Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for an online existence has been laughed off as a corporate folly. Meanwhile, those still existing happily on a virtual world launched 20 years ago may be wondering what all the fuss is about …
Virtual worlds: Second Life and Metaverse. Illustration: Nicolás Ortega/The Guardian
On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City. They had come to hear IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. Palmisano’s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier.
Palmisano’s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair.
It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was “the first big-league CEO” to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life – “the most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds”. IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a “region” of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (£134) a month. Renters could build whatever they wanted on their turf.
Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…
Neal Stephenson, apparently the first to coin the term “metaverse,” has expressed his opinion about the future adoption of virtual worlds.
The science fiction writer and co-founder of Lamina1, a blockchain metaverse company, believes that building experiences that millions of people consider worthy in virtual worlds is quite difficult, hindering the process of technology adoption.
Summary
The future of the metaverse according to Stephenson
With the recent news that the ChatGPT AI can pass a theory of mind test, how far away are we from an artificial intelligence that fully understands the goals and beliefs of others?
By Edd Gent, 14 February 2023 , updated 22 February 2023
Hollie Fuller
SUPERHUMAN artificial intelligence is already among us. Well, sort of.
When it comes to playing games like chess and Go, or solving difficult scientific challenges like predicting protein structures, computers are well ahead of us.
But we have one superpower they aren’t even close to mastering: mind reading.
Humans have an uncanny ability to deduce the goals, desires and beliefs of others, a crucial skill that means we can anticipate other people’s actions and the consequences of our own. Reading minds comes so easily to us, though, that we often don’t think to spell out what we want.
If AIs are to become truly useful in everyday life – to collaborate effectively with us or, in the case of self-driving cars, to understand that a child might run into the road after a bouncing ball – they need to establish similar intuitive abilities.
JPL-developed technologies, including VITAL, FINDER, 3D-printing methods, and Voyager spacecraft communications, are featured in the agency’s technology publication.
Published Jan. 31, 2023
To make sure ventilators could be quickly manufactured and administered to those in need during the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of engineers at JPL created the Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally (VITAL) device, made of off-the-shelf parts. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
When it comes to NASA, most people look to the skies as rockets, rovers, and astronauts push the boundaries of space exploration. But the benefits of going above and beyond can be found here on Earth through products and services born from NASA innovation.
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Project Starline is the real deal. It makes a virtual call feel like a one-on-one conversation. But it’s unclear if it’s something most people will ever get to experience.
Here’s what a Starline booth looks like from a distance. Image: Google
It looked like I could grab the apple. Jason Lawrence, a Google researcher, was sitting across from me, holding the fruit in his hand. I could see it, it was red and shiny, and my brain was telling me it was right there. But Lawrence and the apple were actually in another room — they were just being projected in front of me through Google’s Project Starline.
Project Starline is Google’s next-generation 3D video chat booth that it first introduced at Google I/O 2021. Slide into a booth, and your image is supposed to be projected to another booth in real time, as if you’re actually sitting with somebody else across a table.
In a heartwarming video, Google showed family and friends joyfully connecting with each other using Starline, and the virtual recreations looked remarkably lifelike. “That was mindblowing,” one person says in the video. “I’ve seen a lot, but I’ve never seen this,” said another.