The Genius Of Marie Curie

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Only in Japan : Azuma, the First Hologram Communication Robot

disneyandmore reports:  Azuma is a cheerful young girl about twenty centimeters tall, with long blue hair, living under a glass bell. Lying near the sofa in the living room or on the night table, she welcomes her owner’s bachelor with a big smile when he comes home from work, then turns on the lights and informs him of the weather tomorrow. When her darling is not there, she sends him text messages to remind her that she thinks about him and is languishing. This kind of Tinkerbell is called Azuma Hikari, and it is a character in the manga style: diaphanous skin, interminable legs, huge eyes and childish voice. She is the first occupant of the Gatebox, the magic box launched in December 2016 by Japanese company Vinclu. Once activated, the translucent bubble, placed on a black base, lights up and Azuma appears inside, like a hologram, it’s the first “Hologram Communication Robot”, as they call her.

Azuma lives her life inside the transparent globe. She sleeps, brushes her teeth, takes a cup of tea sitting in an armchair, but rises as soon as her “master”, as named on the site of the apparatus, solicits her. Equipped with a camera and a microphone, she recognizes him, distinguishes his movements, understands a few words and interacts with him, like virtual assistants like Siri.

In a video of demonstration, she is seen under her dome, tiny and smiling, sitting next to her young master watching television. It looks like a couple would be lazing on a Sunday night. “It is a comforting character for those who live alone,” says Vinclu’s website, which defines this virtual girlfriend as gentle, considerate and playful. One understands the goal: this little fairy of the house is supposed to fight the loneliness in a country where the number of singles grows. With Azuma, promises the company, “you will finally want to go home early.”

Just created, its Artificial Intelligence (AI) currently only includes Japanese, and the Gatebox is only available in Japan and the United States. Only 300 copies have been sold to date - at the price of 298,000 yen (2,400 euros). Will this virtual girl become the miniature companion of men alone? But how does it works? Is it really a hologram? Well, not really, it is actually a projection on a glass plate and it uses the old and very famous “Pepper Ghost effect”, the same one that WDI Imagineers use in Disney’s Haunted Mansion since 50 years!

Clouds That Actually Look Like Things

Example-based Face Stylization - Web Demo

DCGI and Adobe Research have put up an online interactive demo of their stylized facial animation paper.

Just drag and drop an image with a face into it, select one of the styles on the right, hit ‘Submit’ and see what happens …

Try it out for yourself here

Please meet our terrible fur sons

Using Google’s open-source machine-learning project called Tensorflow, Christopher Hesse created edges2cats, where you draw a design and it’s filled in with… cat. It makes monsters.

Scrying Pen

Webtoy by Andy Matuschak uses neural network-trained SketchRNN dataset to visualize in realtime potential sketch marks whilst you are drawing particular objects:

This pen’s ink stretches backwards into the past and forwards into possible futures. The two sides make a strange loop: the future ink influences how you draw, which in turn becomes the new “past” ink influencing further future ink.

Put another way: this is a realtime implementation of SketchRNN which predicts future strokes while you draw.

Currently works best in Chrome, you can try it out for yourself here

tele-present wind

Installation by David Bowen reproduces realtime wind data with a collection of mechanized stalks:

This installation consists of a series of 126 x/y tilting mechanical devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in a gallery and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer installed outdoors. When the wind blows it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects this movement transmitting the motion to the grouping of devices in the gallery. Therefore the stalks in the gallery space move in real-time and in unison based on the movement of the wind outside.

May-September 2018 a newly expanded version of tele-present wind was installed at Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao and the sensor was installed in an outdoor location adjacent to the Visualization and Digital Imaging Lab at the University of Minnesota. Thus the individual components of the installation in Spain moved in unison as they mimicked the direction and intensity of the wind halfway around the world. As it monitored and collected real-time data from this remote and distant location, the system relayed a physical representation of the dynamic and fluid environmental conditions.

More Here

Related: Another project by David from 2012 did something similar with ‘Tele-Present Water’ [Link]

Neural net constructs 3D models of your face from a single photo

Researchers from the University of Nottingham and Kingston University have come up with an AI tool that will turn a 2D portrait into a 3D version, using just a single portrait photo you upload to it.

Typically, 3D face reconstruction poses ‘extraordinary difficulty,’ as it requires multiple images and must work around the varying poses and expressions, along with differences in lightning, according to the team.

By training a neural network on a dataset of both 2D images and 3D facial models or scans, however, their AI can reconstruct the entire face – even adding in parts that might not have been visible in the photo. [read more]

Try it for yourself here: cs.nott.ac.uk

give em the ol’ razzle dazzle