Lifeboat Foundation

Virtual assistants and robots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, interactive and human-like. To fully replicate human communication, however, artificial intelligence (AI) agents should not only be able to determine what users are saying and produce adequate responses, they should also mimic humans in the way they speak.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have recently carried out a study aimed at improving how virtual assistants and robots communicate with humans by generating natural gestures to accompany their speech. Their paper, pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2020, introduces Mix-StAGE, a new model that can produce different styles of co-speech gestures that best match the voice of a speaker and what he/she is saying.

“Imagine a situation where you are communicating with a friend in a virtual space through a virtual reality headset,” Chaitanya Ahuja, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “The headset is only able to hear your voice, but not able to see your hand gestures. The goal of our model is to predict the hand gestures accompanying the speech.”

The Universe or any other phenomenon or entity contained therein is not objectively real but subjectively real. Patterns of information emerging from the ultimate code are what is more fundamental than particles of matter or space-time continuum itself all of which is levels below the Code. Nature behaves quantum code-theoretically at all levels. It’s hierarchies of quantum networks all the way down and all the way up. Being part of hierarchical quantum neural networks, a conscious observer system possesses a strange quality: collapsing quantum states of entangled conscious entities and having a privileged interpretation of that. From this perspective, entangled conscious agents would be a mirror conscious environment, whereas the quantum observer would be a central node of the entangled network.

“If we accept that the material universe as we know it is not a mechanical system but a virtual reality created by Absolute Consciousness through an infinitely complex orchestration of experiences, what are the practical consequences of this insight?” –Stanislav Grof

Just like absolute idealism, solipsism certainly defies our common sense but the deeper layer of truth is not what first meets the eye. Here’s what Richard Conn Henry and Stephen Palmquist write in their paper “An Experimental Test of Non-local Realism” (2007): “Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.” One can extend their line of reasoning by arriving at pantheistic solipsism as a likely revelation to ponder about.

Continue reading “Philosophical Insights on Universal Consciousness and Evolving Phenomenal Mind” »

A dash of virtual reality helps replicate the serendipitous interactions of an in-person conference when participants are scattered across the globe.

The immersive qualities of virtual-reality gaming are making effective biofeedback treatment of anxiety and other conditions more affordable and accessible.

Color is a foundational aspect of visual experience that aids in segmenting objects, identifying food sources, and signaling emotions. Intuitively, it feels that we are immersed in a colorful world that extends to the farthest limits of our periphery. How accurate is our intuition? Here, we used gaze-contingent rendering in immersive VR to reveal the limits of color awareness during naturalistic viewing. Observers explored 360° real-world environments, which we altered so that only the regions where observers looked were in color, while their periphery was black-and-white. Overall, we found that observers routinely failed to notice when color vanished from the majority of their visual world. These results show that our intuitive sense of a rich, colorful world is largely incorrect.

Color ignites visual experience, imbuing the world with meaning, emotion, and richness. As soon as an observer opens their eyes, they have the immediate impression of a rich, colorful experience that encompasses their entire visual world. Here, we show that this impression is surprisingly inaccurate. We used head-mounted virtual reality (VR) to place observers in immersive, dynamic real-world environments, which they naturally explored via saccades and head turns. Meanwhile, we monitored their gaze with in-headset eye tracking and then systematically altered the visual environments such that only the parts of the scene they were looking at were presented in color and the rest of the scene (i.e., the visual periphery) was entirely desaturated. We found that observers were often completely unaware of these drastic alterations to their visual world. In the most extreme case, almost a third of observers failed to notice when less than 5% of the visual display was presented in color.

UC Santa Barbara researchers continue to push the boundaries of LED design a little further with a new method that could pave the way toward more efficient and versatile LED display and lighting technology.

In a paper published in Nature Photonics, UCSB electrical and computer engineering professor Jonathan Schuller and collaborators describe this new approach, which could allow a wide variety of LED devices—from virtual reality headsets to automotive lighting—to become more sophisticated and sleeker at the same time.

“What we showed is a new kind of photonic architecture that not only allows you to extract more photons, but also to direct them where you want,” said Schuller. This improved performance, he explained, is achieved without the external packaging components that are often used to manipulate the light emitted by LEDs.

Waves, whether they are light waves, sound waves, or any other kind, travel in the same manner in forward and reverse directions—this is known as the principle of reciprocity. If we could route waves in one direction only—breaking reciprocity—we could transform a number of applications important in our daily lives. Breaking reciprocity would allow us to build novel “one-way” components such as circulators and isolators that enable two-way communication, which could double the data capacity of today’s wireless networks. These components are essential to quantum computers, where one wants to read a qubit without disturbing it. They are also critical to radar systems, whether in self-driving cars or those used by the military.

A team led by Harish Krishnaswamy, professor of electrical engineering, is the first to build a high-performance non-reciprocal device on a compact chip with a performance 25 times better than previous work. Power handling is one of the most important metrics for these circulators and Krishnaswamy’s new chip can handle several watts of power, enough for cellphone transmitters that put out a watt or so of power. The new chip was the leading performer in a DARPA SPAR (Signal Processing at RF) program to miniaturize these devices and improve performance metrics. Krishnaswamy’s group was the only one to integrate these non-reciprocal devices on a compact chip and also demonstrate performance metrics that were orders of magnitude superior to prior work. The study was presented in a paper at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February 2020, and published May 4, 2020, in Nature Electronics.

“For these circulators to be used in practical applications, they need to be able to handle watts of power without breaking a sweat,” says Krishnaswamy, whose research focuses on developing integrated electronic technologies for new high-frequency wireless applications. “Our earlier work performed at a rate 25 times lower than this new one—our 2017 device was an exciting scientific curiosity but it was not ready for prime time. Now we’ve figured out how to build these one-way devices in a compact chip, thus enabling them to become small, low cost, and widespread. This will transform all kinds of electronic applications, from VR headsets to 5G cellular networks to quantum computers.”

We’re getting closer to technologies that let us exist forever in some way — using data to power our existence in VR, robots, chatbots and holograms. Should we do it?

“It’s not just about the smell,” said Adrian Cheok, one of the scientists behind the experiments. “It is part of a whole, integrated virtual reality or augmented reality. So, for example, you could have a virtual dinner with your friend through the internet. You can see them in 3D and also share a glass of wine together.”

In real life, odors are transmitted when airborne molecules waft into the nose, prompting specialized nerve cells in the upper airway to fire off impulses to the brain. In the recent experiments, performed on 31 test subjects at the Imagineering Institute in the Malaysian city of Nusajaya, researchers used electrodes in the nostrils to deliver weak electrical currents above and behind the nostrils, where these neurons are found.

The researchers were able to evoke 10 different virtual odors, including fruity, woody and minty.