Suffering from immersive experiences

How AI is able to define future reality

Last week I encountered Matthew, while having a latte with Elon in a new coffee place near my house. We had an interesting discussion on politics and how Elon saw himself as being the next president of the United States, while Matthew was debating him on his decisions he made so far. We had a lovely time, friends among each other. But then I noticed something was wrong. I felt everything started shaking. “Not another earthquake, please!” I remember myself thinking. Or was it Travis Scott’s concert in the venue around the corner? At the same time, I felt someone pulling my shirt, like I needed to run to go to a safe place. That’s the moment I tripped, and my glasses fell off. What happened after I just don’t know…

Using VR and AR in the Metaverse is one of the next big things in branding and advertising. Enabling a new way to engage audiences by creating immersive experiences, that go beyond everything we’ve been able to do so far. There are even companies enabling customers to feel, smell and taste products in the very near future! What an amazing development is that, right? It does bring a lot of challenges with it though, like reality, safety, mental state of users, obesity, and other side-effects. How are we going to deal with these challenges, while technical development is so fast, and soon we can be wherever, whenever and whomever we want to be?

Metaverse // Developing a limitless animated world

So, my daughter (6) just entered Roblox last week and is overexcited. We normally don’t have our kids spend too much time on devices like tablets or watch YouTube via our smart TV. We’d rather have them play with toys, craft some cool drawings, or run outside with friends. Which I believe is healthier and enriches them through the interaction with others. Just like I did myself when I was their age. But now, she did enter the space that both excites me and gives me some worries.

While most people believe metaverse is owned by Meta, this space originally comes from the gaming industry. Platforms like Roblox, Fornite but also Web3 platforms Decentraland and Sandbox are the actual base of the proposed metaverse. As the Big Tech saw a large audience entering this space during the peaks of the Covid-pandemic and the entertainment industry taking its chances with concerts of Ariana Grande and Travis Scott, they thought it would be a good decision to change focus to developing itself in these immersive spaces. With Facebook as frontrunner, claiming the entire space as theirs by rebranding completely and changing their name into Meta. Will the image of Facebook also damage the idea of Meta and thus the metaverse?

What I am more worried about is the fact that my daughter was entering the world of Roblox. That she becomes part of the metaverse and can interact with people we don’t know. And without knowing what their intentions are. Of course, as long as my daughter is playing (educational) games and learns cool stuff this way, it’s fine for me. But when it becomes a world where she wants to be more often, to escape reality and spend most of her time, then I believe we lose them to a world that is limitless and can do more harm than we all understand today.

What harm can these worlds do on our future generations? I believe even more than we ever imagined about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and all other so-called ‘social’ media platforms. Let’s name a few harmful, potential side effects:

1. Tech addiction

The gamification has the aim to keep users engaged and increase their usage. An addiction is therefore closely related to the use of this technology. Affecting the way users look at reality and extracting them from the outside world. Especially when this parallel world becomes more attractive than the real world.

2. Mental health issues

Being extracted from society, there is an increased chance of depression and anxiety. The pandemic has forced young adults to stay inside and ensured an increase in depressions among the audience.

3. Obesity

Related, by getting stuck in a gaming world, users are less outside and moving to a minimum. The combination with depressed feelings might cause to bad eating habits and overweight: obesity. Also, body image issues can arise even more and causing the next venue for body dysmorphia online.

So, these are risks I can foresee. And most likely I am missing the risks that we can’t foresee yet. In a world that is proposed to be parallel to our existing world. A world that we are creating for them ourselves. And looking back at this paragraph, what the *%^ are we building?

So, I tend to ask myself: isn’t there a way to make the metaverse more safe and real?

AI // Creation of Digital DNA

Reality is one of the main factors that defines the current vision on the metaverse. These worlds are fully animated and include mostly avatars that rather look like LEGO® Minifigures, GTA actors and action heroes. By spending a lot of time in these VR environments, is our reality becoming more of a game instead of a planet where we should solve real problems, like Climate Change, wars in multiple first and third world countries, and global poverty? Can’t we use the metaverse to solve real problems in real life?

Within business purposes, we see improvements towards a more realistic type of avatar. But still, these puppets are animated and don’t look like real humans. Your CEO looks like an animated version of Clark Kent, does that work effectively in business meetings? It still is a fake world in which we try to act like it’s the real world. Luckily, there are ways to make the VR worlds look more realistic, by applying AI and synthetic media to the creation of digital twin worlds and synthetic characters as AI Avatars.

Synthetic Media

Yes, synthetic media is the solution. But what is it about? Synthetic media, also known as AI-generated media, generative media, personalized media, or deep fakes has come a long way since it first hit the tech scene in the early 2000s, slowly consolidating itself as one of the most popular and important applications of AI technology. To some extent, this seems to fit the bill, but if we take a closer look at synthetic media, or however you choose to label this technology, you may spot something significant. Synthetic media manages to resonate with an integral part of ourselves that truly makes us human — our latent desire to express ourselves through the act of creation.

Humans.ai believes that synthetic media is a direct expression of our interest and desire to create something original, representing at the same time a new medium of expression that will challenge the current top-down media creation paradigm by reducing the gap between idea and execution.

Synthetic media is a catch-all term that describes the creation of artificially generated content in multiple modalities like text, image, audio, and video. Together, several of these AI technologies can turn ourselves completely in digital actors, enabling us to have our digital DNA. Enabling us to interact with real people in this proposed parallel world. Being ourselves and interact with everyone we want, wherever and whenever. That’s so cool!

But then again, we have created an amazing possibility to bring reality to the metaverse, what happens if someone steals my identity? Or creates another identity and starts doing harm to other people? Let’s try to discover some technical framework that can solve these challenges and not wait for governed solutions running behind the tech development…