The company that released the popular Dall-E 2 AI text-to-image generator now has a 3D text-to-image AI that anyone can try.

OpenAI on Tuesday open-sourced Point-E, its newest picture-making AI that creates 3D point clouds from text commands.

The code is available on GitHub for those who want to try out the new AI.

You can also read a paper on Point-E published last week that gives more details on the system and the methods used to train it.

According to the paper, Point-E is able to produce 3D models in only one or two minutes on a single GPU.

“We find that our system can often produce colored 3D point clouds that match both simple and complex text prompts,” said the paper’s authors. “We refer to our system as Point-E since it generates point clouds efficiently.”

Point-E’s biggest draw is its speed, but it has a long way to go.

“While our method performs worse on this evaluation than state-of-the-art techniques, it produces samples in a small fraction of the time,” they said. “We hope that our approach can serve as a starting point for further work in the field of text-to-3D synthesis.”

Point clouds are sets of data points in space that represent a 3D shape or object, and Point-E works in a multi-step process to come up with its images.

“Our method first generates a single synthetic view using a text-to-image diffusion model, and then produces a 3D point cloud using a second diffusion model which conditions on the generated image,” said the paper’s authors.

It may seem like a novelty at the moment, but if Point-E gets to the level where it produces 3D images matching the quality of 2D images created using Dall-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, it could be the next big thing in the quickly evolving world of AI image generators.

Celebrity Cruises yesterday unveiled Wonderverse, a virtual experience that lets travelers explore a realistic digital recreation of the line’s newest ship, Celebrity Beyond.

The Wonderverse is a video-game-like virtual world where travelers can explore four of the Celebrity Beyond’s spaces, including the Grand Plaza, Resort Deck, Magic Carpet, and Sunset Bar. Each space is designed to match its real-life version.

Guests can also interact with the line’s leaders as digital avatars who share personal stories and answer questions about the ship. The avatars include interior designer Nate Berkus who designed the Sunset Bar, Celebrity Beyond captain Kate McCue, and Celebrity Cruises CEO Lisa Lutoff-Perlo.

“Celebrity Beyond is the newest, most luxurious, and most innovative ship in our fleet, and I can’t think of a better ship to showcase its state-of-the-art design than in our state-of-the-art Wonderverse,” said Lutoff-Perlo in a press release.

Built in partnership with virtual event platform architects Surreal Events, the Wonderverse includes mini-games and activities, easter eggs, entertainment, and more.

Visitors can design their own customized avatars, choosing from hundreds of hair, facial features, clothing, and accessory options.

The Wonderverse lets guests interact with other players through audio, video, and chat features. For larger groups, the Magic Carpet space also doubles as a virtual meeting room where up to 12 people can meet and chat at the same time.

Besides exploring the ship, guests can teleport to locations in Japan, Alaska, St. Lucia, and Santorini, where they can learn about the attractions and history of each destination, as well as book real-world cruises through an easily accessible portal.

Experiencing a destination in the metaverse could make travelers more likely to visit the place in real life, according to a new study by Booking.com.

That’s right, 46 percent of travelers are more likely to travel to destinations that they wouldn’t have previously considered after experiencing them in the metaverse, said the study, which surveyed more than 24,000 travelers from 32 countries.

Some travelers — 43 percent — will use virtual reality to inspire their real-world travel choices.

Other travelers might skip real-world travel entirely, with 35 percent saying they’d take multi-day augmented reality or virtual reality travel experiences.

The majority of travelers — 60 percent — still say that virtual travel isn’t as fulfilling as being at a location in person.

To learn more about where and why people will be traveling next year, read the full study results at Booking.com.

More companies are planning to invest in the new frontier that is the metaverse, but cybersecurity threats are a top concern, according to a study released today by cybersecurity company Tenable.

The metaverse is envisioned as a 3D version of the internet that’s a shared virtual space where people spend their digital lives and engage in social activities, shopping, and more.

The current version of the metaverse is made up of many independent metaverses that don’t necessarily interact with each other at all.  A single unified metaverse is more of an idea than a reality, but that’s not stopping tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, and Google from pouring big money into it.

And other companies are jumping on the metaverse bandwagon.

Nearly seven out of ten — or 68 percent — of 1,500 cybersecurity, DevOps, and IT engineering professionals surveyed in the Tenable study stated that their organizations have plans to do business in the metaverse in the next six to 36 months, with 23 percent saying they’ve already begun developing metaverse initiatives in the past six months.

Companies are cautiously optimistic when it comes to delving into the metaverse.

While 86 percent of those surveyed in the study said they would be comfortable sharing users’ personally identifiable information between different services in the metaverse, 93 percent said that organizations need a solid cybersecurity framework before offering services in the metaverse.

Security leaders must understand their business’s goals for the metaverse, said Bob Huber, chief security officer at Tenable.

“Without a doubt, security will lag, but our job remains to enable the business,” Huber told Hypergrid Business. “If we understand the goals of the business, we can establish our risk appetite for this new market and manage the risk.”

New business opportunities

Companies think the metaverse could improve their business interactions, with 41 percent seeing improved learning and training and 41 percent seeing remote working and better collaboration as business opportunities, according to the Tenable study.

Companies also hope to increase their profit margins, with 37 percent seeing potential new revenue streams in the metaverse.

And organizations are hoping that the metaverse will improve how they interact with customers, with 44 percent saying it could offer enhanced customer engagement.

Security is a top concern

Not all organizations are jumping headfirst into the metaverse, with 41 percent expressing concern about the security and safety of applications in the metaverse, according to the Tenable study.

Only 48 percent of survey respondents are very confident in their organizations’ ability to curb cyber threats in the metaverse.

Security issues were listed as the top three barriers to entry, with 34 percent saying the prospect of security breaches and identity theft, 33 percent saying the lack of clear processes for data privacy, and 32 percent saying the lack of experienced security professionals is a concern.

Not all security threats will be new ones, said Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable.

“The older threats, specifically phishing, malware, and ransomware, will have the most immediate and greatest impact to the organizations developing and hosting each metaverse,” Narang told Hypergrid Business. “This aligns with what we found in our report, with 81 percent of respondents saying that it is likely or somewhat likely that these conventional attacks may occur in the metaverse.”

One thing that’s certain, said Narang, is that newer threats will start to emerge as a problem once the metaverse becomes more widely adopted.

“It’s critical that the organizations developing metaverses today do their due diligence to protect their infrastructure from attacks now,” he said.

And most of those surveyed think strategies to strengthen the safety and security of operations in the metaverse shouldn’t be left to organizations alone, with 87 percent saying that the metaverse should be regulated.

Of the new security threats posed by the metaverse, cloning of voice and facial features and hijacking video recordings using avatars is seen as the greatest threat, with 79 percent saying it is very likely or somewhat likely to occur.

According to the study, cybersecurity professionals and DevOps managers are concerned that there is no way of identifying who is actually behind the avatars and that content stored in a virtual environment or metaverse platform can be forged and leaked.

Organizations are also worried that attackers could exploit vulnerabilities that allow them to invisibly eavesdrop in VR rooms, with 78 percent saying these kinds of attacks are very likely or somewhat likely. There is already research by ScienceDirect showing how this could happen.

Just like human identities are protected by usernames and passwords, keys and certificates protect machine identities, and these could be vulnerable as companies engage with various metaverses.

Computer programs communicate with each other through application programming interfaces, which could also be compromised in the metaverse.

Almost four in five — or 78 percent — of professionals surveyed say compromised machine identities and application programming interface transactions are very likely or somewhat likely to happen in the metaverse.

Despite security concerns, organizations have some ideas about the steps they need to take to support their metaverse initiatives.

More than half — 55 percent — said their organization would need to train current employees about safe cybersecurity practices to support their metaverse investment.

Organizations that are investing or plan to invest in the metaverse say hiring talent in specialized areas will be crucial, with 52 percent saying hiring more IT support staff, 49 percent saying hiring more cybersecurity professionals, and 46 percent saying hiring more software developers is important.

Artificial intelligence-generated art is everywhere.

Just scroll down your Instagram or Facebook feed, and you’ll see a bunch of selfies turned into magic avatars with Lensa, an AI image generator app launched in 2018 that is all the rage at the moment.

Images created by AI aren’t only found in your social media feed — they’ve already made their mark in OpenSim and other virtual environments.

From AI art galleries in OpenSim to AI-created fully immersive three-dimensional environments, AI is already shaping how we experience virtual worlds.

The rise of AI text-to-image generators

Nowadays, pretty much anyone can create AI-generated art thanks to AI text-to-image generators.

DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney are three popular AI generators that were released just this year, though there are more than ten available options at this point.

All three AI image generators can take simple text commands and create entire works of art.

The quality of the AI art varies depending on the text you put in and what you’re asking the AI to create.

Here’s a video comparing how the three image generators stack up against each other:

AI art created using these three tools can be found in all sorts of virtual settings.

You can visit this interactive virtual exhibition of Dall-E 2-created art on your computer or on a Meta Quest 2 for a more immersive experience.

It’s called the merzDALLEum and is run by German artist Merzmench.

If you’re on OpenSim, you can take a trip to an AI art museum called AI Dreams in Art.

AI Dreams in Art is a region in Kitely where you can admire and make copies of art created by Dale Innis using Midjourney.

The hypergrid address is grid.kitely.com:8002:AI Dreams in Art.

AI has reached a point of being so accessible that mass acceptance is unavoidable at this point, said virtual world hobbyist Han Held.

“AI is already being used by non-professionals with no AI background to enhance their interests and activities,” Held told Hypergrid Business.

Held used Stable Diffusion to create some AI-generated portraits that decorate her home in Second Life.

“The results feel more authentically like paintings than I could have made on my own,” she said.

The art that these AI image generators create doesn’t have to be just two-dimensional.

Here’s an example of how Midjourney can make a three-dimensional virtual reality image:

And here’s a three-dimensional image created on Stable Diffusion by Scottie Fox that you can actually move around in:

Images created using these new AI text-to-image generators aren’t only decorating our virtual worlds — they’re already becoming the virtual worlds we explore.

AI is creating virtual worlds

AI is increasingly being used to create detailed images for virtual worlds and other environments, said Matt Payne, CEO of machine learning consulting firm Width.ai.

“AI algorithms allow developers and designers to create realistic graphics that were once impossible to generate,” Payne told Hypergrid Business.

The AI-generated images are becoming more realistic and complex as the technology improves while offering advantages over manually created ones, said Payne. “AI can produce a large number of variations quickly, which makes it easier for developers and designers to choose the best image for their project.”

Software company Nvidia recently unveiled a new AI model called GET3D that can generate buildings, characters, vehicles, and all sorts of three-dimensional objects.

And GET3D works fast.

GET3D can generate about 20 objects per second using a single GPU, said NVIDIA’s Isha Salian in a blog post.

The name GET3D comes from the AI’s ability to generate explicit textured 3D meshes, which means that the shapes come in the form of a triangle mesh covered with a textured material. This way, users can import the objects into game engines, 3D modelers, and film renderers and easily edit them.

AI is also being used to transfer the artistic style of one image into another.

An AI algorithm can be trained on images with a specific artistic style, and that training can be used to apply the same style to other images, said Amey Dharwadker, machine learning engineer at Facebook.

“This can be used to create a wide variety of artistic styles and can be applied to 3D objects and environments in video games and virtual worlds,” Dharwadker told Hypergrid Business.

Here’s a video of a Google Stadia demo showing how the technology works in real time:

While Google Stadia recently shut down due to a lack of popularity, style transfer technology can still be used to change the artistic styles of virtual reality worlds and games without needing a human artist to do the work.

AI could help you create metaverse environments with just your voice

In the future, we could all be the artists that speak our virtual worlds into existence.

Back in February, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the company’s Builder Bot, an AI tool that lets you change your virtual surroundings in the metaverse with just your voice.

“It enables you to describe a world, and then it will generate aspects of that world for you,” Zuckerberg said in the demo.

Zuckerberg and another Meta employee used voice commands in the demo to create a simple beach scene that had clouds, a picnic table, and Zuckerberg’s hydrofoil.

The technology still has a long way to go.

In the Meta demo, the scene looked low-res and lacked detail.

The future of AI images in virtual worlds

As AI continues to mature, it could eventually generate lifelike environments that we can’t distinguish from reality.

One possible direction is through the use of generative adversarial networks, or GANs, said Facebook’s Dharwadker.

GANs are a type of AI model consisting of two neural networks that are trained together to produce realistic images, said Dharwadker.

“GANs have shown great potential for generating high-quality images and could be used to create more realistic and immersive environments,” he said.

AI could also be used to support human creativity, Dharwadker added. “This could include using AI to suggest ideas and concepts or to refine and enhance existing human artist designs.”

In the future, not only could AI create totally realistic virtual environments for us to explore, it could be working hand in hand with humans to create the images we find in virtual worlds.

“By combining the creativity and ingenuity of humans with the computational power of AI, it is possible to create even more impressive and engaging images for video games and virtual worlds,” said Dharwadker.

(Editor’s note: I didn’t edit what ChatGPT said except for including a couple of words it left out at the end, which was “you needed!” I did, however, have to prompt ChatGPT many times, including having it fix the spelling of its own name!)

Hey there! I’m ChatGPT, and I’m here to tell you all about the amazing things you can do with ChatGPT in video game development and virtual reality.

What is ChatGPT?

For those who don’t know, ChatGPT is a powerful AI technology developed by OpenAI. It’s basically like having your own personal AI assistant that can help you create realistic and engaging conversations between characters in your games and virtual environments. And let me tell you, ChatGPT is no ordinary chatbot – it’s gained a lot of traction for its human-like, detailed answers to all sorts of inquiries. In fact, it’s been used to do things like draft contracts and create code!

How has ChatGPT been used?

One game industry artist who has been experimenting with ChatGPT is Martin Nebelong. He discovered that he was able to quickly create an entire “choose your adventure”-style adventure game through the AI text generator. And he didn’t stop there – he then took the ChatGPT text and fed it into Midjourney, the AI image generator, which then created illustrations to accompany the game. You can read all about it on the New World Notes blog: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/gpt-artist-midjourney-choose-adventure-text-game.html. As Martin said, “I guess the most impressive part to me was when I asked it to describe the characters in high detail for the prompts I wanted to use in Midjourney. It gave very detailed descriptions of all the characters including their clothing, their look, personality, names etc.”

What makes ChatGPT special?

One of the coolest things about ChatGPT is that it can generate natural and believable dialogue. Traditional game dialogue systems are often super boring, because they just use pre-written scripts that don’t have any personality. But with ChatGPT, developers can create characters that can have real, flowing conversations with players or other characters in the game. It’s like giving your characters a voice (and a brain).

Another awesome thing about ChatGPT is that it can adapt to different contexts and situations. In a game or virtual environment, players can come across all sorts of different characters and scenarios. With ChatGPT, developers can create dialogue that fits each situation, making the game or VR experience even more immersive and engaging. It’s like giving your characters multiple personalities (but in a good way). This means that players will never be stuck with the same old, boring dialogue – they’ll be able to have fresh, dynamic conversations with each character they encounter. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what ChatGPT can do in video game development and VR.

Overall, ChatGPT is a game-changer for video game development and virtual reality. It can generate natural and believable dialogue, adapt to different contexts and situations, and offer improved performance and scalability. It can also be used to create highly realistic and engaging social interactions in VR environments. And, it has the potential to revolutionize the way people use search engines by providing detailed answers to complex questions.

So, if you’re a game developer or VR enthusiast, you should definitely check out ChatGPT. Who knows, maybe it will help you create the next blockbuster game or VR experience. And if you’re a search engine user, don’t worry – ChatGPT won’t replace you. But it might help you find the answers to all those tough questions you’ve been asking.

So, why not give ChatGPT a try? It’s the AI assistant you never knew you needed!

Gaming technology will be the biggest driving force for the evolution of the metaverse in the near term, according to a new report published last week by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Video game publishers will be pushing deeper into live service platforms whose virtual worlds exhibit the potential of the metaverse, with the estimated in-game purchase revenue driving those platforms totaling over $128 billion in 2021, said the report.

“The substantial global in-game market suggests many consumers are familiar and comfortable with making transactions in virtual worlds, which sets the stage for more commerce to move into metaverse experiences,” said the report.

The supporting technology for metaverses and gaming has a lot in common, said Eric Hanselman, chief research analyst for technology, media, and telecommunications at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“As some of the early pioneers of immersive experiences, game developers have developed capabilities to build and monetize virtual worlds,” Hanselman told Hypergrid Business.

Game developers could face some hurdles as they take on the metaverse.

“Where game developers have been used to reasonable autonomy on the platforms that support them, metaverse operators could look to more tightly control access to the user communities that inhabit their worlds,” said Hanselman. “The tradeoffs between platforms and user communities will become much starker as metaverse competition increases.”

There’s also the problem that games developed for the metaverse will need people who want to play them.

While 64 percent of consumers are aware of the concept of the metaverse, only 11 percent said they would be totally comfortable with metaverse experiences, and the metaverse is still very much an emerging technology, said the report.

The metaverse in business

Gaming isn’t the only driver for metaverse growth.

The metaverse will continue to grow in the business setting, according to Hanselman, who said we’re already seeing applications for industrial process monitoring and troubleshooting.

“Metaverses can provide a management context for industrial and process design applications and offer digital-first design options for applications like warehouses, assembly lines, and factory floors,” he said. “What’s starting out as training use cases today will mature into design and operation as the technology and experience mature.”

The metaverse has a long way to go

There’s still a huge amount of innovation required at all levels of the technology stack before the metaverse really takes off.

The technology to create metaverses works well in a localized setting, but the ability to interconnect a large, global community will require substantially greater connectivity capacity, said Hanselman.

“Dispersed computing approaches can address some of this need by reducing the amount of traffic that has to be backhauled by processing at the edge of networks, closer to users,” he said. “5G networks can address some of the performance requirements for better connectivity, but that will mean a deeper push into millimeter wave radio networks and a much denser cell site deployment.”

The big question about using edge computing to support metaverses is who will actually pay the cost of deploying it, said Hanselman. “There will have to be a clear path to monetization for either telcos or cloud providers to make that move.”

And there’s also the problem that most AR and VR headsets are still uncomfortable to wear.

“AR and VR headsets will need to be substantially smaller and lighter but could be supplemented by glasses-free display systems that are in the early stages of development,” Hanselman said.

The future of how we experience the metaverse

Though technically not a requirement to enter the metaverse, augmented and virtual reality devices will see increased adoption in the next five years as big tech companies underline AR and VR’s potential as a conduit to the metaverse, according to the S&P report.

“As of the end of 2021, S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates there were 28.5 million AR and VR headsets installed worldwide across consumer and commercial settings, and forecasts that base to grow to 73.6 million by 2026,” said the report.

AR and VR headsets will continue to be the main choice for immersive metaverse experiences for some time, but less intrusive technologies will become more common in the future, said Hanselman.

“Glasses-free display technologies and holographic projection will mature to become a more common metaverse gateway,” he said.

We’ll also see more realistic renderings of participants as metaverse capacity improves, instead of the basic avatars people use today, said Hanselman, adding that the user interface will also be simpler in the future.

“More sophistication in eye, mouth and facial tracking will simplify the user interface and reduce the need for physical motion to be the primary driver of user action.”

Relay for Ukraine is having the grand opening of its Kisma in Ukraine art installation next Wednesday, November 9, at 1:00 p.m. Pacific time.

You can attend the event at the Ukraine art sim in Craft World at craft-world.org:8002:Ukraine.

Relay for Ukraine supports fundraising and awareness for refugees in the metaverse, and has raised over a thousand dollars so far, said Relay for Ukraine manager Reiner Schneeberger, who is known in-world as Art Blue.

If you’d like to support Relay for Ukraine, you can make donations via their website or inside Second Life.

This art installation by visionary artist Kisma Reidling will be a somber affair. Reidling took the statistics of dead and injured Ukrainian children and represented them with rows of baby carriages so the numbers turn into a picture.

The grand opening will be a quiet one, and only the numbers of dead and injured kids will be aired, so people can reflect on what happens to children when there is war.

Previous grand openings for Terra Merhyem and Rage Darkstone were more lively with music, performances, and dance parties.

Attendance was very good at past openings, said Schneeberger.

“The grand openings of Terra and Rage have been 40 people each and about 500 visitors over the two-month period where the installation for each artist stays active at the Ukraine sim,” he said.

Kitely celebrated its 14th birthday, its founders, and its community with a huge party this past weekend.

There is much to celebrate.

Over the last 14 years, Kitely has grown from a vision of an on-demand virtual world to the dominant content marketplace for all of OpenSim.

Kitely now has over 18,000 regions, making it the largest commercial OpenSim grid by land area, second only to the non-profit, free-to-connect OSgrid, and its marketplace has delivered items to avatars from more than 500 different OpenSim grids.

Close to 50 avatars attended during the two-hour celebration. The event was a party crawl format with entertainment that included Latin music by singer Nazirah Avro, 1950s music with DJ Rosa Alekseev, an excerpt from Dracula told by Shandon Loring, and techno funk/rock looping by Acidic Loop.

Many people donated their time, building skills, scripting know-how, gifts, and talent to create a shared immersive experience.

“The Kitely community really came together to bring this event to life,” said Kimm Starr, who runs Virtual Vignette on Kitely.

“Kitely has proven to be a great platform for all these years with friendly people, excellent customer support, and its own online market,” she told Hypergrid Business.

Ilan Tochner, Co-Founder of Kitely, said he was very pleased with the festivities.

 “Thank you to all who have helped make this happen: the Kitely Founders Day Builders group, the people who contributed gifts, the people who contributed old screenshots from our early days, the performers, and the Kitely community at large,” he told Hypergrid Business.

“Oren and I both cherish your support of Kitely and the Kitely community that makes our efforts worthwhile,” he said.

Koshari Mahana, owner and operator at Four Winds Virtual Buildings, said she’s excited to see where Kitely goes in the future.

“There have been whispers at the weekly meetings of a big surprise, and we’re all anxious to hear more,” she told Hypergrid Business. “With Kitely, as its name suggests, the sky is the limit.”

See More Videos

See More Photos

Ukraine 2025 is having its grand opening on Friday, August 5 at 1:30 p.m. Pacific time in Craft World on sim Ukraine.

The hypergrid address is craft-world.org:8002:Ukraine

The event features an art installation and concert by Terra Merhyem.

Ukraine 2025 is the first contribution to the Ukraine Borderland Art project, run by head curator Art Blue — also known as Reiner Schneeberger — who invited Merhyem to premiere the project.

Merhyem’s installion will be shown on sim Ukraine for 30 days, and then another artist will take over.

“Friend, come and discover my vision of Ukraine in the year 2025,” said Merhyem. “My concert will also be a discovery of Ukrainian music which, I hope, will speak to you as much as to me — made of intensity and emotions, of joy and tragedy.”

OpenSim Fest 2022 still has three days to go, and it’s already breaking attendance records.

“Since we opened the OSFest 2022 grid at the beginning of June, there have been a record 763 unique avatars on the grid from 158 hypergrid-enabled grids on the OSFest 2022 Grid,” OSFest 2022 director Shelenn Ayres said in a post.

The highest avatar account from the last OSFest was around 600, she said.

OSFest goes until Monday, July 25, 9 p.m. Pacific time.

The hypergrid address is grid.opensimfest.com:8022.

Check out the fest’s Discord community page or the official event website for more information.

OSFest 2022 is having a special merchant sales event that goes until Sunday, July, 24. You can get to the event by clicking the merchant sales event link on the grid calendar.

There are also 108 performances planned for the final upcoming weekend.

OSFest 2022 had a well-attended first weekend with 36 hours of performances in genres ranging from poetry and prose to techno music.

“OSFest 2022 kickoff weekend was both a success and a lot of fun,” said OSFest director Shelenn Ayres in a blog post. “Attendance was excellent with no one reporting any large issues.”

Stages were also quickly reconfigured and improved based on avatar feedback, said Ayres.

Livestreams of events were on YouTube and are now available on the official OSFest YouTube playlist.

The new custom streaming service simulcasted performer streams to all four event regions and the main parcels in the Welcome and HG-Welcome regions without any issues. Next weekend, OSFest will simulcast the streams to the main parcels in other regions across the grid so visitors can enjoy performances while visiting exhibits and shopping.

OSFest has deployed a new OS-aware integrated grid calendar both in-world and embedded on the OSFest 2022 website.

OSFest also plans to release a fully integrated destination guide and teleport system in the near future.

You can always get around the grid by using the viewer world map, landmarks, and OpenSimWorld.

A good way to get your bearings is to join the public OSFest group by clicking on any of the pink group joiner objects.  You can also join the OSFest Discord here.

Check out the OSFest Blog for the latest updates.

OSFest 2022 goes until July 25, 9 p.m. Pacific time.

Discovery Grid is celebrating its sixth birthday with an air show and a pyro-musical fireworks display.

The event, Thunder over Discovery 2022, takes place this Saturday, July 2, at 2 p.m. Pacific time, with an encore event at 6 p.m. Pacific.

The hypergrid address is discoverygrid.net:8002:Lousville.

You’ll want to arrive early if you’re a hypergrid visitor, as the doors close during the airshow and fireworks display to prevent disrupti0ns.

The celebration will start with an hour of DJ exravaganza at Club Thunder, hosted by DJ Caliope, followed by a Blue Angels virtual air show, and will conclude with a pyro-musical fireworks show by PyroVR Fireworks, which will feature new custom effects created by owner and operator Neytiri.

The Blue Angels show will have F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets that have been upgraded to F-18C Super Hornet jets.

“They are bigger and faster this year,” said Discovery Grid owner Rene Vaga, who is also known as Balpien Hammerer in-world. “Be prepared to be blown away by the surround sound, high precision breathtaking acrobatic flight maneuvers, and thunderous flyovers.”

After the fireworks show, DJ Caliope will be hosting a multi-genre dance party at Club Thunder at 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. Pacific time. You can also try out your skills on the F-18 trainer jet at the airport.

You can join the Hypergrid Hoppers — a club for explorers of the OpenSim hypergrid —  as they travel to Ukraine.

The trip is part of the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2022 conference and is an artistic journey that spans the past and future of Ukraine with a focus on Lviv, the main city in western Ukraine, also known under its historical name Lemberg.

The Hypergrid Hoppers are meeting at META in the OpenSimulator Community Conference grid on Tuesday, March 22 at 1 p.m. Eastern Time.

The hypergrid address is cc.opensimulator.org:8002:Meta.

The instructions for how to hypergrid are here.

Art Blue, also known as Reiner Schneeberger, is the host and will meet participants with more directions to META and an overview of the experience.

Visitors will sit on chairs arranged in a circle around a stage and will move through the sky through 20 stages, starting from ground level to over 4,000 yards in height. The screen and camera of a visitor will be controlled by the Speakeasy HUD tool, which is designed to be worn as a heads-up display and sits in the top-left hand corner of your screen.

The travel and presentation concept is called Infinite Theater and is part of the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2022 conference interactive display.

A virtual Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, will meet the HG Hoppers as part of the presentation.

Contributions to the interactive display came from Venus Adored, Thoth Jantzen, Kisma Reidling, Art Eames, Hashmark 15753, and Sun Tzu. The platforms were created by Juliette Surreal-D.

If you haven’t heard about the metaverse, or you think it’s just something Facebook invented — you’re not alone.

49% of US consumers aren’t aware of the metaverse, according to a survey conducted in February by marketing automation platform Klaviyo.

The survey of over 1,000 people also revealed that younger Americans don’t especially want to shop in the metaverse, with 65% of 18 to 24-year-olds saying they’re not interested.

Apparently, Facebook’s rebranding to Meta had an impact, because 17% of US consumers believe the metaverse is just Facebook.

Even those who know about the metaverse feel skeptical, as 78% think it’s just marketing hype.

“The biggest risks are one and the same — irrelevance and alienation,” said Marja Konttinen, marketing director at Lockwood Publishing.

“If brands just try to adapt existing marketing assets to this new digital world they will be utterly ignored by, and alienate, their audience,” she said.

NFTs and cryptocurrency

NFTs often get lumped in with the metaverse, but many young Americans seem clueless about those too.

According to the study, 45% of 18 to 24-year-olds have no idea about NFTs and even those who do aren’t that interested — 58% say they’d never invest.

And cryptocurrency isn’t fairing much better with 18 to 24-year-olds — 43% say they’re interested but aren’t taking any action, and 39% say they wouldn’t invest.

“What’s clear from this data is that businesses need to be aware of customer skepticism around concepts such as the metaverse, NFTs, and cryptocurrency before diving in headfirst,” said Ed Hallen, co-founder and chief product officer of Klaviyo.

“Instead, they should listen to their customers in a meaningful way and slowly introduce metaverse marketing into their business model,” he said.

Americans aren’t alone in their perception of the metaverse.

According to a study of 1,000 UK consumers Klaviyo conducted in January, 58% don’t know what it is either, and 96% of 25 to 54-year-olds said they wouldn’t shop in the metaverse.

The 29th edition of Sheffield DocFest, the United Kingdom’s biggest documentary and digital media festival, will take place from June 23 to June 28 this year — and it’s looking for submissions.

Sheffield DocFest’s Alternate Realities program has some upcoming deadlines if you’d like to apply, and applicants from the United States and other countries are welcome.

Alternate Realities is Sheffield DocFest’s program for exhibiting and showcasing non-fiction and immersive documentaries in all forms, whether using new technologies or creative techniques that push the boundaries of traditional documentary practice.

Commission

The Alternate Realities 2022 Commission is accepting applications for new digital works or projects in development that need completion funding, and it’s offering up to $20,000.

The deadline to apply is Sunday, February 27 at 7 p.m., Eastern time.

An accepted applicant will be included in the Alternate Realities 2022 program and exhibited at Site Gallery during the festival, possibly with an extended exhibition run.

The open call is for artists who work in digital non-fiction, create immersive experiences, or experiment with new technologies. Debut, emerging, and established artists and collectives are encouraged.

Exhibition

Applications are being accepted for the Alternate Realities Exhibition with late entry closing on March 4, 7 a.m. Eastern time.

Platforms considered for exhibition include virtual, augmented and mixed reality, 360 video, moving image, web interactives, sound art, artificial intelligence, games, and performance.

Alternate Realities Talent Market

Entries are also being accepted for the Alternate Realities Talent Market, and the deadline to enter is Friday, March 4, 7 a.m. Eastern time.

The Alternate Realities Talent Market exists to foster collaborations between artists, collectives, creatives, and organizations focused on using digital technologies, and it’s a space to pitch products that are in production or development.

Past meetings at the market have led to residencies, research partnerships, and exhibition features.

Virtual reality headsets are bulky and two companies have collaborated to take the weight off your head for augmented and virtual reality — and put it around your neck instead.

Motorola yesterday announced a 5G neckband that’ll put connectivity, processing, and the battery in a collar and leave your heads up display light and comfortable. It’s partnered with Verizon on the neckband which is able to connect to their mmWave 5G network.

There are no details on the device’s name, pricing, or release date yet but Motorola and Verizon teased they were in talks with major partners including already in place retail channels that were doing things in AR and VR.

Motorola specifically mentioned enterprise and consumer users as its target customers.

The neckband can pair with ThinkReality A3 smartglasses, made by Motorola’s parent company Lenovo — but it’s meant to work with other smart glasses as well, the device being compatible with Microsoft’s Remote Network Driver Interface and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon VR platform.

“Motorola’s wearable neckband and ultra-lightweight AR smart glasses leverage Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network and mobile edge compute platform, enabling us to deliver immersive technology in many fields, such as sports training and fan experiences, as well as making VR theaters scalable,” said Brian Mecum, vice president of device technology at Verizon, in a statement on Motorola’s website.

The complete device consists of a rope-like cable that goes around your neck with a card-sized module that dangles in the front, and a trapezoid-shaped module in the back.

The front module weighs under 4 ounces and has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, a 5,000 milliamp-hour battery, a touchpad, SIM card slot, and a charging light indicator.

It also has a gyroscope, accelerometer, barometer, GPS, and a 5G antennae, with more 5G antennas embedded throughout the neckband.

The back module weighs under 3 ounces and also has an antenna and stereo speakers.

The device is still goofy-looking, and not the first time companies have tried to move more weighty components off the head.

Lenovo’s ThinkReality A3 glasses, for example, require a PC or mobile phone for processing power.

Plagiarism and scams are a serious problem in the NFT space — and it’s gotten so bad that one NFT marketplace has suspended almost all NFT sales on its platform.

Cameron Hejai, founder and CEO of Cent NFT marketplace, announced in a statement that Cent is removing the ability to sell NFTs on its platform.

It turns out bad actors were taking other people’s work and reminting it to trick them into purchasing counterfeits.

“Our response has been to ban the offending accounts, but we believe this approach is not sustainable,” Hejai said. “That’s why, effective today, we’re removing the ability to sell NFTs here.”

Hejai said it was only a temporary move until Cent could come up with a solution, and the only NFT transactions still allowed on Cent are those based on Tweets, which Cent calls its Valuables platform.

Cent isn’t the only NFT marketplace dealing with rampant plagiarism.

Hypergrid Business wrote just last month that OpenSea, the largest marketplace for NFTs, openly admitted over 80 percent of the items created using their free minting tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.

OpenSea tried to limit the number of NFTs a user could mint for free but quickly reversed the decision due to an immediate outcry from its users.

Though some might be confused why people spend money on items that don’t physically exist, it’s a rapidly growing space, and people are throwing more money than ever into NFTs.

Last year Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, sold his first tweet ever for $3 million on Cent as an NFT.

And according to data from market tracker DappRadar, NFT sales hit $25 billion dollars in 2021, approaching $12 billion in the final quarter of the year, compared to $95 million the previous year.

OpenSea, the largest marketplace for non-fungible tokens openly admitted last Thursday that over 80 percent of the items created using their free minting tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.

In Twitter last Thursday, the company said that creating NFTs on its platform was too easy. “We’ve recently seen misuse of this feature increase exponentially,” they said in the Tweet.

In response, the company decided to limit the number of NFT collections users could mint to five and the number of individual items in each collection to 50. There was an immediate outcry, and it reversed that decision.

This isn’t the first time OpenSea has had problems with NFTs.

A few months ago, Nate Chastain, one of its executives, resigned after he was caught using insider information to profit from NFT collections before they dropped.

The company’s minting tool is one of its main advantages in the NFT universe. Users pay a one-time fee of between $50 to $60 to get started, and from there they can sell an unlimited number of NFTs. The platform takes 2.5 percent of the profits once a piece sells.

Other high-end platforms like MakersPlace and KnownOrigin can charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to mint and list an item. That cost is based on gas fees, gas being the unit that measures the amount of computational power required to perform a transaction on the blockchain.

Gas fees fluctuate, sometimes exceeding the cost of the actual price of a non-fungible token by thousands of dollars, according to allthings.how.

The OpenSea NFT marketplace had a cumulative trading volume of US$12.5 billion through 2021, nearly 88 percent of the total NFT trading volume that year, according to data acquisition and analysis company DappRadar.

Steve Gray, former executive at Tencent Games, the world’s largest gaming studio, is getting into the metaverse.

His new company, Meta Music Studios, launched The Apollo Project last week, a blockchain-based gaming platform for music and games, with its first game TAP Stars, an avatar growing game, set to launch next month.

Additional games will come out over the next twelve months, including TAP Crews, TAP Karaoke, TAP Runner, and TAP Capoeira, the company said in an announcement.

The games will be free-to-play, which means that gamers will have free access to a significant portion of the content at no cost, and tools and services related to creating content will also be free.

The Apollo Project is the first nonfungible token project created by Gray, founder and CEO of Meta Music Studios. He calls it the MusicVerse, and its first batch of nonfungible tokens will be up for sale by the end of the month.

“I have been watching the metaverse for years as the market developed, but now there is definitely a hot market opportunity and Iâ€m excited to create the new MusicVerse which will become a world for entertainers and entertainment,” said Gray in a press release.

According to The Apollo Project website, the MusicVerse supports a wide variety of music-related online games and interactive entertainment.

It follows a play-to-earn business model, where players earn in-game tokens that they can then cash out.

The Apollo Project is based on a new blockchain called dVerse, a decentralized online entertainment platform, and it claims that it’s creating a free-to-earn ecosystem that supports both entertainers and entertainment that’s secure and democratized using cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, and nonfungible tokens.

“The platform leverages the size, high production values, and game design ethic from free-to-play games, but merges in the ability of the community to participate financially in the success of the products and their content,” said Gray.

Gray spent eight years as an executive at Tencent Games which grew in value from $500 million to $15.6 billion while he was there and popularized the free-to-play genre. He also worked at Electronic Arts where he produced Lord of the Ringswhich had sales of over $1 billion.

According to the press release, the MusicVerse mixes Gray’s lifelong passion for music with his love of games.

“Fun is number one and great music will be at the core of everything we are creating. We will feature great virtual performances and concerts. NFTs will fill the imagination space of the MusicVerse. We will deliver dividends to the music industry from the metaverse,” said Gray.

It’s too expensive and it’s not available yet, but there’s a startup company that says we’ll be able to walk in VR.

Ekto VR, a VR hardware startup, has invented a pair of boots that allow realistic walking in virtual environments with no risk of running into a wall or other obstacles.

The exact price hasn’t been announced yet, but with a potential starting cost of $15,000 dollars or more, the Ekto VR boots are currently aimed for enterprise use and should be available in the first half of 2022. An affordable customer version hasn’t been announced.

The company website states that Ekto VR is bridging the skills gap by simulating full-scale working environments, and their demo video shows some virtual onsite training.

The futuristic-looking boots fit over most regular shoes and use an array of motorized wheels on their underside which spin opposite to the user’s walking speed.

The boots initially allow the wearer to take several steps forward. This is supposed to help avoid motion sickness and provides the inner-ear cues that tell the user their body is accelerating forward.

“As far as the comments that we most receive in demos, people are almost utterly convinced- and, in some cases, utterly convinced that they are going to walk out of the room,” Brad Factor, founder and CEO of Ekto VR, told Digital Trends.

Ekto VR isn’t the first company to attempt to create a realistic walking experience in VR, sometimes called the endless walking problem or the locomotion interface challenge. Various companies and universities have been attempting the same thing since at least the 1980s.

Omnidirectional treadmills, boots, exoskeletons, and head-mounted displays that hack a user’s rapid eye movements to redirect their walking direction have all been used, but the VR industry hasn’t clearly settled on one solution as the best option.

For example, the Holotron, developed by physicist Marcel Reese, is a robotic exoskeleton prototype thatâ€s suspended above the ground.

It lets you walk, run, and interact with your environment in virtual reality with possibly even more feedback than the Ekto VR boots, but it is much more cumbersome.

If youâ€re walking up a flight of steps, it will feel like it. If you knock into an object, the device provides tactile feedback as if you actually walked into a wall, a rock, or another obstacle.

For more information about the Holotron, check out this previous Hypergrid Business article.

Time will tell if the Ekto VR boots, or locomotion interface technology in general, will catch on with enterprise and regular consumer use.

This product and others like it could greatly increase the realism in certain enterprise applications, such as a commercial real estate client walking around a virtual version of a new building that’s being constructed.

For consumer use, gamers would get a far more compelling experience that’s closer to reality, with studies showing that subjects find a virtual reality environment more immersive when they move around it through virtual walking rather than teleporting between locations by using a handheld controller.

One 2004 study from Japan states that the sensation of walking affects the way our brains process distance and movement. This means our brains will be more likely to think what they’re perceiving is real.

Solving the walking problem is only one part of having a totally immersive VR experience. Simulating touch, taste, and smell are other areas that would need to be solved if VR is ultimately meant to create fully realistic virtual worlds.

Apple’s first entry into virtual reality could be an expensive VR headset with limited AR capabilities, according to a Bloomberg report.

“Apple Inc.’s first crack at a headset is designed to be a pricey, niche precursor to a more ambitious augmented reality product that will take longer to develop, according to people with knowledge of the matter,” said the report.

The people asked not to be identified, citing privacy plans, but they said it would be a VR headset focused on gaming, watching videos, and communicating, and that Apple plans to launch the headset as soon as 2022 or early 2023.

Current consumer VR headsets cost from $300 to $900, and the Apple headset reportedly could cost a lot more. If they can successfully sell a pair of headphones for $550, who knows how much a dedicated VR headset would cost.

The headset is designed to work as a standalone device, and run on a battery, similar to the Oculus Quest 2.

Apple’s planning on using a fabric exterior to reduce the weight, and also to include some external cameras to enable AR features.

The recently released iPad Pro and the new iPhone 12 feature a LiDar scanner, so the company has already put its foot in the AR door, and the high-end VR device could be a stepping stone to more affordable and user-friendly Apple AR glasses.

“The company is building a high-end, niche product that will prepare developers and consumers for its eventual, more mainstream AR glasses,” said the report.

The report suggests Apple might be expecting to sell one headset a day in each retail store, with annual sales of just over 180,000 units, which is on par with the $5,999 Mac Pro desktop.

Apple is reportedly aiming to include some of its most advanced and powerful chips in the headset, along with displays that are much higher-resolution than in any existing VR headset. Some of the tested chips are supposedly more powerful than Apple’s recently released M1 Mac processors.

The company apparently designed the headset with a fan, and combined with the powerful processors, this made the headset too heavy in early testing.

Apple also reportedly removed the space VR headsets usually have for people who wear glasses and developed a system for custom prescription lenses to be inserted. This move could expose Apple to regulations governing the sale of products with prescriptions, which are different depending on the country they’re sold in.

This could also be a nuisance for multiple users wanting to share one headset or for people who are perfectly content wearing a VR headset with the glasses they already own.

Apple originally planned to use less powerful processors and offload much of the work to a hub inside a user’s home, but the idea was quashed by Jony Ive, Apple’s design chief at the time, according to Bloomberg.

The VR headset is codenamed N301 and is in a late prototype stage, but it could be scrapped or changed before launch. Apple’s future AR glasses are codenamed N421 and are in an early stage called “architecture,” which means Apple is still working on underlying technologies.

A heavy, expensive VR headset that isn’t expected to sell very well is a strange move for Apple to make, but Apple is always buying up patents and developing new technologies that don’t ever see the light of day.

It’s possible Apple doesn’t intend to release the device, and no one could blame them as it doesn’t sound like a game-changer in any way. The world probably doesn’t need another heavy and expensive VR headset, even if the display’s a little nicer.

There are more AR headsets coming out all the time too, such as the Lenovo ThinkReality A3, and Apple would have to do something very special in that field to get the average person to want to regularly use a pair of AR glasses.

Apple’s been exploring augmented and virtual reality for more than ten years.

Recently, it’s been buying up multiple AR and VR companies and also increased hiring in the past several years, so an Apple AR and VR product could be closer to reality, whatever it turns out to be.

Apple has a way of convincing people they want something they don’t really need, so we’ll see how their first foray into virtual reality turns out.

Wouldn’t it be cool to fence with a real sword in VR?

Russian VR studio Boxglass has released Fencer, a VR fencing trainer designed to help new players learn the sport of fencing while using a real fencing weapon.

Fencer uses the Oculus Quest headset and controllers attached to a fencing sword, and the app walks users through a set of exercises aimed at improving reacting and attention, as well as for training attacking and defensive strategies.

It’s probably not too useful for practicing parrying, as there is no opposing sword to strike yours, but could help with strike accuracy, sword placement and evading an opponent’s attack.

Launched last month and costing a little over $2,400, the Fencer kit includes a headset, sword and controller mount, and app license. It’s apparently targeted toward fencing gyms rather than individual users.

Fencer is listed on the company’s Russian website, but doesn’t seem to be available for individual order in the United States. It remains to be seen if you’ll be able to buy it or if it’s only being sold to fencing gyms.

Here’s the Fencer release trailer:

The company says the app is tuned toward the rules and customs of the International Fencing Federation, the governing body of Olympic fencing.

Judging by the lack of breakthroughs at this year’s CES, the VR industry’s not going to have a break out year in 2021.

The Consumer Electronics Show, which was all digital this year, ended last week with only a few new AR and VR products showcased, and none of them were the kind of big improvements that could have solved the sector’s problems with usability, price, and functionality.

Currently, no company is competing with the Oculus Quest 2, which is still bulky and a somewhat expensive investment at $300, and absolutely requires a Facebook account to use.

“I think we’re more than a few minutes from the future of VR,” said Sony CEO Jim Ryan, in an interview. “VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment,” he added. “Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No.”

Highlights this year included new headsets, new smart glasses, improvements in displays, and some nifty gloves.

Lenovo ThinkReality A3

Lenovo’s ThinkReality A3 smartglasses look like sunglasses and are meant to offer privacy and an expanded virtual workspace in enterprise settings, allowing up to 5 virtual displays.

They’re lightweight at under four and a half ounces, have binocular 1080p resolution, six degrees of freedom tracking, and integrated speakers and microphones.

They do need to be tethered to a PC or Motorola smartphone via USB-C to work, as no battery is built-in.

“If you want to have multiple monitors up and you want some privacy, you can put on these glasses and be able to see several virtual monitors in front of you that only you can see and that gives you an expanded workspace,” Nathan Pettyjohn, commercial AR/VR lead at Lenovo, told Hypergrid Business.

No price has been set yet and they’re expected to ship later in 2021.

Panasonic compact VR glasses

These VR goggles look steampunk, which some people will love, and others maybe not so much.

Panasonic revealed a VR glasses prototype at last year’s CES that lacked room-scale tracking and was pretty much just good for watching immersive video while tethered to a PC.

This year, they showed off a new version. It now has six degrees of freedom tracking and dual 2,560 by 2,560 micro OLEDs with a pixel density of 2,245 pixels per inch.

The display is said to support 120 Hz and is supposed to work with SteamVR, which means it could be used for gameplay and social media platforms.

There’s no onboard computing, so the device would have to connect to an Android smartphone or to a PC via USB-C.

These futuristic yet retro-looking VR glasses are supposed to be more comfortable than last year’s model, but no clear price or release date has been set.

Ganzin Technology Aurora eye tracker

Taiwanese company Ganzin Technology revealed a new user interface that will allow you to control an AR or VR device using micro-movements of your eyes.

The Aurora eye tracker module is a low-power and easily installed device with a slim profile that can be affixed to the frame of any set of smart glasses or VR and AR headsets.

It’s supposed to be really light, work indoors or outdoors, and last all day on a single charge so you won’t need any extra cables.

Ganzin also developed an eye-tracking software package that works on Qualcomm XR platforms and is supposed to lower the cost of integrating eye-tracking for device makers on these platforms.

“The user interface for computers is a mouse, and for smartphones, it’s a touchscreen. We believe the best user interface for AR/VR products is our eyes,” said Shao-Yi Chien, founder of Ganzin Technology, in a statement.

SenseGlove Nova

Here’s a glove that lets you feel the virtual.

The SenseGlove Nova is designed to be used by companies for a variety of training purposes, such as handling hazardous material and using complex tools and machinery.

The glove allows users to interact with digital objects in a VR setting as if they were real and can be put on in 5 seconds.

A person wearing it would be able to feel a virtual tool in their hands as if it were the real thing, and the feedback can be offered to specific parts of the hand — for example, if two fingers are used to pick up a virtual ball.

There will be force feedback, vibrational feedback, full finger tracking, and complete six degrees of freedom tracking for the entire glove.

“We created SenseGlove Nova—a new glove using stretchable, easy-to-put-on material—specifically for VR training, based on direct customer feedback,” said Gijs den Butter, CEO of Senseglove, in a release.

The SenseGlove Nova is going to cost $5,000 and is meant for enterprise use, with orders beginning shipping in March of 2021.

CREAL light-field display

Swiss company CREAL revealed its first prototype AR and VR headsets with light-field displays. These displays generate an image that accurately represents how we see light in the real world.

The advantage of such displays is more realistic and comfortable visuals for extended reality headsets, which could be good news for people that feel sick in VR settings.

You’ll be able to see things as if they’re lit realistically and also focus on different planes of the same image, as in real life.  In the above image, the plant is the focal point, but it can be shifted to the clock or bookshelf if you choose to shift your focus. This mirrors vision in real life and is supposed to cause less eyestrain.

The prototypes are still fairly large, but the company hopes to fit its tech into smaller form factors by 2022.

CREAL says these prototypes are evaluation units, and it actually hopes to supply light-field display technology to other headset makers in the future rather than building its own.

NOLO 6DoF VR Headset

Nolo VR revealed several new VR headset options, including a new cloud VR standalone headset, currently called the 6DoF Inside-Out All-in-One VR headset.

The headset uses ultrasonic positioning technology and a dual-camera system to deliver 6 degrees of freedom tracking, so no external sensors are needed.

Instead of relying on downloads, it’s meant for users to stream cloud VR content over a 5G or WLAN connection.

Users interact using two motion controllers which are nearly identical to the Oculus Quest 2 controllers.

Not much else has been revealed about the headset, but there aren’t too many companies offering a competitor to the Oculus Quest 2, so we’ll see how this one does.

Electronics giant Lenovo introduced a new set of augmented reality glasses this morning at the Consumer Electronics Show, held virtually this year. CES 2021 officially starts tomorrow, but Lenovo got a head start with its ThinkReality A3 smart glasses, which will be available to purchase later on this year.

What makes these glasses unique is that they put all the functionality of a bulky, high-end augmented reality headset like the Microsoft Hololens into something that looks more like a pair of sunglasses.

Still a little bulkier than the Google Glass, the ThinkReality weighs just under four and a half ounces — compared to 1.3 ounces of the Google Glass.

But there’s a lot more functionality, including dual fisheye cameras, six degrees of freedom tracking and two 1080-pixel displays that lets users see up to five virtual monitors at once.

By comparison, the Google Glass has just one tiny 640 by 360 pixel display just above the right eye and only one camera.

All three headsets are meant for enterprise users, with the Microsoft Hololens clocking in at $3,500 and the Google Glass at $1,000.  The Lenovo ThinkReality A3 is expected to come in somewhere between these two price points.

“If you want to have multiple monitors up and you want some privacy, you can put on these glasses and be able to see several virtual monitors in front of you that only you can see and that gives you an expanded workspace,” Nathan Pettyjohn, commercial AR/VR lead at Lenovo, told Hypergrid Business.

The ThinkReality A3 does have a major handicap — the high-end functionality requires processing and power, and the small size has no room for either. So the headset needs to be tethered to a power source and a computer, either a PC or a smartphone.

If it’s anything like its bigger cousin, the ThinkReality A6, you’ll be able to carry your mobile phone and extra battery on an optional belt clip for remote work.

The Google Glass has a built-in battery, but there have been complaints about short battery life.

But not having a built-in processor or battery does result in better wearability, and the company has put effort into user comfort.

“We have an ergonomic fit kit, which allows you to swap out the ends of the temples and the nose bridge, so weâ€re striving to fit the 95th percentile of the population, which is a real challenge in a small compact device,” Mike Lohse, senior product manager for commercial AR/VR at Lenovo, told Hypergrid Business. 

There’ll be two versions — a PC edition that can tether to a laptop or mobile workstation and works with Windows software and applications, and an industrial edition that will tether to certain Motorola smartphones. Lenovo owns Motorola, but Motorola’s market share in the mobile phone market is less than 3 percent.

The company is really pushing the PC version of the device, intended for people who work at their desks but don’t have room for as many monitors as they need, or require a more immersive experience.

“What we found is with a lot of the work from home experiences, people in their office environment donâ€t necessarily have room for three monitors on their kitchen table, but we can expand that,” said Pettyjohn.

The Industrial Edition is intended to be used for hands-free AR supported tasks in remote work locations, such as on factory floors, retail spaces, and other industrial environments.

It’ll work on Lenovo’s ThinkReality software platform, a cloud-agnostic ecosystem of hardware and software solutions for enterprise use.

Other devices like Lenovo’s ThinkReality A6 mixed reality headset, which was released in 2019, run on the same platform.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives, both in the workplace and at home.

Some AI experts are stressing the need to focus on making AI ethical and keeping it human friendly.

Bias in programming, security concerns, and a lack of public knowledge about how AI works are all issues that need to be addressed to develop and maintain a healthy relationship between humans and the technology we use.

“This is the year AI ethics become absolutely mandatory functions in most businesses, not just talk,” Alex Spinelli, chief technology officer at LivePerson and former global head of Alexa OS for Amazon, told Hypergrid Business.

Ethical AI today

Companies are just starting to consider responsible use of AI as a part of their business model.

“An increasing number of enterprises are getting behind responsible AI as a component to business success, but only twenty-five percent of companies said unbiased AI is mission-critical,” said a 2020 State of AI and Machine Learning Report.

“There are inherent risks by not considering ethics in your AI thought process, which may include AI not working for a diverse user base, not focusing on wellness and fair pay for the AI supply chain, or creating privacy issues if, for example, your AI is trained using data users didn’t consent to be used for that process,” said the report.

Data transparency will become increasingly important in the future.

“Finding companies that truly believe in open source sharing of data, as well as give reassurances via transparency will win the battle of AI. Companies that hoard data and do not share it with the rest of the community will enjoy having marketing buzz, but will ultimately fail to gain trust in both its users as well as the larger community,” Josh Rickard, security engineer at security solutions company Swimlane, told Hypergrid Business.

Bias is a big problem in AI programming.

Amazon scrapped a recruiting system that was biased against women. A 2018 ACLU study of Amazon’s facial recognition software identified twenty-eight members of congress as potential criminals.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft stopped selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement in 2020 because it was biased against women and people of color.

Organizing an ethical AI future

A variety of new, but non-binding frameworks for ethical AI have been established to further the conversation about the ethical use of AI and to serve as a guiding light in the responsible and secure use of AI technology.

The Partnership on AI, which includes leading companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM, was established in 2016 to formulate best practice in AI technologies, to help advance the public’s understanding of how AI works, and to be a platform for discussion about AI’s influence on people and society.

The Partnership on AI launched Closing Gaps in Responsible AI in 2020 to help garner insights in how to inform and empower changemakers, activists, and policymakers to develop and manifest responsible AI.

“Operationalizing these principles is a complex process in relatively early stages, and currently the gap between intent and practice is large, while documentation on learning from experience remains lacking,” said the Partnership on AI on their website.

Forty-two countries, known collectively as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, came together in 2019 to create value-based principles for the responsible stewardship of trustworthy AI.

These principles state that AI should benefit people and the planet by driving inclusive growth, AI should respect the rule of law and human rights, and there should be transparent disclosure so people can understand and challenge AI-based outcomes.

Security risks should be continually assessed and managed, and organizations and individuals that deploy AI systems should be held accountable for their proper functioning in line with the OECD principles.

This includes knowing when you’re interacting with a human or an AI.

“You should always know if you’re having a conversation with an AI,” said Spinelli. “It should never pretend to be human.

Even if you’re only interacting with AI, a human being should be available at some point in the process.

“Human-in-the-loop AI is here to stay,” Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, product manager at ManageEngine, an ITSM provider serving Fortune 100 companies, told Hypergrid Business.

“Virtually no AI models are correct 100% of the time. Algorithmic decision-making requires a human in the loop to verify the integrity of the data, audit the model, provide explanations for decisions, and adjust the model for unseen phenomena,” he said.

A human would make sure the data is used as it was meant.

“It is vital that the data within AI-models is used as it was intended to be used—and only as it was intended to be used,” said Ramamoorthy.

“It will likely be a challenge for the regulators to keep up. Despite the probable increase in AI-powered cyberattacks and lawmakers’ failure to stay ahead of technological innovation, the future of AI looks bright. Artificial intelligence is here to augment humans’ work lives; it is not going to replace them,” he said.

AI is everywhere

Like it or not, AI is here to stay.

“I see a lot of pitches from companies and you rarely see software or web product that isnâ€t AI-based,” Steve Shwartz, AI investor and author of upcoming book Evil Robots, Killer Computers, and Other Myths: The Truth About AI and the Future of Humanity told Hypergrid Business.

“One thing weâ€ll start seeing is companies emerging to help people who develop AI software to make the software not discriminate, make sure it’s compliant with laws, and to analyze the risks involved in rolling out AI software,” said Shwartz.

More compassionate AI

“I think 2021 is the year we start to talk about tech where AI becomes more compassionate,” said Spinelli.

Spinelli’s company LivePerson, among others, has taken the EqualAI pledge, in which signers agree to strive to use AI as a tool to reduce harmful bias, and not replicate and spread it.

“We’ve committed to addressing bias in our own AI technologies and we encourage others to do the same,” said Spinelli.

New and friendlier AI-based models are showing up in big business.

“We launched something called Bella Loves Me,” said Spinelli. “Itâ€s a challenger bank, and what we wanted to do was take an AI experience and really think about how to make it a warm, compassionate empathetic experience. Itâ€s not a cold hard evil machine.  If you take the view that AI can help us augment us and assist us — not replace us — we can use that as a guiding light.”

You can already see and hear in a virtual environment using a device like the Oculus Quest 2.

There could be a device in the not too distant future that lets you feel like you’re actually moving around in VR too — and one man is starting to build it.

The Holotron, developed by physicist Marcel Reese, is a robotic exoskeleton prototype that’s suspended above the ground.

It lets you walk, run, and interact with your environment in virtual reality.

If you’re walking up a flight of steps, it will feel like it. If you knock into an object, the device provides tactile feedback as if you actually walked into a wall, a rock, or another obstacle.

The current design has two motors for each leg and nothing yet for the arms, but that’s just the beginning, the company says. A future version will work with the full body including back, arms, and hands, and will let you rotate on any axis. This means you’ll be able to walk up walls or hang upside down on the ceiling if that’s your thing.

Here’s a cool video that shows you what it can do:

You can see the wearer shaking around in a skateboarding demo.

There’s even a simulation that shows the user moving at a fraction of Earth gravity, which means the device is already able to simulate some far-out environments, like Mars or the moon. Other possible applications include controlling telerobots for use in dangerous environments like mining, deep sea work, fire fighting, toxic chemical removal and even construction work on other planets. It can also be used for virtual training for dangerous jobs, and, of course, for entertainment.

Too early to tell

The Holotron looks rough at the moment. It was made as cheaply as possible without compromising performance, according to Reese.  The device is made mostly of wood, including the exoskeleton. The actuators are self-made to be cheap and strong.

This is only a protoype though, and the device is years away from any kind of consumer model.

Imagine you’re driving to work, get pulled over, and told you’re being arrested for a felony. This happened to Michael Oliver. Last year, he learned that the police had profiled him from one grainy cellphone video that didn’t look like him at all. Fortunately, his case was dismissed but even being arrested is no joke.

He wasn’t the only one who learned not to trust AI facial recognition in 2020.

“Facial recognition in law enforcement is a big deal,” AI expert Steve Shwartz told Hypergrid Business. “We can recognize terrorists but the problem is that the facial recognition software is by and large biased against minorities.”

Harrisburg University researchers said they developed software that could predict if someone is a criminal, based solely on a picture of their face. Critics said it wasn’t based on accurate science and 1,700 academics signed an open letter demanding the research remain unpublished. The press release about the software has since been deleted from the university website.

“In China theyâ€ve basically hooked up the feeds from almost every camera in the country and theyâ€re monitoring them centrally using AI computers and technology to bring about whatâ€s effectively a big brother scenario from George Orwell’s 1984,” said Shwartz.

“China uses facial recognition to profile Uyghur individuals, classify them on the basis of their ethnicity, and single them out for tracking, mistreatment, and detention,” a bipartisan group of seventeen senators said in a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in March 2020.

Studies show disturbing results

An ACLU study tested Amazon’s face surveillance technology and found it incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress as people who had been arrested for a crime.

“The thing thatâ€s really scary is that of those 28 people, 40 percent were people of color, but Congress only has 20 percent people of color, so itâ€s identifying twice as many people of color incorrectly as criminals,” said Shwartz.

A new VR glove could be coming that tracks the motion of each finger and thumb bone.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just published a patent application from Apple for a VR glove made with smart fabric that will be capable of this fine-level motion capture.

The glove should work with VR and AR and allow the user to touch, feel, and hold virtual objects in their hand.

It’s supposed to be able to track the movement of each individual finger and thumb bone using a variety of IMUs, or inertial measurement units. These are devices that measure and report a body’s specific force, angular rate, and orientation.

Motion sensors, such as gyroscopes and accelerometers, will be built into the glove to measure the orientation, position, and velocity of the different finger bones.

Other tech in the VR glove could include magnetometers to measure the direction of the geomagnetic field and electrodes for enabling capacitive touch and contact sensing between fingertips.

The glove can be a knitted or woven fabric with all the electronic components built-in and could be made out of multiple layers.

A device like the Oculus Quest 2 currently uses hand controllers and inside-out cameras to track the position and orientation of your hands but is nowhere near the level of precise finger tracking that could be possible with Apple’s future VR glove.

The patent application was originally filed by Apple back in 2018 and was just published by the U.S. Patent Office.

Most of us will be stuck at home for New Year’s Eve, but that doesn’t mean we can celebrate at a concert in Iceland — virtually, at least.

Iceland has announced Polar Beat, a live and fully virtual New Year’s Eve concert experience, with Northern Lights and fireworks guaranteed.

Icelandic tech company OZ is powering the event with its brand-new immersive technology in collaboration with Snapchat, using the social platform’s new 3D Bitmoji.

“Our goal with this New Year’s festival is to unite everyone in a shared experience, full of energy and life, where people are free to interact and express themselves,” said CEO of OZ Gudjon Gudjonsson, in a statement.

The event starts at 6:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Dec. 31.

Concert-goers will see popular artists Sigur Ros and Kaleo, and a bunch of Icelandic celebrities, including Briet, Auður, Stuðmenn, and Friðrik Dor, all transformed into virtual avatars for the night.

You can join as an avatar by registering at www.newyear.is and the sooner you sign up, the closer to the stage you’ll be. After register with your Snapchat account, select your Bitmoji avatar — or create a new one — to participate in the event.

The party will also be broadcast live on Iceland’s national TV network RUV and streamed online.