VR Motion Controller Patent by Sony

Sony Interactive Entertainment recently published a patent for a VR motion controller. Filed with the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO), the patent outlines a VR motion controller with embedded LED tracking markers. The technical document also outlines that it could be tracked optically from the headset. There’s no mention of finger tracking as with Valve Index Controllers although the patent is more concerned with differing sensor configurations, detailing a cluster of 30 per controller.

Again, this may or may not be a PSVR 2 controller in the making, but it’s clear a more standard, optically tracked controller would be a big step in the right direction in bringing the platform’s capabilities in line with both the PC and standalone headset side of things. That is of course provided the VR headset doesn’t rely on the upcoming PS5 HD Camera, which would bring up back to square one in terms of 360, occlusion-free tracking.

More information:

https://www.roadtovr.com/sony-vr-controller-patent-valve-index/

Special Issue Extended Reality From Theory to Applications

Extended reality (XR) is a relative new term that covers virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). There are numerous research as well as business applications of XR, and the field is growing exponentially. Projections suggest that in the next decade, XR will be mainstream, and it is one of the most promising technologies that will dominate our lives. The goal of the special issue is to collect original and high-quality research articles as well as review papers focused on the theoretical and practical aspects related to extended reality.

Exceptional contributions that extend previously published work will also be considered, provided they contribute at least 40% new results. Authors of such submissions will be required to provide a clear indication of the new contributions and explain how this work extends the original contributions. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. All papers will be peer-reviewed. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

More information:

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/special_issues/Extended_VR_AR_MR

AI Getting Smarter

Of all the AI models in the world, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has most captured the public’s imagination. It can spew poems, short stories, and songs with little prompting, and has been demonstrated to fool people into thinking its outputs were written by a human. But its eloquence is more of a parlor trick, not to be confused with real intelligence. Nonetheless, researchers believe that the techniques used to create GPT-3 could contain the secret to more advanced AI. GPT-3 trained on an enormous amount of text data. What if the same methods were trained on both text and images?

Now new research from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2, has taken this idea to the next level. The researchers have developed a new text-and-image model, otherwise known as a visual-language model, that can generate images given a caption. The images look unsettling and freakish, nothing like the hyper realistic deep fakes generated by GANs, but they might demonstrate a promising new direction for achieving more generalizable intelligence, and perhaps smarter robots as well.

More information:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/25/1008921/ai-allen-institute-generates-images-from-captions/

Visual Part of Brain Keeps Hidden Thoughts

A recent study led by UNSW psychologists has mapped what happens in the brain when a person tries to suppress a thought. The neuroscientists managed to decode the complex brain activity using functional brain imaging (fMRI) and an imaging algorithm. The findings suggest that even when a person succeeds in ignoring a thought, like the pink elephant, it can still exist in another part of the brain, without them being aware of it. This suggests that mental images can form even when we are trying to stop them. Participants were given a written prompt (either green broccoli or a red apple) and challenged not to think of it. To make this task even harder, they were asked to not replace the image with another thought. After 12 seconds, participants confirmed whether they were able to successfully suppress the image or if the thought suppression failed. 

Eight people were confident they had successfully suppressed the images, but their brain scans told a different story. Brain neurons fired and then pulled oxygen into the blood each time a thought took place. This movement of oxygen, which was measured by the fMRI machine, created spatial patterns in the brain. The researchers decoded these spatial patterns using an algorithm called multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA). The algorithm could distinguish brain patterns caused by the vegetable/fruit prompts. Eight study participants were confident they had successfully suppressed the images of the red apple or green broccoli, but their brain scans suggested otherwise. The scans showed that participants used the left side of their brains to come up with the thought, and the right side to try and suppress it.

More information:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-neuroscience-hidden-thoughts-visual-brain.html