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Category: AI

Realtime Human ‘tele-operation’

Realtime Human ‘tele-operation’

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Carnegie Mellon researchers have developed a real-time human tele-operation system. Using a simple camera, it is able to read the actions of a human person and then translate that into real-time full-body control of a robot.

Individuals can now seamlessly teleoperate full-sized humanoids to execute a myriad of actions. According to researchers, they can perform simple tasks like picking and placing objects to dynamic movements like walking, kicking, and even boxing.

Read the paper here: https://human2humanoid.com/resources/H2O_paper.pdf

There’s lots of possibilities for this kind of remotely operated humanoid robotic system. Remotely controlled humanoid robots could save countless lives operating in dangerous environments.

They could be used to go in and shut down equipment after dangerous chemical or industrial accidents. Search dangerous buildings for survivors after earthquakes. They could perform dangerous police or urban warfare operations without loss of life. Stop terrorist by defusing bombs. Another such place would be effecting repairs, shutdowns, and cleanup in highly radiated areas like Chernobyl, Fukushima, or when there are nuclear accidents. In the future, we may never need the horrors of Chernobyl’s biorobots to deal with such disasters.

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Create a playable game from a single image

Create a playable game from a single image

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Google researchers have published a new artificial intelligence model that can take a text prompt, sketch or idea and turn it into a virtual world you can interact with and play.

Named Genie, the virtual world model was trained on gameplay and other videos found online and is currently a research preview. The games are 2D platformer style games.

Genie can be prompted with images it has never seen before, such as real world photographs or sketches, enabling people to interact with their imagined virtual worlds-–essentially acting as a foundation world model. This is possible despite training without any action labels. Instead, Genie is trained from a large dataset of publicly available Internet videos. We focus on videos of 2D platformer games and robotics but our method is general and should work for any type of domain, and is scalable to ever larger Internet datasets. 

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Getting closer to synthetic people

Getting closer to synthetic people

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Microsoft has released a fascinating new framework for generating lifelike talking faces called VASA-1.

Given a single static image and a speech audio clip, VASA-1 is capable of producing lip movements that are synchronized with the audio and capture a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions.

See more here, read the paper here and here.

Getting worried you’ll be replaced by AI yet? If this gets perfected (it’s not perfect yet, but the results get better and better each year), then you can pretty much get rid of any ‘talking head’ jobs.

This could also be used to fool people on conference calls where video quality would totally render any minor glitches as unnoticeable or easily ignored as just streaming artifacts.

Just slap the CEO’s face into this, set up a conference call with finance via some very easy phishing, and approve that $1m transfer to your Swiss bank account.

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Teaching your robot to do chores

Teaching your robot to do chores

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A household robot can learn how to do almost any chore in about 20 minutes when taught by a human using an iPhone camera and a grabber.

Mahi Shafiullah at New York University and his colleagues created a way to teach robots that involves using the grabber equipped with an iPhone to train the operation.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2408273-housework-robot-can-learn-to-do-almost-any-chore-in-20-minutes

3D from 2D photographs

3D from 2D photographs

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Emm used her iPhone 12 Pro + @Scenario3d iphone app to generate this 3D image of her daughter.

Scenario makes a number of products. Read more about Scenario3d here.

LumiLabs also has some of their own offerings to capture scenes.

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Introducing Scenario (3D scanning + 3D creation from your phone)
byu/Low_Cress_111 inphotogrammetry
AI based fighter pilots – now for real

AI based fighter pilots – now for real

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Back in 2016, I wrote about how a grad student created a fighter pilot AI that was able to defeat a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene “Geno” Lee. It was so good that it didn’t do it just once. It shot him down every time.

Fast forward just 8 years and now there is the real thing.

The US military has tested an AI-controlled F16 named X-62A in a dogfight with an actual test pilot. The Variable Stability In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft, or “VISTA” for short, is essentially a modified F16 fighter jet controlled by AI that has previously conducted multiple test flights to demonstrate the capabilities of its artificial pilot (via The Telegraph).

In a press release, the USAF Test Pilot School and DARPA revealed that they initially tested various defensive maneuvers with the AI controlled jet to establish initial in-flight safety, before engaging in air-to-air simulated combat with another F16 in the skies above Edwards air force base in California last year.

It’s not clear if the tested dogfights were limited purely to aerial combat maneuvers with simulated weapons fire or how it did against live pilots. However, a previous AI developed by Heron Systems as part of a DARPA tournament was able to defeat a human pilot in five out of five tested scenarios.

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AI generated short films using LTX Studio

AI generated short films using LTX Studio

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AI video platform LTX Studio is now open for users to get stuck in and make short films, storyboards and other generative productions all from a simple text prompt. Simply type the film idea or a full synopsis of your desired creation and then set the visual aesthetic, aspect ratio, inspiration and your virtual casting for a selection of AI generated characters.

It utilizes dozens of AI models to generate the script, add voice narration, background music, sound effects, and generate the image and video elements.

Other AI video tools create more realistic video, speech tools with more realistic speech and lip sync available in both Pika Labs and Runway — but for each of those you still have to make a series of short clips and they have poor character consistency.

It has a lot of limitations; but it absolutely could be used for previsualization and concept pieces.

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