"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #41
August 6, 2023
"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #41
Your weekly roundup of the relevant trends, regulatory developments and policy insights, about the metaverse, AI, crypto, neurotech, and gaming.
😩I’m exhausted, just give me “the weekly snapshot”:
Here we go!
Worldcoin continues with its worldwide scanning campaing while activist continue to reveal the eye-opening implications for privacy ( the eye-rony of this cant be overstated!) China's putting a "bedtime" on kids' internet usage. Meanwhile, Meta's been busy losing billions and inventing bug-eyed AR glasses. X continues to give headaches, both trademark and light-related. This week we also higlihgt a new virtual reality experience titled "Body of Mine", that enables users to experience a different body. In AI litigation developments, the judge was skeptical to AI plagiarism claims, due to lack of substantial similarity in the results. Yuga Labs' new acquisition might roar, but the SEC's telling Coinbase to quiet down. Lastly, Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks got a high-tech makeover and San Diego Comic-Con had a case of 'he said, AI said.'
Quite the week!
👁️🗨️Now the full version, what's going on:
👀 => WorldCoin continues to scan irises worldwide with heightened concerns about its privacy implications
The project that claims to use cryptocurrency to distribute money across the world, though its bigger ambition is to create a global identity system called “World ID” that relies on individuals’ unique biometric data to prove that they are humans.
MIT researchers already found that Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users through deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts.
Our investigation revealed wide gaps between Worldcoin’s public messaging, which focused on protecting privacy, and what users experienced. We found that the company’s representatives used deceptive marketing practices, collected more personal data than it acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent. These practices may violate the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR)—a likelihood that the company’s own data consent policy acknowledged and asked users to accept—as well as local laws.
Crypto security firm CertiK revealed it recently unearthed a vulnerability in the Worldcoin protocol that allowed an attacker to bypass the verification process to become an Orb operator.
All while France's watchdog questions legality of Worldcoin biometric data collection, and the German data protection agency continues to investigate them since November of last year.
China is proposing to restrict internet access to minors and children.
The move is intended to curb internet addiction. Tech sector regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China said on Wednesday that people under 18 will not be allowed to access the internet via a mobile device between 10pm and 6am each day.
More on =>variety.com
Meta’s Reality Labs has lost $21 billion in roughly 18 months
Body of Mine puts users in a virtual body of a different gender
In Body of Mine, a new virtual reality experience, users can put on a headset and body tracking sensors, then look down and see a body — their arms, their chest, down to their feet — that does not match the gender they were assigned at birth.
More on => axios.com
Meta Connect and the Quest 3 have an official date in September . Also, Meta shows Flamera passthrough AR headset prototype at SIGGRAPH
Mixed reality headsets like the Quest Pro or the Apple Vision Pro have a problem. Their external cameras sit a few centimetres in front of your eyes. As a result, the computer-graphic-enhanced outside world is not captured from the correct perspective. Algorithms have to correct the deviation by projecting the image.
Meta wants to solve this problem with an approach that makes users look like insects.
More on => mixednews.com
Apple's Vision Pro Dev Kit Comes With Some Insanely Strict Rules
The Vision Pro dev kit document stipulates that all usage of the kit for developer purposes must take place in a secure, private location, and only by yourself or your direct, authorized employees. The document even goes as far as to require that office doors be locked while the kit is in use. For those who work from home, anyone who doesn't explicitly work for you cannot be in the presence of the kit, and that includes friends and family. Additionally, when the kit is in use, it must always be in your "positive control." In other words, you either have it on you constantly or at least have eyes on it at all times.
More on => slashgear.com/
VR desktop maker, ImmersedVR, is launching an XR headset
Immersed is making a work-centric XR headset with an ultra-sharp resolution of 4K-per-eye and micro-OLED display technology.
More on => mixecdnews.com
Yuga Labs Acquiring Roar Studios to Accelerate 'Bold Vision' for Otherside
More on => coindesk.com
Snapchat is launching a new Lens Creator Rewards programme to reward AR creators and developers for their top-performing Lenses
If a creator’s creation is a top-performing Lens with strong interaction in the United States, India, or Mexico, the firm will pay them up to $7,200 per month.
The corporation initially launched this reward programme in these three nations. If the Lens does well in the United States, India, and Mexico, it will then expand to 40 qualifying countries.
More on => techcrunch.com
🤖I Am Not A Robot: AI news
Nvidia's new AI Image Perfusion image presonalization method takes 100KB of space and needs only 4 minutes of training to reproduce a concept.
Nvidia researchers have introduced a research paper with an innovative new text-to-image personalization method called Perfusion. The main new idea in Perfusion is called "Key-Locking." This works by connecting new concepts that a user wants to add, like a specific cat or chair, to a more general category during image generation. For example, the cat would be linked to the broader idea of a "feline." This helps avoid overfitting, which is when the model gets too narrowly tuned to the exact training examples.
More on => decrypt.co
Judge Appears Likely to Dismiss AI Class Action Lawsuit by Artists
Judge William Orrick of the US District Court for the Northern District of California heard oral arguments on defendants’ motion to dismiss in the case of Andersen v Stability Ltd, a closely-watched class action complaint filed by multiple artists against companies that have developed AI text-to-image generator tools like Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt.
During the hearing, the judge appeared to side with AI companies, making it likely that he would dismiss the case.
“I don’t think the claim regarding output images is plausible at the moment, because there’s no substantial similarity [between the images by the artists and images created by the AI image generators],”
"Inside a Genius Mind," a new online Leonardo da Vinci retrospective from Google Arts and Culture
Dive into Leonardo Da Vinci’s personal notebooks - his codices - exploring themes across time and subject matter with the help of machine learning.
Meta releases an open source AI kit that creates audio from text prompts
The AudioCraft kit that bundles three existing generative AI models for creating sounds from text descriptions. AudioGen and MusicGen respectively produce sound effects and music, while EnCodec compresses sounds to produce higher-quality results.
More on => engadget.com
Researchers figure out how to make AI misbehave, serve up prohibited content
They used an open source language model to develop what are known as adversarial attacks. They showed that the same attack worked on several popular commercial chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Claude from Anthropic.
More on => arstechnica.com
🤦The WTF award of the week goes to…
Twitter/X is suing sued the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) arguing that the nonprofit “embarked on a scare campaign to drive away advertisers from the X platform” and illegally accessed the X’s data.
The complain states that the data was quoted “out of context” to make it appear like X is “overwhelmed by harmful content and then used that contrived narrative to call for companies to stop adverstising on X”.
Wonderful meme by https://twitter.com/HallGrae The lawsuit came days after Twitter unbanned Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, whom Musk kicked off the platform for tweeting a swastika in December.
More on => Gizmodo.com
And also, Meta, Microsoft, hundreds more own trademarks to new Twitter name, and the giant lowing, pulsing and strobing ‘X’ sign atop Twitter office got removed, after complaints of its intrusive lights.
San Diego Comic-Con Artist Alley Removed A.I. Exhibitor? Not So Fast
One story that spilled out of San Diego Comic-Con was that an exhibitor at Artists Alley was asked to leave over selling AI images. BleedingCool spoke with San Diego Comic-Con management, and they were bemused by the story being spread. They had no knowledge of anyone being removed from the show for that basis.
😬Meme corner:
🎮Gaming news
ESRB wants to make it easier to harvest kids' personal data
The North American ratings board is asking the US Federal Trade Commission to make facial age estimation one of the approved methods of verifiable parental consent (VPC) under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
More on => gamesindustry.biz
💸CryptoLand:
SEC asked Coinbase to halt trading in everything except bitcoin, CEO says
As reported by FT, according to Brian Armstrong, prior to suing the exchange for failing to register as a broker, the US Securities and Exchange Commission asked Coinbase to stop trading in all cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin.
“They came back to us, and they said . . . we believe every asset other than bitcoin is a security,” “And, we said, well how are you coming to that conclusion, because that’s not our interpretation of the law. And they said, we’re not going to explain it to you, you need to delist every asset other than bitcoin.”
OTOH, Decrypt reached out to Coinbase, and reported that a
“spokesperson told Decrypt that the interview "omitted critical context regarding [Coinbase's] conversations with the SEC in the US," adding that "per the SEC’s own admission, the views shared in the FT article may have represented the views of some staff at the time, but did not represent those of the Commission more broadly."
✍️Ending nugget:
“We must carefully peel away the assumptions and ideology of virtual worlds interface design that impact on intercultural interaction. As with all representational technologies we find a reification and naturalisation of the dominant group’s images/perceptions of themselves, so that particular social interests are served in the mode of (re)presentation. In cinema, Dyer (1997: 83) examines the technology of representational practices and finds a bias in the aesthetic technology and its habitual uses that produces "a look that assumes, privileges and constructs an image of white people."
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading!
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