Hyper-realistic robots 🤖, Midjourney inpainting 🎨, India landing on the moon 🌝, and much more! ✨

#53

Hey there! Welcome back to Augmented Rarity 👽, your weekly newsletter on emerging tech and future trends.

🖼️ Today's cover: hyper realistic humanoid robots in the making.

Let’s begin! 👇

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🤖 Artificial Intelligence

Let’s start with “robonews”:

• This week’s AI highlight is definitely the World Robot Conference. My top 3 pics:

  • An army of robots that follows your facial expressions (there's a camera that tracks and maps your facial expressions onto the robots).

    

    Image: AP Photo/Andy Wong

  • A backpack for octopus arms, similar to what we saw a couple of months ago.

    

    Image: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

  • The most realistic androids I’ve ever seen so far.

    

    Image:AP Photo/Andy Wong

• They were also having an exhibit of handmade robots in Israel that mimic animals like turtles and elephants and got elements of old-fashioned puppetry built into their mechanics and design.

  

  Image: Xinhua

• They say money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy you real life manga inspired robots. I’d be happy.

  

  Image: ARCHAX

And now let’s get to more general AI news:

• Midjourney finally allows inpainting! This new feature, that Dalle had for over a year already, allows you to do a modification on your AI creation, which is great for when you already got something good going on but you want to be more specific.

  

  Image: Midjourney

• Stephen King’s books had been used to train AI 📚. Nothing new, when AI art took off, a lot of people saw their work showing up in AI-generated images, and although it's annoying, we've come to accept that AI is fed with all the data we put online, plus all the illegally-obtained books.

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🥽 Extended Reality

• After Meta and Apple, Pico also wants more hand tracking in VR

• Microsoft kills Kinect again 😵. This is your last chance as the last few Azure Kinect Developer Kits will be on sale until the end of October (or until they run out).

  

• Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit 3, MRTK3, is gonna get its own independent development, with Qualcomm and Magic Leap joining Microsoft's committee. Let’s not forget that they laid off the entire MRTK team earlier this year 🐷.

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🛸 Space

While Russia's first lunar mission in 47 years failed when it spun out of control and crashed into the moon, India becomes fourth country to successfully land on the moon 🌝. India's success means a new era of space exploration 🎉. We’ll soon cover more about this second space race.

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🗃 Resources

• 🔗 Are AR glasses still a pipe dream?

• 🔗 Ex-NASA astronaut explains why the moon's south pole is of special interest

• 🔗 Humanoid Robot Design Evolution: Now Wearing Clothes

• 📺 Selena Gomez Reacts to AI Version of Herself Singing Ex The Weeknd’s Song “Starboy”

• 📄 Trustworthy LLMs: a Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' Alignment

• 📺 How chefs are preparing food for a fully automated restaurant

• 🔗 How Many People Does It Take to Start a Colony on Mars?

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And that’s it for today!

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