Robot Avatars Getting Reading

How soon, how good?

YOUR ROBOTIC AVATAR IS ALMOST READY in Spectrum IEEE  By Evan Ackerman

What the Avatar XPrize revealed about the future of telepresence robots

ROBOTS ARE NOT READY for the real world. It’s still an achievement for autonomous robots to merely survive in the real world, which is a long way from any kind of useful generalized autonomy. Under some fairly specific constraints, autonomous robots are starting to find a few valuable niches in semistructured environments, like offices and hospitals and warehouses. But when it comes to the unstructured nature of disaster areas or human interaction, or really any situation that requires innovation and creativity, autonomous robots are often at a loss.

For the foreseeable future, this means that humans are still necessary. It doesn’t mean that humans must be physically present, however—just that a human is in the loop somewhere. And this creates an opportunity.

In 2018, the XPrize Foundation announced a competition (sponsored by the Japanese airline ANA) to create “an avatar system that can transport human presence to a remote location in real time,” with the goal of developing robotic systems that could be used by humans to interact with the world anywhere with a decent Internet connection. The final event took place last November in Long Beach, Calif., where 17 teams from around the world competed for US $8 million in prize money.  ... ' 

Metaverse-style avatars are now available in Microsoft Teams

 Do we need fancy avatars?   Will it create anything useful?   Will take a look.  

Metaverse-style avatars are now available in Microsoft Teams  By Luke Hughes published about 6 hours ago in Techradar

Get the metaverse look without a pricey headset

Microsoft has announced that animated avatars are now available in preview for its Teams collaboration platform.

Via the Avatars app in the Microsoft Teams App Store, members of the Technical Access Program can now design up to three avatars for use during meetings, and choose from an array of reaction gestures.

So-called Mesh avatars were first announced for Microsoft Teams in a blog post(opens in new tab) by John Roach, the company’s CTO of digital advisory services, back in November 2021.

Microsoft’s release of the feature at its Ignite event reiterates its commitment to blurring the line between video conferencing software and metaverses, which some business leaders believe are the next big development in collaboration tools following the shift to hybrid working. 

These spaces are designed around mesh avatars interacting inside a virtual space equipped with the tools that teams need to collaborate, such as whiteboards, document storage, and video conferencing software.

If Microsoft continues to develop metaverse-adjacent features for the Teams platform, it could manage to scupper Meta’s plans for the sector with its own Horizon Workrooms metaverse.

> Check out our list of the best business webcams right now

> Microsoft Teams is about to enter a whole new (virtual) dimension

> Zoom’s new animated avatars are the stuff of nightmares

Horizon Workrooms could end up being seen as a less convenient offering when up against Teams, a video conferencing app that’s already in use by many organizations and benefits from Microsoft 365 integration.

Until then, organizations looking to try out the new mesh avatars but without access to the private preview build can sign up for updates on the Teams website(opens in new tab). ...  ' 

Baidu Makes Some AI Meta Humans

 Indeed. 

Baidu Unveils Its Metaverse of Custom Virtual Humans

ERIC HAL SCHWARTZ in Voicebot.ai

Chinese tech giant Baidu introduced a metaverse of virtual humans this week at Baidu Create 2021, in deliberate contrast to the presentation by Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year. The digital world, named XiRang, is populated by humans and AI interacting through avatars built on the XiLing platform debuting in tandem with XiRang.

METAVERSE XIRANG

XiRang hosts a digital “Creator City” mimicking a physical city with original and recreated locales like the Shaolin Monastery. The virtual world is accessible through an app on computers and smartphones or with Pico virtual reality headsets. Baidu hosted CEO Robin Li and other executives at an AI conference within XiRang this week. Users with a Baidu service account can register on the app and build an avatar to travel around the virtual world, interacting with others by pointing their avatar at another and talking. XiRang, which means ‘land of hope,’ can support up to 100,000 users at a time right now, which Baidu emphasized because its metaverse is still under development.

According to Baidu CEO Robin Li, the metaverse will kick off a “golden era of AI over the next ten years” and the start of “man-computer symbiosis,” which will change the world. Li claims Baidu has more than a million employees working on AI and plans to quintuple that number in the next five years. “Creators are our companions in pursuing our dreams of technology, they are also one of the great driving forces of human progress,” Li said.  .... ' 

A World of Holograms and Avatars Next?

Would like to see Avatar Holograms again,  in fact have seen in many forms over the years. Even formally tested it in the large enterprise.   Its got some good specialized applications, but no, not for day to day work and communications.   Still introduces too much noise, which over weighs its wow factor. Good for demos today.    It may come to play some day.

Tech Companies Want to Make Holograms Part of Office Life  By The Wall Street Journal,  June 11, 2021

To reduce Zoom fatigue, some companies want to implement holograms in the workplace.

Proponents of hologram technology say three-dimensional (3D) representations of people on video calls feel more personal and help participants read body language. WorkLife Ventures' Brianne Kimmel said holograms and avatars allow for "a new style of communication, where you'll have better, more frequent interactions."  Gartner's Kanishka Chauhan said holograms may be best for recorded events, trainings, or seminars, citing the complex and time-consuming logistics of live hologram meetings.

WeWork, which has partnered with hologram technology company ARHT Media to bring holograms to 100 WeWork buildings across the globe, expects to use them for recorded or livestreamed videos to virtual, physical, and hybrid audiences.

From The Wall Street Journal

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Soul Machines: Avatars for AI Presence

Brought to my attention and related to work recent and past.

Soul Machines is Humanizing Computing to Better Humanity    Some examples.

Democratizing and Disrupting the Economics of Human Interaction

Where Deep Science & Technology Meets
Real World Applications

For innovators and brands seeking to communicate, collaborate and cooperate like never before Soul Machines™ is the first Human Experience Platform that gives you the ability to automate and personalise digital interfaces and interactions at scale.

Soul Machines™ is a deep science and technology company fusing AI, computational brain models and experiential learning to usher in a new era of Human Experience across all digital platforms and interfaces. We are first applying our innovations to redefine customer and brand experience – through digital interfaces and applications ranging from service and support to sales and product. In the process we’ve created the world’s most human digital beings.

Leading innovators and brands are using Soul Machines™ AI HX™ Platform to create, deploy and manage new forms of digital interfaces that operate independently. They are driving the shift from transmission to interaction. From content to compelling communications and powerful emotional connections.

Our revolutionary AI HX™ Platform consists of Soul Machines Digital DNA Studio for creating and personalising hyper-real interfaces rapidly and at scale. Our Soul Engine™ integrates deep AI, computational brain models and Experiential Learning to dynamically manage interfaces across all environments, infusing them with intelligence and your brand personality. SoulX™ provides the community, tools and services to deploy with development and brand partners. .... "

Neon Digital Avatars

Interesting in seeing Samsung involved in this, meaning unclear.

Neon CEO explains the tech behind his overhyped ‘artificial humans’  in TheVerge  Neon Genesis Evangelicalism

The most buzzed-about company at CES 2020 doesn’t make a gadget you can see or touch. It doesn’t even have a product yet. But for reasons I’m still not entirely sure I grasp, the lead-up to this week’s show in Las Vegas was dominated by discussion of a project called Neon, which has emerged from a previously unknown Samsung subsidiary known as STAR Labs.

What Neon has been promising is so ambitious that it’s easy to swing your expectations around full circle and assume the mundane. The project’s Twitter bio simply reads “Artificial Human,” which could mean anything from an AI chatbot to a full-on android. Promotional videos posted in the run-up to CES, however, suggested that Neon would very much be closer to the former.  .... "

Millie the Avatar Tests Interaction

Testing the idea of what kind of 'human' engagement works in what context.

Meet 'Millie' the Avatar. She'd Like to Sell You a Pair of Sunglasses  By Bloomberg in ACM

Toronto, Canada-based startup Twenty Billion Neurons (TwentyBN) has created a life-size digital avatar to help retail brands looking for ways to boost falling in-store sales in the face of growing competition from e-commerce.

The Millie avatar appears on a slightly-larger-than-life screen, seemingly making eye contact with customers and tracking their movements with her gaze; Millie is also able to tell where in the store a customer is looking and respond accordingly.

The system is equipped with speech recognition and natural language processing software, which allow Millie to understand and answer simple questions or have a basic conversation with a shopper.

The avatar also uses facial-recognition software to learn to recognize people it sees often by name.

Natalie Berg of U.K. consultancy NBK Retail observed that there is a fine line between cool and creepy, adding that “While this kind of tech is still novel, it is a way to get people into the store, but it might not be for everyone.”    .... " 

From Bloomberg via CACM.

Beyond, to a VR Facemask

Reading emotions was one of our early efforts to understand consumer interactions with products.   Called Expression Glasses developed at the Affective Computing Project at MIT.  This seems to take it yet beyond that.   For what applications?   In the Verge:

This VR face mask can read your emotions  by Adi Robertson
" ... The new MindMaze Mask, which was announced today, is a ring of electrodes that can be installed in any VR headset’s foam face mask. When you put the headset on, the mask detects which sensors your skin is touching with a certain pressure, then matches the pattern to one of 10 facial expressions, which an avatar reproduces. There’s also some software-based prediction, which is supposed to reduce lag between your face and your avatar’s. It’s not detecting and mirroring every movement — it’s more like you’re pressing button combinations with your face to call up animations. The example avatars are simple cartoons, but they can look like anything a developer wants. ,,,"

Engagement AI Goes Public in the UK

Not really AI, as I read it, not autonomous, but tele-operation, and the researching of how people would act and interact with local avatar robotics.    What would these avatars be acting as: Police, workers, security, information providers?  The simple reaction of people to robotics in public is not clear.   Can they project authority?  What are the legal implications?   A natural extension of large scale UK CCTV networks: Making them mobile and interactive.  A stunning view of the future.   Full article in LaboratoryTalk: 

At the right a picture clip of Robothespian, one of the avatars mentioned in the article. It is not implied that this is the form of the robots being considered.

" ... Researchers from leading UK institutions are working on a £2m project designed to look at how remotely operated robots could enable people to take part in public spaces - without them actually being there. Alongside researchers from the Universities of Bath, Oxford and Queen Mary University of London, experts from Exeter University and Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) will look at how using remotely operated robots might enable people to participate in public spaces.

The £2 million three-year project, Being There: Humans and Robots in Public Spaces, funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and led by Exeter University, will examine how robotics can help to bridge the gap between the way we communicate in person and online. The aim of our research is for the robot to be an avatar for a remote person

The project will seek to look at the social and technological aspects of being able to appear in public in proxy forms, via a range of advanced robotics platforms. The robots will be controlled remotely - a method called tele-operation and a tele-operator will be able to see through the robot’s eyes and speak through its mouth, while directing where it looks and how it moves. .... "

Diagnosing Expression

In CACM: On diagnosing Depression.  " ... Automatic systems that analyze gestures and facial expressions might improve the challenging task of diagnosing depression. One such system, SimSensei, is a digital avatar that interviews people to determine their state of mind using facial-recognition technology and depth-sensing cameras integrated with Microsoft Kinect to capture and analyze body language. University of Southern California researchers identified characteristic movements that signal possible depression by interviewing non-depressed volunteers and those who had been diagnosed with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. ... " 

Fluid Catalogs

Are we ready for shopping in a post Pinterest world?  Fluid HTML5 layouts replace the simulated shelf layout in old online retail.   More here.   Better I think than walking avatars through simulated shelves.

Chore Wars: An Alternate Reality Game

I am doing some research in the area of 'gamification' and the use of games to improve serious work processes. That and some emerging project work has led me to start reading: Reality Is Broken: What Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World:

by Jane McGonigal. 

One of the areas I am interested in is how to use games to promote the performance of relatively tedious tasks that are still important, such as recording learnings for knowledge management.  McGonigal gives a good example, the use of an alternate reality game called Chore Wars.  This to promote performance of simple, but often painful household tasks.  Nicely described in her book pp120-   More about it here.


Without experience with it I would think that this is kind of game would work best with people that already have a positive experience with multiplayer games that use avatars.  Still a useful example of what can be done with games to address less than fun tasks.

See also Jane McGonigal's blog.