Meta Quest 3 VR headset days before Apple reveals its own

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It appears to have at least three cameras on the front that may improve some of the pass-through experiences, where a user can see the real world around them while wearing the headset and interacting with apps. The video noted that it had improved “natural” depth perception for the wearer, and touted graphics improvements for gaming.

“High-fidelity color Passthrough, innovative machine learning, and spatial understanding let you interact with virtual content and the physical world simultaneously, creating limitless possibilities to explore,” Meta said in a release. ...

See the full story here; https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/01/meta-quest-3-unveiled-ahead-of-apples-planned-vr-headset-debut.html

Anxious Consumers Unlikely to Cut Leading Entertainment Subscriptions

From https://www.degonline.org/musicwatch-consumers-not-cut-leading-entertainment-subscriptions/

AI Deepfakes of True Crime Victims Are a Waking Nightmare

... Such inaccuracies are par for the course in the grotesque world of AI true-crime-victim TikTok, a subgenre of the massive true crime fandom, which uses artificial intelligence to essentially resurrect murder victims, many of whom are young children. The videos, some of which have millions of views, involve a victim speaking in first-person about the gruesome details of their deaths; most of them do not have a content warning beforehand. ...

See the full story here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ai-deepfakes-true-crime-victims-210828026.html

Mojo Vision partners with DigiLens to make better AR glasses

Mojo Vision has partnered with holographic display company DigiLensto use micro-LED technology for improved augmented reality glasses.

Mojo Vision recently veered away from plans to make AR contact lenses and is instead using its micro-LED technology to create better AR glasses. The partnership aims to combine the technologies developed by both companies to push AR forward. ...

See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/metaverse/mojo-vision-partners-with-digilens-to-make-better-ar-glasses/

When Digital Technologies Enhance Craftsmanship: How to Build a Domed Pavilion with Augmented Reality

Can current design and manufacturing technologies be incorporated into vernacular and traditional construction techniques? On the IE University campus in Segovia, a group of researchers from IE University, Princeton University, and the University of Bergamo built an unreinforced masonry structure called innixAR that demonstrates how digital technologies can enhance craftsmanship. This pavilion explores the intersection between the latest augmented reality (AR) innovations and 4D funicular design to allow vault craftsmen to build masonry structures without the need for physical guides and costly temporary molds.
The project led by the architect Wesam Al Asali and Sigrid Adriaenssens is composed of three curved vaults that use fixed wooden ribs for support. The construction uses the technique of Guastavino tile, which uses quick-setting plaster and lightweight terracotta pieces to create thin compression structures.

The form was created using an innovative 4D funicular design method developed at Princeton University. This method uses a sequence of assembly and restricted form-finding to generate compression-only structures. In this case, inspired by the study of vernacular vault construction. Here, they worked closely with Salvador Gomis Aviñó, an expert in vault construction from Valencia with 20 years of experience in his trade.

Guided by holograms superimposed on their field of view through an Augmented Reality viewer, the builder was able to create a complex masonry structure without the need for molds, guides, and formwork that consume time and materials.  ...

InnixAR is the result of a three-year-long collaboration between IE University's School of Architectureand Design and Princeton University's Form Finding Laboratory, and has been supported by the Teaching Initiative Fund of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.archdaily.com/1001450/when-digital-technologies-enhance-craftsmanship-how-to-build-a-domed-pavilion-with-augmented-reality

A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn

... “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter has been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I. ...

Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three researchers who won a Turing Award for their pioneering work on neural networks and are often considered “godfathers” of the modern A.I. movement, signed the statement, as did other prominent researchers in the field. ...

Eventually, some believe, A.I. could become powerful enough that it could create societal-scale disruptions within a few years if nothing is done to slow it down, though researchers sometimes stop short of explaining how that would happen.

The brevity of the new statement from the Center for AI Safety — just 22 words in all — was meant to unite A.I. experts who might disagree about the nature of specific risks or steps to prevent those risks from occurring, but who shared general concerns about powerful A.I. systems, Mr. Hendrycks said. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/ai-threat-warning.html

How to talk about AI (even if you don’t know much about AI)

Here are seven things to pay attention to when talking about AI. 

1. Don’t worry about sounding dumb ... And “prompt engineers” are just people who know how to talk to the AI to get what they want. ...

2. Be specific about what kind of AI you’re talking about ... are you talking about natural-language processing and language models, or computer vision? Or different applications, such as chatbots or cancer detection? If you aren’t sure, here are some good definitions of various practical applications of artificial intelligence. 

3. Keep it real ... discussions about AI are usually better served by being pragmatic and focusing on the actual, not the what-ifs, Vincent adds.  ...

4. Adjust your expectations ...It’s important to remember that language models aren’t search engines that are built to find and give the “right” answers, and they don’t have infinite knowledge.  ...

5. Don’t anthropomorphize ... “Don’t give it a [gendered] pronoun, [or] say that it can feel, think, believe, et cetera.” Doing this helps feed into the misconception that AI systems are more capable and sentient than they are. ...

6. It’s all about power ... key to understanding who can afford to get an advanced degree in computer science and who is in the room during the AI model design process,” Johnson says. ... “Sometimes the conversation around AI is less about the technology and more about the people.” ...

7. Please, for the love of God, no robots ... “Remember that AI is basically computer programming by humans—combining big data sets with lots of compute power and intelligent algorithms,” says Sharon Goldman, a senior writer at VentureBeat. ...

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/30/1073680/how-to-talk-about-ai-even-if-you-dont-know-much-about-ai/

The odd appeal of absurdly long YouTube videos that play nothing on purpose

... In a way, I’ve come to see “24 hours + of pure black screen in HD!” as a perfect microcosm of YouTube. YouTube is part entertainment platform, part information library… and part tools repository. ...

I even understand now why a seven-day-long video, which is just a timer counting down 168 hours, has 3.7 million views. One commenter summed it up thusly, “This is the timer you need when you need to stay active on your computer while working from home. No one will notice you were gone because this video keeps playing.” As long as the computer’s awake, I can be wherever I want.

See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/28/23738957/youtube-videos-24-hours-blank-screen?mc_cid=fe632d05ac&mc_eid=cf24d7da5b

Reality Is Broken. We Have AI Photos to Blame.

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Astronaut, fighter pilot, pediatrician. I turned myself into all of them in under a minute each. The AI-generated images did have noticeable issues: The uniforms were strange and had odd lettering, the stethoscope seemed to be cut in half and the backgrounds were warped and blurry. Yet the final images are fun, and the quality will only get better. 

I used the free beta Firefly web suite, which just requires an Adobe account. The Firefly generative-fill tool is also available in the Photoshop beta app.

You don’t have to go to extremes when using AI to recognize, swap and remove objects in a photo. In FaceApp, for iOS and Android, I was able to change my frown to a smile—with the right amount of teeth! I was also able to add glasses and change my hair color. Some said it looked completely real, others who know me well figured something was up. “Your teeth look too perfect.” Invisalign, here I come. ...

Firefly adds a “content credential,”digital information baked into the file, that says the image was manipulated with AI. Adobe is pushing to get news, tech and social-media platforms to use this open-source standard so we can all understand where the images we see came from. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/reality-is-broken-we-have-ai-photos-to-blame-de00b23?page=1

Watch video here: https://m.wsj.net/video/20230526/ea3f97f6-7344-4679-97bf-5a712253e1c6/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8#t=0