"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #38
July 3, 2023
"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #38
Your weekly roundup of what’s happening in the digital land(scape). Metaverse ethics, governance and interesting trends from crypto, AI, gaming and regulation.
👁️🗨️What's going on:
Meta launches a VR subscription service that costs $7.99 a month
New games will launch for Meta Quest+ subscribers on the first of each month. The games can be played as long as the subscription is active.
More on => cnbc.com
Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads
More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites—and the problem is growing fast.
More on => technologyreview.com
Unity AI 🔮 introduces Unity Muse and Unity Sentis, AI-powered creativity.
⭐ #UnityMuse, a platform of AI capabilities for content creation, with Muse Chat for AI-based search now in closed beta
⭐ #UnitySentis for AI-powered experiences at Unity runtime, now in closed beta
More on =>blog.unity.com
The announcement met heavy backlash from the artistic community, with Twitter threads filled of inquiries about the traning datasets.
Meta makes big advances in Quest full-body motion capture
While virtual hands arrived on the Quest platform in 2019, the VR leader is still refining its model and enabling new Hand-tracking features to take advantage of the improved accuracy. The latest research, published on Arxiv, attempts to solve a much harder problem — leg tracking.
More on => mixed-news.com
Report says Apple Vision Pro could have 20 million users in 5 years
The analyst firm Canalys has published a new report with an estimate for Vision Pro shipments, and the it predicts that Apple will achieve an install base of 20 million users within 5 years.
(Credit to Canalys stimates and forecasts, June 2023) The report also signals that “Apple had the luxury of relying on its in-house M series processors for optimal performance, which most headset vendors did not. Beyond chipsets, Apple expanded and integrated some of its technologies, such as:
Expanded iOS’ smooth, simple and visually pleasing UI with a strong focus on low latency and natural input methods, including eyes, hands and voice.
A newly designed R1 chip dedicated to processing information from sensors.
Spatial AR tracking capabilities found in modern iPhones and lidar-equipped iPad Pros.
Spatial audio.
More on => tomsguide.com and canalys.com
🤖I Am Not A Robot: AI news
US Copyright Office held a webinar explaining the guidelines to register AI generated works.
The seminar follows the publication of the “Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence” released on March 16, 2023. The key take-aways are around the portion and uses of AI in the creation of a work, with emphasis that “Disclosures have always been required if the work contains unclaimable material”.
More on =>ipwatchdog.com
My take:
=>the upside: by not allowing registration of purely or heavily AI-generated works (produced by a ton each minute), this policy will have a benefitial impact for the future of public domain.
=> the downside: the complexity of determining how “substantial” was the AI intervention to the creation of the work, opens up avenues for uncertainty and therefore, risks of costly litigation.
Rage Against the Machine co-founders ,Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha, are Boycotting venues That Use Face-Scanning Technology
The artists are among 100 other performers and venues calling for the ban of facial recognition technology at live events
More on => rollingstones.com
Meet the Humans Trying to Keep Us Safe From AI
More on =>wired.com
Scientists recontruct what you are looking at by enhacing reflection in the eyes
Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a technique that can reconstruct 3D images from the reflections in your eyes, by building on a neural network model called neural radiance fields (NeRF).
More on => futurism.com and world-from-eyes.github.io
🤦The WTF award of the week goes to…
Linkedin will add AI to help writing “hustle posts”
“In other words, when you go to post on LinkedIn at some point in the presumably near future, an integrated generative AI tool will help you — to throw in a few LinkedIn buzzwords — maximize and accelerate your content creation productivity by essentially writing your post for you.”
More on => futurism.com
And of course, there is an honorable mention to Twitter on its ongoing race to the bottom, this time with putting a limit on the amount of tweets you can read if not suscribed to Twitter Blue.
😬Meme corner:
🎮Gaming news
Valve is not banin won’t approve Steam games that use copyright-infringing AI artwork.
In a statement emailed to The Verge, Valve PR representative Kaci Boyle said the company’s goal is “not to discourage the use of [AI] on Steam; instead, we’re working through how to integrate it into our already-existing review policies.”
More on => TheVerge.com
🧠Neurotech:
ICO warns of “real danger” of discrimination in new technologies that monitor the brain
More on => ico.org.uk
✍️Ending nugget:
“If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.”
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse! .
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