People have been experimenting with revamping old games using AI. The efforts are still in their infancy, but they’re getting more and more impressive – such as this photorealistic upgrade of GTA V.
Here’s an example of someone updating Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines made by Many-ad-6225 using Stable Diffusion and TemporalKit v1.3
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Old games often suffer from the limited graphics capabilities of the time they were made, while developing new games costs a fortune due to the requirements to author high quality models and textures. What if you could solve BOTH problems – with the same solution? A machine learning project from Intel Labs in 2021 called “Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement” might push rendering toward photorealism a lot quicker and easier.
Researchers studied how to use a convolution network to re-render the scene. Below you can see an example of how they used the CityScapes dataset to give a much more realistic output of a race game – all in realtime.
You can read how the image enhancement actually works in their paper (PDF). It includes a lot of good information about how their method works and how it improves on previous attempts that have issues with color, object hallucination, and temporal instability. They do this by using the extra information provided by rendered scenes such as clever use of the g-buffer – along with a specialized discriminator and segmentation network.
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Equator AI created a video series that answers the question of what ancient languages sounded like. They even tackle some purely reconstructed proto-languages like Indo-European that was re-built from later derived (but documented) Indo-European languages.
The first video demonstrates Old Norse, Latin, Old English, Proto-Celtic, Phoenician, Hittite, and Akkadian. I can affirm the Latin is understandable but has an interesting accent. We do actually have some idea of how things were pronounced in Latin, because ancient documents exist that gave pronunciation guides or even (in a mirror of modern grammar Nazi’s) complained about common pronunciation errors.
This second video shows off Proto-Indo-European, Sabaic, Sanskrit, Aramaic (bonus points for the video character looking like Jesus), Sumerian, Old Chinese, Ge’ez, and Gothic.
Since it is all AI generated, it seems like it would be an interesting way of adding authentic language pronunciation to games about the past. Imagine playing Civilization and having each of the ancient leaders speaking their actual languages.
If you like this, maybe give learning Latin a try.
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I’ve talked about generating 3D models from text prompts using AI before. But the big boys appear to be getting into the game now.
Stability.ai is previewing Stable 3D in private preview. It allows you to create 3D models with textures from text prompts.
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One area in which VR seems to land well is scary experiences. Everything from walking on a tiny plank hundreds of feet in the air, to madness, to the isolation of space.
As a lover of classic ghost stories from the Edwardian and Victorian eras, I applaud this attempt by Abi Salvesen to retell H.G. Wells’ The Red Room as a VR experience.
Give it a watch. Or curl up with a cup of warm drink, start a fire, and give an audio version a listen.
“It’s like a child’s backyard project”. The cool looking unibody design shakes and rattles, only goes about 12mph, has no heater/AC, isn’t practical, but there it is and it turns heads since it’s basically an art car.
It’s part of the Peterson automotive museum which is worth checking out.
1 When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all assembled together in one place. 2 Suddenly, there came from heaven a sound similar to that of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were sitting. 3 Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which separated and came to rest on each one of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different languages,[c] as the Spirit enabled them to do so.
5 Now staying in Jerusalem there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven. 6 At this sound, a large crowd of them gathered, and they were bewildered because each one heard them speaking in his own language.
7 They were astounded and asked in amazement, “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? 8 How is it then that each of us hears them in his own native language?
So many things happen around the octave of Easter that it’s easy to be overwhelmed and miss the important and deeply rich events.
Pentecost (Hebrew Shavuot, Greek pentekoste fiftieth) was an annual Jewish festival marking the end of the barley harvest and the beginning of the wheat. It is also called “the day of the first ripe fruits” (Numbers 28:26), and in the Greek Scriptures is the name used for the Feast of Harvest (Exodus 11:16) or Feast of Weeks (Exodus 34:22). Shavuot unfolded ‘seven full weeks after Passover from 16 Nisan, the day when they offered a sheaf of barley (Leviticus 11:15).
According to Jewish tradition, the day of Pentecost correspond to when the law was given to Moses at Sinai and Israel became a people apart. The apostle Paul draws a comparison of this event by saying that the Christians are a ‘holy nation’ (1 Peter 2: 9) a kind of first fruits to God (John 1:18), met on a heavenly Mount Zion as part of a new covenant (Hebrews 12: 18-24; Luke 22:20).
Jean Restout II’s Pentecost is currently housed in the Louvre (room 924, Sully Wing, Level 2), but was originally painted for the Abbey of Saint-Denis which is outside of Paris and is definitely a painting you should see if you get a chance. Click below for a bigger image.
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The 1982 movie The Thing is one of my favorite sci-fi/horror movies – right up there with Aliens. It a paranoia fueled mystery of a alien organism that can assimilate and imitate both human or animal hosts.
Based on the 1938 story Who Goes There by John W. Campbell Jr, The Thing takes us along into the fear and paranoia of an isolated Antarctic research station with the characters trying to ascertain whether everyone is who they say they are.
What makes it so re-watchable is that the timeline when certain characters are assimilated is unclear. Filmmaker John Carpenter even used stand-ins so that the shadows were not easily identifiable. This has lead to years of speculation and fan theories (Clothing continuity theory, Molotov whiskey theory, No breath theory, Who sabotaged the blood bank) about what happened when.
Of all of them, I think the Den of Geek does the best breakdown of the most likely order that each of the characters succumbs to the thing.
The Old Church downtown is a concert hall and has a number of cool things. One of the fun things is their free lunchtime concerts. They have started live casting them on YouTube, which is even more convenient.
The October concert for the last 2 years has usually an organ concert by Michael Barnes in which he plays classic spooky organ music like the ones below. Plus a guest performer with some more folk classics.
While others artists are suing AI engine companies, Peter Gabriel is embracing it. And the court will rise, while the pillars all fall comes from his new album i/o. The video was created by Junie Lau using various AI tech, including Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, MidJourney, and DALL·E 2.
