SpaceX gave an update on early tests of its Starlink satellite internet network, which showed speeds capable of playing online video games and streaming movies.
Starlink is the ambitious plan by Elon Musk’s company to build an interconnected network of about 12,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit. To date, SpaceX has launched about 650 of its version 1.0 satellites and is currently building a system of ground stations and user terminals to connect consumers directly to its network.
The company confirmed during the webcast of its latest launch on Monday that employees have been testing Starlink’s latency and download speeds, key measures for an internet service provider. SpaceX senior certification engineer Kate Tice said that the initial results of those tests “have been good.”
Denis Shiryaev uses algorithms to colorize and sharpen old movies, bumping them up to a smooth 60 frames per second. The result is a stunning glimpse at the past.
Move.ai can use artificial intelligence to capture a 3D representation of an actor in a process known as motion capture. But it doesn’t need actors in Lycra suits with lots of white balls attached to them. And it enables game companies to do motion capture in a remote way during the pandemic.
That’s an important technological advancement, because the hassles of motion-capture systems have led to a stall in production for both movie makers and video game companies. Move.ai hopes to fix that with “markerless” motion capture that can lower the costs and hassles of doing the work.
The technology comes from a London company that started out capturing the images of sports athletes and turning them into digital animated objects. But the pandemic hobbled that business with the closing of physical sports events. Luckily, games need better realism to give players total immersion and engagement in an alternate reality, and that means that they need motion capture.
The internet has transformed most areas of our lives over the last few decades, and the technology keeps improving: researchers just set a new record for data transmission rates, logging an incredible speed of 178 terabits per second (Tbps).
That’s around a fifth faster than the previous record, set by a team of researchers in Japan, and roughly twice as fast as the best internet available today.
With 4K movies about 15GB in size, you could download about 1,500 of them in a single second at the new speed.
Chinese film authorities issued a new document outlining policy measures to boost the country’s production of science fiction movies.
Entitled “Several Opinions on Promoting the Development of Science Fiction Films,” the document highlights how the sci-fi genre fits into the ruling Communist Party’s broader ideological and technological goals. It was released earlier this month by China’s National Film Administration and the China Association for Science and Technology, a professional organization.
The document focuses on domestically developing pro-China science fiction film content and high-tech production capability. It comes in the wake of the country’s first VFX-heavy sci-fi blockbuster hit, “The Wandering Earth,” which remains the third highest grossing film of all time in the territory with a local box office of $691 million.
A team of researchers at Stanford University has created an artificial intelligence-based player called the Vid2Player that is capable of generating startlingly realistic tennis matches—featuring real professional players. They have written a paper describing their work and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server. They have also uploaded a YouTube video demonstrating their player.
Video game companies have put a lot of time and effort into making their games look realistic, but thus far, have found it tough going when depicting human beings. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a different approach to the task—instead of trying to create human-looking characters from scratch, they use sprites, which are characters based on video of real people. The sprites are then pushed into action by a computer using artificial intelligence to mimic the ways a human being moves while playing tennis. The researchers trained their AI system using video of real tennis professionals performing; the footage also provided imagery for the creation of sprites. The result is an interactive player that depicts real professional tennis players such as Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Novak Jovovich and Rafael Nadal in action. Perhaps most importantly, the simulated gameplay is virtually indistinguishable from a televised tennis match.
The Vid2Player is capable of replaying actual matches, but because it is interactive, a user can change the course of the match as it unfolds. Users can change how a player reacts when a ball comes over the net, for example, or how a player plays in general. They can decide which part of the opposite side of the court to aim for, or whether to hit backhand or forehand. They can also slightly alter the course of a real match by allowing a shot that in reality was out of bounds to land magically inside the line. The system also allows for players from different eras to compete. The AI software adjusts for lighting and clothing (if video is used from multiple matches). Because AI software is used to teach the sprites how to play, the actions of the sprites actually mimic the most likely actions of the real player.
Starring: Carlos Burle, Sylvio Mancusi, Rodrigo Koxa, Maya Gabeira, Felipe “Gordo” Cesarano, Hugo Vau, Eric Rebiere, Pedro Scooby, Andrew Cotton and Garrett Macnamara Shoot with Canon 7D and canon lens 300mm f.4 A film by Hélio Valentim http://www.heliovalentim.com
Awesome Tow In Session from Nazaré in Portugal.
The X-Treme Channel features awesome extreme sports action from all over the world!
Aside from tracking asteroids that could endanger the planet, the telescope played a major role in the “SETI” program — the search for intelligent life. It was notably used by astronomer Carl Sagan to send an interstellar message.
Earlier this week, the facility was forced to close down after a cable supporting a metal platform above the telescope fell, tearing a 100-foot gash in its giant reflector dish.
“The cable didn’t really break in the sense of a cable kind of snapping, but it just sort of slipped from its socket, which is you know, an even weirder condition,” Arecibo Observatory Director Francisco Cordova told CBS News’ Jeff Glor.
Just like a nostalgic grandparent flipping through old photo albums, our brains constantly replay memories from past events in our lives as we sleep.
It may seem overly sentimental at first, but our minds aren’t just looking to reminisce and remember the good times. All of that brain activity while dreaming serves to strengthen and preserve existing memories, all while simultaneously finding some room for any new memories we may have made over the previous day.
Those are the main findings from a fascinating new study just released by the University of California, San Diego that investigated neural activity during sleep. The research team at UCSD says that no memory is set in stone within our minds; any memory can be lost, and sleep is when our minds rejuvenate old memories via replay and refine/make room for new memories.
