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Category: entertainment – Page 32

After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all bets were off for live musicians who played in movie theaters. Thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary — and perhaps a larger sin, old-fashioned. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound.

The evil face of that campaign was the dastardly, maniacal robot. The Music Defense League spent over $500,000, running ads in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. The ads pleaded with the public to demand humans play their music (be it in movie or stage theaters), rather than some cold, unseen machine. A typical ad read like this one from the September 2, 1930 Syracuse Herald in New York:

Tho’ the Robot can make no music of himself, he can and does arrest the efforts of those who can.

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Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s AI studio Deep Voodoo said Wednesday that it has secured a $20 million in an investment round led by Connect Ventures. The South Park creators’ startup said it will use the capital to accelerate its development of deep-fake technology, VFX services and original synthetic media projects.

Connect Ventures is an investment partnership between CAA and venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates and represents the first outside capital raise for Deep Voodoo, which was previously funded by Parker and Stone’s entertainment company Park County.

Parker and Stone originally began building out their deep fake technology in early 2020, assembling a team of artists for a feature film they had developed. When the film was suspended amid the Covid shutdown, they pivoted to building out those deep-fake tools.

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We see the world around us because light is being absorbed by specialized cells in our retina. But can vision happen without any absorption at all—without even a single particle of light? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Imagine that you have a camera cartridge that might contain a roll of photographic film. The roll is so sensitive that coming into contact with even a single photon would destroy it. With our everyday classical means there is no way there’s no way to know whether there’s film in the cartridge, but in the it can be done. Anton Zeilinger, one of the winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, was the first to experimentally implement the idea of an interaction-free experiment using optics.

Now, in a study exploring the connection between the quantum and classical worlds, Shruti Dogra, John J. McCord, and Gheorghe Sorin Paraoanu of Aalto University have discovered a new and much more effective way to carry out interaction-free experiments. The team used transmon devices—superconducting circuits that are relatively large but still show quantum behavior—to detect the presence of microwave pulses generated by classical instruments. Their research was recently published in Nature Communications.

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Bubbles are ubiquitous, existing in everything from the foam on a beer to party toys for children. Despite this pervasiveness, there are open questions on the behavior of bubbles, such as why some bubbles are more resistant to bursting than others. Now Francois Boulogne and colleagues from the University of Paris-Saclay have taken a step toward answering that question by measuring the temperature of the film surrounding a soap bubble, finding that it can be significantly lower than that of its local environment [1]. The team says that the result could help industrial manufacturers of bubbles better control the stability of their products.

On a sunny day, our bodies cool down by releasing energy into the environment through the evaporation of sweat. Soap films also release energy by losing liquid via evaporation. Researchers studying bubbles have tracked the evaporation of a soap film’s liquid content under different conditions. But those experiments all assumed that the film’s temperature matched that of the environment, an assumption the results of Boulogne and his colleagues challenge.

In their experiments Boulogne and colleagues created a soap bubble from a mixture made of dishwashing liquid, water, and glycerol. They then measured the soap film’s temperature under a variety of environmental conditions. They found that the film could be up to 8 °C colder than the surrounding air. They also found that glycerol content of the soap film impacted this temperature difference, with films containing more glycerol having higher temperatures. Boulogne says that such a large temperature difference could impact bubble stability. But, he adds, further experiments are needed to corroborate that idea.

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Many of us are guilty of giving up on a game because of a long grind or seemingly insurmountable challenge, but Sony’s latest patent shows the company wants to change that.

Some masochists enjoy the pain of being repeatedly beaten in games like Dark Souls – it’s understandable, overcoming those challenges is a great feeling – but most of us have a breaking point where the power button gets hit and the game just ends up collecting dust on a shelf.

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Carmack, known for his work in VR and on classic games like Doom and Quake, is stepping down from his consulting CTO role at Meta.

John Carmack, a titan of the technology industry known for his work on virtual reality as well as classic games like Doom.

Carmack originally joined Oculus as CTO in 2013, after helping to promote the original Oculus Rift prototypes that he received from Palmer Luckey, and got pulled into Meta when the company (then Facebook) acquired Oculus in 2014.

“We built something pretty close to the right thing,” Carmack wrote about the Quest 2. He also said that he “wearied of the fight” with Meta, which is burning billions in its Reality Labs division to build things like VR headsets and software for its vision of the metaverse. Carmack would also write internal posts criticizing CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth’s decision making while at Meta, The New York Times reported.

Bosworth, in a tweet thanking Carmack on Friday evening, said that it is “impossible to overstate the impact you’ve had on our work and the industry as a whole. Your technical prowess is widely known, but it is your relentless focus on creating value for people that we will remember most.”

This isn’t not the first time Carmack has been unhappy with Meta’s priorities for VR. The company also killed off his mobile efforts with the Samsung Gear VR — “we missed an opportunity,” he said at the time — and the low-cost Oculus Go, both of which were his projects.

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Human-like articulated neural avatars have several uses in telepresence, animation, and visual content production. These neural avatars must be simple to create, simple to animate in new stances and views, capable of rendering in photorealistic picture quality, and simple to relight in novel situations if they are to be widely adopted. Existing techniques frequently use monocular films to teach these neural avatars. While the method permits movement and photorealistic image quality, the synthesized images are constantly constrained by the training video’s lighting conditions. Other studies specifically address the relighting of human avatars. However, they do not provide the user control over the body stance. Additionally, these methods frequently need multiview photos captured in a Light Stage for training, which is only permitted in controlled environments.

Some contemporary techniques seek to relight dynamic human beings in RGB movies. However, they lack control over body posture. They need a brief monocular video clip of the person in their natural location, attire, and body stance to produce an avatar. Only the target novel’s body stance and illumination information are needed for inference. It is difficult to learn relightable neural avatars of active individuals from monocular RGB films captured in unfamiliar surroundings. Here, they introduce the Relightable Articulated Neural Avatar (RANA) technique, which enables photorealistic human animation in any new body posture, perspective, and lighting situation. It first needs to simulate the intricate articulations and geometry of the human body.

The texture, geometry, and illumination information must be separated to enable relighting in new contexts, which is a difficult challenge to tackle from RGB footage. To overcome these difficulties, they first use a statistical human shape model called SMPL+D to extract canonical, coarse geometry, and texture data from the training frames. Then, they suggest a unique convolutional neural network trained on artificial data to exclude the shading information from the coarse texture. They add learnable latent characteristics to the coarse geometry and texture and send them to their proposed neural avatar architecture, which uses two convolutional networks to produce fine normal and albedo maps of the person underneath the goal body posture.

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