PlayStation VR2 Arrives - Tech Insiders News, February 2023
A curated collection of «signal over noise» links about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.
Lots of good insights this week! Let’s dive in:
- The new PlayStation VR 2 headset is coming up this week, and Bigscreen made the surprise with the world’s smallest VR headset.
The PSVR seems to be a pretty good device (see full review here), but faces the limitations of being tied to a Gaming Console: it can’t be plugged into a PC (yet) so the catalog will be limited to PS5 games, and movies.
That’s too bad: I think that interoperability is an essential component for the tech world to be less competitive and more beneficial to society. Also, isn’t interoperability the foundational concept of the «Metaverse»?
The Bigscreen VR is interesting: it’s very small, and it will allow you to scan your head with an iPhone to create a custom foam that matches your face’s shape, in addition to adjusting to your IPD (interpupillary distance, very important in VR to get a clear picture and avoid motion sickness).
It’s a trend to notice: personalization is also coming to VR Headsets. Imagine a future where the headset sits comfortably and is also adjusted to your sight with corrective lenses; it will drive the adoption to a wider audience. - As usual these days, a lot of AI news:
Bing Chat makes the news with a lot of false statements and expressions of emotions when challenged. It feels very uncanny, but remember, these AI are (for now) not actually having these emotions, they are just predicting texts from being trained on billions of texts we humans wrote. Don’t anthropomorphize them. It gets philosophical and might be up to debate, but to me, these AI are not sentient nor alive… yet.
(Skynet, if you read this later, please don’t kill me.) That being said, it’s a great example that aligning AI to humanity is very complex.
Related: Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, DALLE, and Bing Chat, published their plan for the alignment of AI with human interests. And it gets weird: if I understood it correctly, they basically plan to build new AI systems to research how to align other AIs! Isn’t that chicken or egg / putting off a fire with fire situation? It does not look good (deeper dive here).
Credit https://twitter.com/jimplantstrees - In short:
A few weeks back I talked about text-based game generation; the very popular Metaverse Virtual World Roblox is exploring this as well!
NBA demoed a concept where you can use their app to scan and see yourself in place of a player on the field. I’m not a basketball fan, so if you are, please tell me, but I’m doubtful of the actual purpose of this concept. Is this something that fans want? Or any sports fan at all?
The tech is nice though, I can imagine many applications in games, movies… Or fake videos!
I believe that the ability to focus is a superpower in our world, where many apps and websites are constantly fighting to get our attention. In the past week, I’ve tried:
one sec: fantastic to interrupt the limbic hijack that social network apps can have on us. (limbic hijack = opening an app with the intention to check it for a few seconds and waking up 20 minutes later still doomscrolling)
Rize is the best time-tracking app I’ve ever tried and doubles with well-being features such as focus and break reminders.
Note: I’m not affiliated with any of these, I just found them very good.
And today’s image, thanks to Midjourney: «In a Virtual World, two AI entities are competing for humanity's attention.».
A bit dark?
Yes, but we can change things! It’s a different mindset, away from unhealthy competition and mindless pursuit of money and power.
Remember: don’t hate the players, change the game (Liv Boeree)
#ExperientialIntelligence