Brain implants to treat depression 🧠, AIs that mimic your voice 🙊, AR contact lenses on hold 👁️, and much more! ✨
Hi and welcome to another week of Black Mirror. I mean, Augmented Rarity 🫡.
This week i’m getting reminded why I started this newsletter, keep reading to understand why 😮💨:
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
From the creators of DALL·E and ChatGPT… 🥁 VALL·E 🥁, the new text to speech AI that can mimim your voice. Check out the demo page here 🙊.
ChatGPT just opened a waitlist for professional use 💼. A ChatGPT version that will always be available and with faster responses. For what the form anticipates, they might bring a monthly subscription model and they are testing how much are we willing to pay. I’d pay. Remember that OpenAI anticipates making $200 million in revenue this year, so this is a big step towards that goal. You can register here 🤓
Phishing emails are more convincing than ever because of AI 🎣, but not only the emails to get you, malicious code is also written with AI 🏴☠️. This is alarming because these attacks could get even more sophisticated as the algorithm is being trained. But don’t get me wrong, the problem is not the AI, but the people who are using it.
Brain impacts to treat depression. Yes. They take form as a tiny digital pill that's implanted under your skin and every day, for 15 min, it sends tiny electrical pulses that don’t go directly to the brain but act to it. This is being tested on humans already 😱 and the startup behind this, Inner Cosmos 🌌, has just raised $10M. This could allow that in the future, millions of people could regain control of their lives and this treatment could be expanded to other mental illnesses. We are getting to biohacking and transhumanism and it gives me goose bumps because the future is here. Yes, this is exactly what reminded me why I started this newsletter 😮💨
I must admit these “digital pills” aren’t as tiny as I expected, but it’s good progress! Another goose bump generator news: ChatGPT could potentially help detect Alzheimer through changes in speech. Doctors have been studying changes in speech for Alzheimer for decades but since everyone talks differently, AI could help detect those not so obvious changes in this extremely hard to diagnose illness.
If we were worried about your phone spying on you, worry more now that your vacuum cleaner might have been doing it too 🧹. Ok I know this is serious but it sounds funny, can’t help it.
Always make eye contact online thanks to NVIDIA’s new feature:
NVIDIA is launching an Eye Contact feature to Broadcast. It changes the position of your eyes to make them appear to be focused on the camera 👀
And I’ll end this section now, otherwise I’ll end up writing a full newspaper. Let’s get to XR, shall we? 🥽
🥽 Extended Reality
2022 wasn’t a good year neither for tech companies nor the XR industry itself. One of the companies that surprised me the most to get affected by layoffs is Mojo Vision, who has just put the production of the first AR contact lenses on hold.
“Although we haven’t had the chance yet to see it ship and to reach its full potential in the marketplace, we have proven that what was once considered science fiction can be developed into a technical reality,” Their CEO writes. Unfortunately the timing is not right as the investment is not enough and they had to to prescind of 75% of their staff 😔.
The dream of the American army to be like in a video game has to wait. The U.S. Army has temporarily halted plans to purchase more HoloLens devices due to previous reports of negative effects on testers, including bright screen lights, nausea, headaches, eye discomfort and short battery life.
A device to help vision impaired people to detect obstacles around them with ultrasonic sensors 🦇. Okay not exactly XR but it’s “extending” human’s senses and creating a new one. We had a similar brief back at my masters and I created a wearable suit that could read other people’s emotions (a sort of empathy amplifier but it then derived into a way to stealing emotional data 😈).
🗃 Resources
Read, watch, listen
📚 A collection of resources for intersection of design, UX, ML and AI. Yes, just adding this one because everything is here. I’ll be making a selection in the upcoming weeks tho.
To try/download
Definitely GPTZero, an AI-written text detector 🚨
Checklist.gg, an AI-powered checklist generator. Ask it about any topic, it will generate a checklist for you ☑️
I’m seriously considering starting a podcast at some point this year because we have so much to discuss and a 2-4 min read weekly email is not enough. Anyone else feeling that AI is going to fast? It is amazing tho 🤩
If you have some background on the topics I cover, please send me an email 📧 so we can plan something!
Aaaand as always, if you like Augmented Rarity, remember to follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin for daily content and to share so we can reach more people ✨
See you next Friday 💚
Best,
Martina