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Sony introduced Mocopi, small devices that you can adjust to your limbs, these make sure your whole body will be visible in the metaverse.

Mocopi is a new motion-caption method that can be used not only in the metaverse. For example, people who make their own games can use their motion capture in programs such as Unity, VRChat and Autodesk MotionBuilder. The advantage is that it is not a very expensive system: for about 360 euros, creatives can add more realistic movements to their games in a fairly approachable way. Think 3D artists, for example. Vtubers are also identified as a target group: these are YouTubers and streamers who are not themselves on screen, but are virtual avatars. For them, Mocopi would in many cases be a much cheaper way than the many more expensive solutions out there for virtual, moving avatars.

- Jin Vonk
20-Mrt-'23

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We kennen allemaal Xbox Kinect nog wel: de camera die je lichaam zo scande dat je je hele lijf kon terugzien op het scherm. Soms wat confronterend, maar wel heel tof dat technologie dat anno 2010 al kon. Nu is er een manier om je lijf alsnog te scannen, maar dan voor het metaverse. Niet van Microsoft, maar van Sony. Het heet Mocopi.

Mocopi

We kennen het metaverse veelal van Horizon Worlds, het metaverse van Facebook-moederbedrijf Meta dat helaas nog niet in Nederland uit is. Daar hebben mensen geen benen gehad. Het is sowieso nog een wat ver-van-ons-bed-show, voordat we straks allemaal fanatiek in het metaverse stappen. Maar als we er straks onze eerst stappen in zetten, dan kunnen we dat met een beetje hlup van Sony wel heel accuraat doen. Het heeft namelijk Mocopi geïntroduceerd. Een soort schijfjes die je op je ledematen bevestigt en waarmee wordt gezorgd dat je met je hele lijf in het metaverse te zien bent.

Mocopi is een nieuwe motion-caption-methode die niet alleen kan worden gebruikt in het metaverse. Mensen die bijvoorbeeld hun eigen games maken, die kunnen hun motion capturing gebruiken in programma's als Unity, VRChat en Autodesk MotionBuilder. Het voordeel is dat het niet een heel duur systeem is: voor zo'n 360 euro kunnen creatievelingen op een vrij laagdrempelige manier realistischere bewegingen aan hun games toevoegen. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan 3D-artiesten. Ook Vtubers worden aangemerkt als doelgroep: dat zijn YouTubers en streamers die zelf niet in beeld zijn, maar een virtuele avatar zijn. Voor hen zou Mocopi in veel gevallen een veel goedkopere manier zijn dan de vele duurdere oplossingen die er zijn voor virtuele, bewegende avatars.

Sony en het metaverse

Het is de vraag wat Sony precies van plan is met het metaverse. Heeft het plannen met bijvoorbeeld PlayStation, dat natuurlijk al zijn eigen VR-systeem heeft, of zal het instappen op het metaverse van een ander bedrijf? Sowieso zijn er al metaverses te betreden via Sony's virtual reality-bril, zoals Roblox. Roblox is in principe een game, maar omdat iedereen er werelden in kan maken is het tegelijkertijd een metaverse.

Elke Mocopi heeft zijn specifieke locatie die je bevestigt met een band op je hoofd, heup, enkels en polsen. De sensoren werken via Bluetooth en een Android- of iOS-telefoon, maar niet zomaar elke telefoon. Het werkt alleen met sommige Sony Xperia's en iPhone 12, 13 en 14. Ze lijken misschien redelijk flink, maar ze wegen weinig: zo'n 10 gram. Je laadt ze op via USB-C en je kunt daarmee een vrij lange batterijduur verwachten van 10 uur. Ze verschijnen in januari 2023, in eerste instantie alleen in Japan.

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Sony's nieuwe VR-systeem scant je hele lijf voor het metaverse

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We kennen allemaal Xbox Kinect nog wel: de camera die je lichaam zo scande dat je je hele lijf kon terugzien op het scherm. Soms wat confronterend, maar wel heel tof dat technologie dat anno 2010 al kon. Nu is er een manier om je lijf alsnog te scannen, maar dan voor het metaverse.

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The article showed how the Blind Burners collective opened pathways for non-visual access to VR.

The SoC is that this movement is leading VR to a more inclusive future since present VR is still mainly designed for people with visionary. Blind people are not being taken into account in most of the cases.

-Joyce (Chao-Yi) Liu
18-Mrt-'23

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By Harsha Balasubramanian and Chris Hainsworth

"VR does not stand for visual reality." This is a mantra for Blind Burners: an international collective of artists formed around a shared desire for self-expression in virtual reality and an ethos of inclusive production processes.

VR continues to make progress with innovations in visual fidelity, hand controllers and wireless headsets, while simultaneously excluding blind and low vision creators and audiences. In Summer 2021, as part of virtual Burning Man, Blind Burners' collective of blind, low vision and sighted artists gathered to create their own virtual worlds in which to explore non-visual access, producing an art gallery and a Temple of Accessibility.

Blind Burners Art Gallery - created with support from Big Rock Creative for BRCVR, an Official Burning Man Experience in 2021

Whilst Burning Man's temples for many are a powerful contemplative experience focused on spiritual cleansing or psychological release, our Temple of Accessibility was an attempt to playfully call "bullshit" on Burning Man's claim to "radical inclusion" in its ten principles. Given the wealth, connections, and day-jobs of so many in the Burning Man-Silicon Valley Tech Nexus, it is extraordinary that digital accessibility was so absent from planning for 2020's digital burns.

Blind Burners' Temple of Accessibility

Inspired by the art piece Futures Past (2012) by Kate Raudenbush and its juxtaposition of ancient wisdom with modern technologies, we decided to build our own humble stone temple Burning Man offering. We offered our experiences trying to access food delivery apps, dating apps and creator tools, sharing how our attempts to find food, love and opportunities for self-expression were met by barriers. We shared examples of apps which are incompatible with screen readers, one of the most revolutionary inclusive technologies of our time. We strove to tell stories of digital exclusion in the hope that some of the tech gods who bestride Burning Man might listen and wield their power to remove these barriers.

Ahead of launching a re-developed version of our VR world in 2023 (the live version linked in this article is very much "undergoing renovation"), the build team assembled 'round our Zoom campfire to share inspirations and lessons learned from the initial build process.

Blind Burners World was built originally for AltspaceVR, a social VR platform experienced both in 2D through the desktop application and in 3D via a VR headset.

For users who require non-visual feedback, such as through a screen reader, there are currently no viable solutions for launching VR apps like AltspaceVR, for setting up headsets or using creator tools to design their own VR experiences.

The failure of AltspaceVR to work with screen readers meant that even the 2D version of our world could not be logged into and explored independently. Team members who used screen readers had to allow others to take control of their computers via remote access simply to enter the platform: an egregious security compromise.

Our project goals, therefore, were just as much about hacking technologies as they were about tackling preconceptions around visual impairment.

Chris Hainsworth, Blind Burners' UK Co-Founder and the project's Creative Director, offers:

We wanted to represent diverse and powerful artists in this new medium; to playfully educate and inspire tech companies such as Microsoft and Unity, whose VR software and creator tools are broken and exclusionary; and to experiment in use of sound to navigate 3D spaces, foregrounding audio-led design and spatial sound as innovative, playful and creatively rich.

This is a question frequently asked of blind artists working with VR. The assumptions that VR is a visual medium, and that blind- and low-vision VR-accessibility are "hard problems to be solved later," are pervasive.

As highlighted by our temple, access to VR is an increasingly necessary condition underlying our human right to access not only culture, but work, social and educational opportunities too. Beyond this, VR will provide rich opportunities for blind audiences and creators to innovate, as they regularly do in their daily lives.

Marimuthu (he/him), a blind photographer, poet and PhD student in India, reflects on how his movement tends to be restricted in physical surroundings due to unfamiliarity or fellow pedestrians offering unrequested assistance. In that vein, Marimuthu shares, "VR might give us freedom of movement which will do a lot of good for our confidence and... motivate ourselves to face real obstacles."

Ebony Rose Dark ('All of the pronouns!'), who identifies as a proud, partially sighted, Black, gay Caribbean, non-binary performing artist and photographer in England, adds:

In a physical gallery I would be climbing up the wall to look at something really close. Or I use the magnification tool on my phone, zooming in to the picture, taking in the detail section by section. In VR, I can 'zoom' by walking closer to my photographs on the wall. It [feels] as if I [am] there in the space, so that is very exciting.

Photographer and Performer Mickel, aka Ebony Rose Dark. Photograph by Graham Robson. This image appeared on electric billboards and bus stops across Brighton & Hove during lockdown, with the caption "Thank you for giving me space".

To showcase our art, we sought to create a welcoming gallery, modeled visually to reflect the grace, openness and curvature of contemporary art buildings such as the Los Angeles Getty Museum, and inspired above all by the innovative, multi-sensory inclusive architecture of the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind.

Whilst we hope that future projects will draw increasingly on tactile innovations, our current Blind Burners World is all about spatial sound.

Drawing on our team members' experiences of navigating the world through use of sound, like when walking down a busy street or snowboarding down a mountain, we explored how a combination of non-verbal sounds and auditory descriptions could be deployed as guides.

Pathways to locations in the camp were assigned specific sounds. Users could select one sound from several options and follow it to progress down a path, and the selected sound would get louder as they neared the location while other sounds faded into silence. We chose everyday sounds that were easy to recognize and associate with specific places, such as a drum loop for the path to the gallery's rooftop party area.

This multisensory environment was brought to life by Whitt Sellers (he/him), an NYC-based VR developer, and Adi Laflamme (they/them), a sound designer based in Canada.

As Adi recounts, "Putting sound first in design would provide opportunity for all kinds of different experiences that aren't really possible right now, even though the technology already exists."

We also placed directional prompts at entrances and along the paths. These excerpts were recorded in the voice of a screen reader, paying homage to this well-known component in blind individuals' assistive technology arsenal. Artists wrote and recorded the audio descriptions for their own works.

Dancers. Photograph by Mickel aka Ebony Rose Dark, whose description of the image can be found in the Alt text by hovering over the image.

During our six week sprint towards Burning Man 2021, our production process emphasized regular co-design and continuous user testing with blind, low vision and sighted artists.

One key access strategy we used throughout our project was Audio Description, the practice of verbalizing visual aspects in media content for blind and low vision audiences.

In our review meetings, we each described how we experienced the designs and content of our VR world and the user interfaces of the creator tools we were using. Rather than introducing description at post-production stage, as is standard for many accessibility initiatives, we did this throughout the development process. This meant our whole team could review designs and share our ideas while it was still possible to make changes. We discovered that description allowed us to openly reflect upon the influences and assumptions we brought to the project. That said, it wasn't always a serious affair; a large inspiration for this inclusive practice came from Blind Burners' lockdown parties on Zoom, where access-focused descriptions were fun, creative and our collective responsibility.

Participants in the Closing Ceremony of Co-Reality Collective's 2021 Official Burning Man Experience. How would you convey this visual experience as an audio description? Click on the Alt text for our attempt. Screen grab courtesy of Ben Lehman.

Talking about the pencil sketches and 3D models he shared through description, VR Developer Whitt Sellers comments, "It still is a learning process around how to describe something I'm looking at or imagining in a helpful way. It was the first time where I've ever had to do that outside creative writing exercises in high school, describing a setting or a scene, and making it as rich as possible."

Our ability to design an effective audio landscape was hindered by several limitations inherent in the combination of Altspace with Unity. Basic game world functions like sonifying movement or collision, let alone directionality were impossible for someone navigating the experience solely through sound. Without these, large parts of the world felt confusing and lifeless. Audio from one pathway leaked into other spaces, confusing visitors' sense of direction.

Our design process was further hindered by the lack of documentation around technical constraints such as file size and optimization. We needed to weigh the relative resource-intensity of an extra sound versus an extra image, the number of curves/polygons in our design versus the number of carefully placed audio beacons. Without this clarity, we had no reliable way to manage design trade-offs between vital navigational and descriptive sounds with our own creative ambitions around the gallery design and the breadth of our exhibition. Each artwork required an audio description, adding an extra layer to traditional gallerist challenges of curating our work.

Just before virtual Burning Man, a technical update led to the anomaly of visitors being unable to hear each other speak. Members of our team watched as visitors streamed through our gallery and Temple of Accessibility, pausing to look at our art and listen to our story. Unable to hear their responses to the exhibition beyond hand waves, shoulder shrugs and the limited emojis that survived the update, Creative Director Chris Hainsworth recalls this "feeling like the tech gods we had set out to provoke were having a laugh."

Marimuthu and Chris from Blind Burners stand in front of the portal to virtual Burning Man in August 2021

Encouraged by the openness and responsiveness of some tech companies involved in VR platforms and creator tools, we hope that our work alongside that of others, such as the XR Access Initiative, will help to course-correct VR to a more inclusive future. We expect to see accessible user interfaces where blind and low vision individuals can log in, set up profiles and avatars, launch experiences, navigate worlds, create and connect. Fundamental change will only come when we establish clearer career paths for blind software engineers, designers, artists and sound designers.

As Blind Burners India Chapter Lead Marimuthu says, "People assume that visual arts are only done by sighted people, and I want to prove them wrong. We are blind people in Virtual Reality, it is us who are laughing."

Fueled by our artist collective's truly radical self-expression, inclusion and communal efforts, we invite our friends across global arts and technology to accompany us into virtual worlds beyond sight, into a future shaped by the intelligence, wisdom and creativity of blind and low vision artists.

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By Harsha Balasubramanian and Chris Hainsworth "VR does not stand for visual reality." This is a mantra for Blind Burners: an international collective of artists formed around a shared desire for self-expression in virtual reality and an ethos of inclusive production processes.

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Artists Sue Stable Diffusion and Midjourney for Using Their Work to Train AI That Steals Their Jobs

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Artists Sue Stable Diffusion and Midjourney for Using Their Work to Train AI That Steals Their Jobs

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A group of artists is suing the creators of image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney for using their art to train AI that steals their jobs. The creators of these algorithms use these artists' work to create a system threatening their livelihoods and copyright in content owned or represented by an artist. With this action by companies like Stability AI, the content owners are getting nothing out of the arrangement.

While the outcome of these lawsuits is anything but certain, they indicate a groundswell in action being taken against companies like Stability AI. Artists everywhere are furious that their work is being used to train AI algorithms without being asked first or reasonably compensated. But whether this could successfully be argued that it infringes on copyright may be more complex than one might think. For instance, creators of AI art tools say that they are protected under the U.S. fair use laws. More so, there is the fact that the AI dataset is simply indexed to the internet, and it never stores copyrighted images or texts.

Signal of change

filing a class-action lawsuit claiming the machine learning systems infringe millions of artists' rights will set a precedent in the nascent field. Knowing how deeply exploitative AI media model practices are with no legal precedent to set means that these models can do whatever they want without any consequence. Trying to make AI fair and ethical for everyone is going to be challenging. However, without it, does this mean the traditional artists are out of work, or will this be the beginning of new job applications? Such as conventional artists needed for AI database training. Whether the promise made by companies like Stability AI to work with artists to find new ways to reimburse artists for the use of their work is held is still to be seen if it benefits both parties.

-JF
9-Feb-'23

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A group of artists are suing the creators of image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, The Verge reports, for using their art to train AI that steals their jobs.

Stable Diffusion makes it trivially easy to knock off a particular artist's style. With a simple prompt, users can generate any number of images that closely resembles any prominent visual creator's signature visual language.

Unsurprisingly, the rise of these image generators is really irking many artists. From their point of view, the creators of these algorithms used their own work to create a system that's now threatening their livelihoods - and they're getting nothing out of the arrangement.

As such, three artists are now filing a class-action lawsuit claiming the machine learnings systems infringe the rights of "millions of artists" - a suit that could potentially set sweeping precedent in the nascent field.

"As I learned more about how the deeply exploitative AI media models practices I realized there was no legal precedent to set this right," Karla Ortiz, one of the three artists, tweeted. "Let's change that."

"Today, we're taking another step toward making AI fair and ethical for everyone," Matthew Butterick, a writer and lawyer, wrote in a blog post announcing the suit.

It's not the only lawsuit being leveraged against companies like Stability AI. Stock and journalism media provider Getty Images announced this week that it's also suing the startup for infringing "copyright in content owned or represented by Getty Images," according to a statement.

Getty Images claims that the company "unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images" without having a license "and to the detriment of the content creators."

Stability AI, which launched its public version of Stable Diffusion in August, trained its algorithms on a massive dataset called LAION-5B, which scrapes images and text from the internet, created by Germany-based non-profit LAION.

According to tools that can scan these datasets to see if a given artist's work was scraped, some artists like painter Erin Hanson found that LAION-5B had scraped thousands of images of her art, CNN reported back in October.

In other words, there does appear to be compelling evidence that Stable Diffusion is generating art based on specific artists' actual work.

"That one with the purple flowers and the sunset," Hanson told CNN while looking at the broadcaster's efforts to generate art based on her work, "definitely looks like one of my paintings, you know?"

But whether Butterick and Getty Images will be able to successfully argue that Stable Diffusion is in fact infringing on copyright may be more difficult than one might think. For one, creators of AI art tools argue that they are protected under the US' fair use laws.

Then there is the fact that LAION claims it never stored copyrighted images or texts.

"LAION datasets are simply indexes to the internet, i.e. lists of URLs to the original images together with the ALT texts found linked to those images," reads the non-profit's website. "While we downloaded and calculated CLIP embeddings of the pictures to compute similarity scores between pictures and texts, we subsequently discarded all the photos."

While the outcome of these lawsuits is anything but certain, they are indicative of a groundswell in action being taken against companies like Stability AI. Artists everywhere are furious that their work is being used to train AI algorithms without being asked first or fairly compensated.

But that could soon change. According to CNN' s report, both LAION and Stability AI are working with artists to find new ways to remunerate artists for the use of their work.

Stability AI also announced in December that it would allow artists to have their art removed from training datasets for an upcoming release dubbed Stable Diffusion 3.0.

But whether that will be enough to assuage artists going forward remains to be seen. After all, the damage has already been done.

READ MORE: AI art tools Stable Diffusion and Midjourney targeted with copyright lawsuit [ The Verge]

More on AI image generators: Someone Used AI to Dream Up a Nonexistent David Cronenberg Movie

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Artists Sue Stable Diffusion and Midjourney for Using Their Work to Train AI That Steals Their Jobs

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A group of artists are suing the creators of image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, The Verge reports, for using their art to train AI that steals their jobs. Stable Diffusion makes it trivially easy to knock off a particular artist's style.

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Getting rid of the law, Section 230, could make things much worse for both social media companies and the government. This law protects social media platforms and other websites and can quickly be acquitted against HB20. A Texas law passed last summer bans large social media platforms from doing anything to discriminate against the vast majority of content posted on their sites.

For example, it will soon be illegal in Texas for YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram to ban videos from white supremacists or ISIS. In fact, with a few limited exceptions, any content moderation these sites do, including "de-boosting" or "de-monetizing" videos or posts, will open them up to being sued in Texas. In effect, they are legally compelled not to curate their sites in that state.

Signal of change

As Texas takes the lead to get rid of "the special immunity of tech companies," known as Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act of 1996, and the First Amendment right of tech and social media companies, many others will follow or adopt the HB20 law. The consequence will be that in many more cities, social media companies will be provented the right to decide what content they want to host and what content they prefer to ban. Furthermore, providing the governments the right to compel social media companies to publish or leave up content even though they find them offensive or objectionable. No curation of sites means freedom of hate speech and no power over oneself property. In this case, it can be either a social media platform or a website. Ultimately, when the government starts attacking censorship and making social media companies publish content they would otherwise ban, people and social media companies will start looking for other ways that are not open or regulated by the governments to enjoy their experience online.

-JF
06-Feb-'23

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Who would have thought that the day would come when an AI completely replaced actors' speaking skills? Well, it is possible. James Earl Jones, the actor behind the iconic voice of Darth Vader, is handing over stewardship of the character to machine intelligence. He will permanently retire from the role by signing over his archival voice recordings to Respeecher, so they and Disney can create an AI version of his Darth Vader voice for future productions.

Signal of change

Respeecher is a start-up that creates an all-purpose AI voice platform in which they can envisage a future in which famous actors and ordinary content creators deploy cloned versions of their voices. It raises the possibility of films, TV shows, and podcasts spoken entirely by voice clones. These possibilities raises a couple of issues. Firstly, Jones signed over the rights to his voice to Disney and Respeecher. Meaning that this new age of AI reincarnation will mean new revenue streams for both living creatives and the estates of those who have died. If the price is right, Elvis's voice can be used as a character in a future Disney animated film. Secondly, paying to use a dead person's voice means that the living human actor will be deprived of the chance to take on certain roles. Such as the Darth Vader one. We're witnessing the birth of entirely new art forms. But more controversy, including criticism from marginalized creatives, surely lies ahead.

-JF
03-Jan-'23

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Listen now (18 min) | Disney say Darth Vader will now be voiced by an AI. Tesla is building a giant simulation of San Francisco. Plus more news and analysis from this week.