Virtual & Augmented Reality news

Because VR should be for everyone.
Owlchemy Labs, the developer behind popular VR games such as Job Simulator and Rick & Morty Virtual Rick-ality, today announced a new update for Cosmonious High that introduces several nifty features designed to make the alien adventure experience accessible to players with visual impairments.
Available now as a free download, the Vision Accessibility Update (VAU) adds object highlighting that allows low-vision players to see objects more clearly and voice

OpenAI has built a version of GPT-4, its latest text-generating model, that can “remember” roughly 50 pages of content thanks to a greatly expanded context window.
That might not sound significant. But it’s five times as much information as the vanilla GPT-4 can hold in its “memory” and eight times as much as GPT-3.
“The model is able to flexibly use long documents,” Greg Brockman, OpenAI co-founder and president, said during a live demo this afternoon.

In addition to today’s launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is now confirmed to be the GPT model running in Bing, Microsoft also announced the stable version of its Edge web browser will now include the new Bing AI chatbot in a sidebar. The feature was first introduced at Microsoft’s AI press event in February but was previously only available as a developer preview, not a public release.
With today’s official unveiling of GPT-4, Microsoft is shipping the feature, which it cal

Learn various introductory techniques while unlocking the secrets of your constellation.
Available now on Meta Quest headsets, Fight Back VR is an educational VR experience that promises to teach you the basics of self-defense, including important mental skills and muscle memory. According to its developers, their goal is to fight back against gender-based violence by users to build up their self-confidence should they ever find themselves in a potentially dangerous situation.Credit: France T&ea

OpenAI’s new GPT-4 AI model has made its big debut, and is already powering everything from a virtual volunteer for the visually impaired to an improved language learning bot in Duolingo. But what sets GPT-4 apart from previous versions like ChatGPT and GPT-3.5? Here are the 5 biggest differences between these popular systems.
First, though, what’s in a name? Although ChatGPT was originally described as being GPT-3.5 (and therefore a few iterations beyond GPT-3), it is not itself a v

Alongside GPT-4, OpenAI has open-sourced a software framework to evaluate the performance of its AI models. Called Evals, OpenAI says that the tooling is designed to allow anyone to report shortcomings in its models to help guide further improvements.
It’s a sort of crowdsourcing approach to model testing, OpenAI says.
“We use Evals to guide development of our models (both identifying shortcomings and preventing regressions), and our users can apply it for tracking performance across

Duolingo is introducing a new subscription tier with features powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4 technology, the company announced on Tuesday. The new tier, Duolingo Max, costs $29.99 per month and unlocks two new AI-powered features called “Roleplay” and “Explain My Answer.” The announcement comes the same day that OpenAI released its next-generation GPT-4 AI language model.
The Roleplay feature unlocks an AI chatbot that allows users to practice real world conversation

When Microsoft announced the new AI-enabled Bing, which it built on top of OpenAI’s GPT models, neither company would confirm which version of GPT was being used beyond saying it was a next-gen version of the model that powered ChatGPT. Today, OpenAI announced GPT-4, a significant update to GPT-3.5. As it turns out, Bing was using it all along.
“We are happy to confirm that the new Bing is running on GPT-4, which we’ve customized for search,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi

OpenAI has introduced the world to its latest powerful AI model, GPT-4, and refreshingly the first thing they partnered up on with its new capabilities is helping people with visual impairments. Be My Eyes, which lets blind and low vision folks ask sighted people to describe what their phone sees, is getting a ‘virtual volunteer’ that offers AI-powered help at any time.
We’ve written about Be My Eyes plenty of times since it was started in 2015, and of course the rise of comput

After months of anticipation, OpenAI has released a powerful new image- and text-understanding AI model, GPT-4, that the company calls “the latest milestone in its effort in scaling up deep learning.”
GPT-4 is available today via OpenAI’s API with a waitlist and in ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s premium plan for ChatGPT, its viral AI-powered chatbot.
It’s been hiding in plain sight, as it turns out. Microsoft confirmed today that Bing Chat, its chatbot tech co-developed wit

Following a mass layoff at Meta late last year which affected 11,000 of its employees, the company announced today that it would be laying off another 10,000 workers through multiple rounds.Update (March 14th, 2023):  According to a Facebook post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta is laying off an additional 10,000 employees across multiple rounds. It’s also set to close hiring for 5,000 open roles, and cancel more low-priority projects. Layoffs are said to begin this week, first hitti

Anthropic, a startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, today launched something of a rival to the viral sensation ChatGPT.
Called Claude, Anthropic’s AI — a chatbot — can be instructed to perform a range of tasks, including searching across documents, summarizing, writing and coding, and answering questions about particular topics. In these ways, it’s similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But Anthropic makes the case that Claude is “much less likely to produce harmful

PlayStation VR 2 launched late last month alongside more than 40 titles, which included games entirely new to the platform as well existing games from other platforms and upgraded PSVR titles. The headset’s first monthly top download chart has revealed a big shift in which games are taking an early lead in the headset’s growing library.Taking the top spot across the US & Canada, the EU and Japan is Kayak VR: Mirage, a kayak racing sim initially released on SteamVR headsets i

 
PlayStation VR 2 launched late last month alongside more than 40 titles, which included games entirely new to the platform as well existing games from other platforms and upgraded PSVR titles. The headset’s first monthly top download chart has revealed a big shift in which games are taking an early lead in the headset’s growing library.Taking the top spot across the US & Canada, the EU and Japan is Kayak VR: Mirage, a kayak racing sim initially released on SteamVR hea

PlayStation VR 2 launched late last month alongside more than 40 titles, which included games entirely new to the platform as well existing games from other platforms and upgraded PSVR titles. The headset’s first monthly top download chart has revealed a big shift in which games are taking an early lead in the headset’s growing library.Taking the top spot across the US & Canada, the EU and Japan is Kayak VR: Mirage, a kayak racing sim initially released on SteamVR headsets i

ZEISS, the German optical systems manufacturer, announced it’s acquired majority share of the joint venture Tooz Technologies, an AR/VR optics creator founded by Zeiss and Deutsche Telekom in 2018.Zeiss and Deutsche Telekom previously had an even 50% stake in Tooz, which has functioned as a sort of AR optics skunkworks for the companies. Zeiss is now sole owner of the startup.
Zeiss says Tooz will continue to exist independently as it focuses on serial production and visual correction in i

Healthcare has been pegged as a prime candidate for more AI applications — both to aid in clinical work and to lighten some of the more time-consuming administrative burdens that come around clinical care. Now, Nabla, the digital health startup out of Paris co-founded by AI entrepreneur Alexandre Lebrun, claims to be the first to build a tool using GPT-3 to help physicians do their work — more specifically, their paperwork.
Copilot, as Nabla’s new service is called, is launchin

Healthcare has been pegged as a prime candidate for more AI applications — both to aid in clinical work and to lighten some of the more time-consuming administrative burdens that come around clinical care. Now, Nabla, the digital health startup out of Paris co-founded by AI entrepreneur Alexandre Lebrun, claims to be the first to build a tool using GPT-3 to help physicians do their work — more specifically, their paperwork.
Copilot, as Nabla’s new service is called, is launchin

Chris Saad ContributorShare on Twitter Chris Saad is a startup and product builder, angel investor and strategic adviser. Previously, he was head of product for the Uber Developer Platform.As AI becomes a transformative part of our technology landscape, a common vocabulary about the capabilities of each new tool and technique is essential. Common vocabularies create shared intellectual spaces allowing all stakeholders to accelerate understanding, increase adoption, facilitate collaboration, benc

Google and Microsoft are locked in a head-to-head competition to bring as much generative AI to their productivity services as possible. Only days ahead of Microsoft’s “Future of Work” event, Google today announced a sweeping update to Workspace that will bring its generative AI models to virtually every part of its productivity suite, in addition to new developer solutions that will make Google’s foundation models, including its 540 billion-parameter PaLM large language

At the risk of stating the obvious, AI-powered chatbots are hot right now.
The tools, which can write essays, emails and more given a few text-based instructions, have captured the attention of tech hobbyists and enterprises alike. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, arguably the progenitor, has an estimated more than 100 million users. Via an API, brands including Instacart, Quizlet and Snap have begun building it into their respective platforms, boosting the usage numbers further.
But to the chagrin of so