"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #46
October 31, 2023
Dear person reading this:
You might have noticed that there wasn't a new issue for the past weeks.
I am usually an optimist, who thinks that collectively -in the near future, or in a thousand years- humanity will evolve into a mindset of shared prosperity, understanding and peace. The ongoing horrors and violence of war, injustice and greed weigh heavy in my heart.
At the same time, as someone based in Argentina, we are witnessing a high stakes election, with far-right libertarians leading the polls with propositions based on dismantling social rights and support systems, impacting even more so disproportionately in the already most vulnerable communities.
In this context, I am struggling to make sense of my belief system and the relevance of this work. Talking about the metaverse or AI in our usual lighthearted fun tone felt disconnected, therefore this pause for reflection. Recently, I stumbled upon the concept of activism fatigue, and with no better answers and my apologies for the lack of updates in the past weeks, I will just leave you with this quote: “Social justice relies on constant emotional labor, and for activists who have a personal stake in the mission of their activism, this emotional labor factor is only more fundamental.”
👁️🗨️What's going on:
👀 => Countries agree to safe and responsible development of frontier AI in landmark Bletchley Declaration
Leading AI nations, convened for the first time by the UK and including the United States and China, along with the European Union, have today (Wednesday 1 November 2023) reached a world-first agreement at Bletchley Park establishing a shared understanding of the opportunities and risks posed by frontier AI and the need for governments to work together to meet the most significant challenges.
More on => gov.uk
Cities XR: A Japanese Vision for the Digital Transformation of Public Spaces
Psychic VR Lab is a Japanese studio that has been experimenting with VR and AR for several years, and Styly is their platform for user-generated XR content. This content can be viewed anywhere via the smartphone app. According to the studio, around 80,000 artists have now created more than 100,000 XR scenes. The Styly app has been downloaded well over five million times.
More on => mixed-news.com
Hospitals around the world are adopting virtual reality technology for surgeon training.
General Surgeon Dr. Edgar Sanchez from Orlando Health showed how they are using virtual and mixed reality to train surgeons.
A surgeon may use VR to observe a live surgery, or they may use VR to explore a spatially recorded surgery. Both approaches have their benefits. During a recorded session, the surgeon can pause the experience to explore additional data points. During a live experience, the surgeon can ask the expert questions in real time.
More on => mixednews.com
Meta’s Quest 3 lets you choose: better battery life or better VR graphics
In addition to this new Battery Saver mode, the v59 update also gives VR streamers a way to keep track of YouTube Live Chat within the headset, includes more reactions and stickers in a chat, adds legs to your avatar in Horizon Home.
More on => theverge.com
Up close with Qualcomm Snapdragon AR2 smart glasses and why it's taking so long to perfect them
Qualcomm has two new chips for XR, or mixed reality, the AR1 and AR2, and the latter will enable some truly interesting new products.
They imagine two distinct categories of devices. There will be powerful computing tools, like Apple’s Vision Pro headset, these will likely resemble larger glasses or goggles for the foreseeable future.
There will also be smaller wearables that look like normal glasses. These won’t be able to create a new world in front of you, but they should present around a 100-degree field of view to project content. They will also be completely transparent when appropriate. These glasses will sense and interact with your environment.
More on => techradar.com
What Did Ancient Egyptian Art Look Like in Its Glory Days? The Louvre and Snapchat’s New A.R. Program Offers a Glimpse
The Chamber of Ancestors as seen through Snapchat, thanks to an augmented reality program with the Louvre. Courtesy of the Louvre. More on => newsartnet.com
🤖I Am Not A Robot: AI news
Boston Dynamics teaches robo-dog to recognise speech, respond using ChatGPT
They created a robot tour guide using Spot integrated with Chat GPT and other AI models as a proof of concept for the robotics applications of foundational models.
"Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are basically very big, very capable autocomplete algorithms; they take in a stream of text and predict the next bit of text," the post states. "We were inspired by the apparent ability of LLMs to roleplay, replicate culture and nuance, form plans, and maintain coherence over time, as well as by recently released Visual Question Answering (VQA) models that can caption images and answer simple questions about them."
More on => bostondynamics.com
Meta’s AI research head wants open source licensing to change
Meta’s AI research group wants to keep releasing models for free despite criticism that Llama 2 isn’t open enough.
IEEE Spectrum wrote researchers from Radboud University in the Netherlands claimed Meta saying Llama 2 is open-source “is misleading,” and social media posts questioned how Meta could claim it as open-source.
More on => wired.com
Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are announcing the creation of a new AI Safety Fund, a more than $10 million initiative to promote research in the field of AI safety.
The Frontier Model Forum, an industry body focused on ensuring safe and responsible development of frontier AI models, is also releasing its first technical working group update on red teaming to share industry expertise with a wider audience as the Forum expands the conversation about responsible AI governance approaches.
More on => blog.google
🎮Gaming news
Valve officially releases SteamVR 2.0
“In this release we’re bringing all of what’s new and exciting on the Steam platform into VR,” Valve says in a Steam post.
More on => theverge.com
🧠Neurotech:
Restoring Vision: Blind “See” Through Sound with Smart Glasses
Researchers pioneered “acoustic touch” technology, allowing individuals with blindness or low vision to “see” using unique sound icons. These smart glasses translate visual data into distinct auditory cues.
Trials revealed that the glasses notably improved users’ abilities to detect and reach objects. This groundbreaking tech offers a new avenue of sensory augmentation, promoting greater independence and life quality for the visually impaired.
More on => neurosciencenews.com
✍️Ending nugget:
“In this study we find that the social systems of the human brain are more active during real live in-person encounters than on Zoom. Zoom appears to be an impoverished social communication system relative to in-person conditions."
Joy Hirsch, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry, professor of comparative medicine and neuroscience, senior author of the study “Separable Processes for Live “In-Person” and Live “Zoom-like” Faces”
That’s all for now!To continue the conversation, find me at https://linktr.ee/abogamer. And if you want to support my work, please consider sharing this newsletter!!