This Week in XR: Animoca’s new $20 million Mokaverse, alien corpses, US Senate eyes AI regulation
Mexico City, Mexico – September 13: One of two ‘non-human’ creatures shown to the media has been spotted , [+]
The Congress of Mexico got up close and personal with alleged alien mummies. Bodies believed to be aliens were recovered from the Andes in 2017. The withered, three-fingered creatures were dramatically unveiled by self-proclaimed UFO expert Jaime Mawson. As you can see, photos of mummified corpses that bear a striking resemblance to “E.T.” NASA is taking UFOs seriously and has named a chief investigator Whose identity will be kept secret so that they can be protected from harassment.
Washington, DC – September 13: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman departs from closed-door “AI Insight Forum” , [+]
US Senate AI Insight Forum This week featured some of the most powerful people in technology and indeed the world, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sander Pinchai, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Apple was notably absent. CNBC noted that the panelists have a net worth of $550 billion. Earlier, a similar meeting was held at the White House six weeks ago. Tech firms promised to be nice. President Biden announced voluntary commitments from seven US companies that promised to ensure that their AI products are safe before release. Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI form Frontier Model Foruman industry body that promotes Safe and responsible development of AI. The new organization will conduct internal and external security testing, share information, invest in cybersecurity and prioritize research on the societal risks of AI.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 20: (L-R) Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands Yachts , [+]
Metaverse pioneer Animoca has invested $20M in Mocaverse. A non-fungible token (NFT) collection designed to allow users to create on-chain identities to participate in the Mokaverse ecosystem with the Moka ID, a very Web3 concept. The investment was led by CMCC Global and included contributions from Kingsway Capital, Liberty City Ventures and GameFi Ventures. Animoca co-founder Yat Siu also participated in an individual capacity.
Stability AI launches music generation tool – Stable Audio. With the paid version ($12/month) users can generate Up to 90 seconds of music. Unlike its popular free open-source text-to-image generator, Stable Audio on the Web will cost $12/month. Stable Audio is trained with over 800,000 licensed audio files containing music and sound effects from stock music licensing company AudioSparks. The dataset represents over 19,500 hours of sounds.
Keiichi Matsuda started the new short version about AR,agents. The five-and-a-half-minute short film, financed by Niantic, is a decidedly more optimistic view of AR and AI than Matsudo’s masterpiece, Hyper-Reality (2016) and their recent merger (2019), which takes a human-functioning Shows the machine. -Like work. Niantic CEO John Hanke said in his 2022 AWE keynote that we should be building a world we want to live in, not escape from.
Army to buy 120,000 HoloLens IVAS systems to integrate soldiers into IoT battlefield , [+]
Microsoft US Army contract lives to fight another day, Miraculously, and frankly from our POV, surprisingly, Microsoft took the remaining $40M on its extremely conditional $20B IVAS contract and, with its DoD advocates, managed to get a good grade in a field test. Raha, which had earlier received toxic reviews. It’s safe to say that without this contract, HoloLens could follow Google Glass into the memory hole museum of anachronistic technology.
Apple CEO Tim Cook holds an iPhone 15 Pro during a new product announcement on the Apple campus , [+]
Apple iPhone 15 has stereoscopic capture Enabled by its dual offset cameras. Content can be played on the Vision Pro XR headset. This makes much more sense than capturing it with a headset, which would be awkward. Like the new Vision Pro, this functionality won’t be available until 2024. Apple is taking orders for 15 from today, with deliveries starting on September 22.
Like the entire platform, Roblox characters are also rapidly increasing in their power.
Roblox introduced an AI assistant for game development and world building. Roblox Assistant can generate environments, objects, and basic gameplay from text descriptions. Think “laying eggs near a campfire in ancient ruins” or “Victorian haunted house.” The assistant is scheduled to launch in late 2023/early 2024. On a semi-related note, developers attending RDC23 got a free Quest Pro. They are now going for $700 new on eBay.
A new free service for the XR developer community.
ArborXR launches XR Directory to help companies find trusted VR developers, Developers are screened and selected based on merit, with badges awarded to reflect their expertise and experience. Companies can download dozens of demos, preview developer quality first-hand, and assess fit before reaching out. At launch, a library of 60+ developers and 20+ curated demo apps are available on the platform.
This Week in XR is also a podcast Hosted by the author of this column, Ted Shilowitz, futurist, Rony Abovitz, founder of Paramount Global and Magic Leap. Our guest this week is Anna Belova, Founder and CEO of Dever. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes and YouTube.
what are we reading
Uber CEO reiterates his company’s wasteful practices (Patrick Culp/Emerging Tech Brew)
How virtual reality is being used to treat fear, phobias and anxiety (CBS News)