Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: AI
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"Each of these images was generated by AI based on a brief text description of a movie. Can you guess the movie from the image?" Some of them are incredibly obvious, while many (most?) seem utterly insane, but also with some elements that appear to be intuitively insightful. This project from Noah Veltman, who creates data…
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Above: Art created by an AI called "Alejandro", and the AI-generated photo of "Alejandro" I told you last week about "Alejandro", an AI personality who is creating works of art, which entrepreneur August Rosedale is then selling as NFTs. But just how much of a personality does Alejandro actually have? Skeptical that the Turing Test…
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Since launching last week, Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat has been swarming with avatars of all kinds, playing fetch and applying copious force-feedback enabled head pats with the AI-powered pooches. Dr. Kim, the director on the project, told me Monday that it's already attracted over 43,000 visits, and been favorited 7000 times. And while…
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First Class Trouble is a new indie game in Early Access on Steam, and it's next on my list to play. (Soon as I master Fights in Tight Spaces, but that's another story.) To judge by early footage, First Class gameplay is a fairly clever combination of Among Us (but highly immersive) meets BioShock (bloody…
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This is a seriously impressive demonstration of Intel Labs' Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement project, which looks to me like a major advance in realistic 3D graphics. Very roughly summarized, it uses machine learning algorithms to merge 3D graphics with related footage taken from real life — in this case, Grand Theft Auto Online, and video footage…
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Verbose, sassy, and surprisingly spry, Mr. Bones is an animesh skeleton on the Marketplace here from The Really Useful Scripts Corner (a proud sponsoring partner to this blog) powered by the Corner’s unique chatbot system. (Click here to chat with Mr. Bones in SL — touch the pumpkin to rezz him.) As you can see…
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Just in time for Easter, you can buy a pet rabbit in Sinespace (a media partner to New World Notes), and unlike most virtual world pets, Buddy Rabbit is special, built on a complicated AI architecture. As seen above, Buddy can inquisitively explore an area, flee from trouble — even doing flying spin-leaps to get…
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This beautiful portrait of Tupac was created by Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins using Deep Dream’s neural network — and now, a rare copy of it can be purchased as an NFT on the blockchain. Given the recent hype over NFT for artists, you’re probably not surprised by that, but Dr. Gaskins’ NFTs are more noteworthy for…
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… is a title to a post I never guessed I'd write even 12 months ago. But here we are. As to what the F it all actually means: NFT, for non-fungible tokens, are virtual items of perceived value (art, keepsakes, etc) bought and sold on a blockchain. Virtual art made by AI artists, in…
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Well this is the most expressive I’ve ever seen my avatar or for that many any other avatar in the virtual world (don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me): This thanks to Wombo.AI, a new smartphone app that’s designed to convert a RL selfie photo into a lip-syncing popstar via some pretty impressive deep fake machine…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 