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Category: futurism – Page 836

Are lifelike digital humans the future of customer experience?

Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based company that uses CGI, AI and natural language processing to create lifelike digital people who can interact with humans in real time, has raised $70 million in a Series B1 round, bringing its total funding to $135 million. The startup will put the funds toward enhancing its Digital Brain technology, which uses a technique called “cognitive modeling” to recreate things like the human brain’s emotional response system in order to construct autonomous animated characters.

The funding was led by new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with additional participation from Cleveland Avenue, Liberty City Ventures and Solasta Ventures. Existing investors Temasek, Salesforce Ventures and Horizons Ventures also participated in the round.

While Soul Machines does envision its tech will be used for entertainment purposes, it’s mainly pursuing a B2B play that creates emotionally engaging brand and customer experiences. The basic problem the startup is trying to solve is how to create personal brand experiences in an increasingly digital world, especially when the main interaction most companies have with their customers is via apps and websites.

Chile is making its own glaciers

This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here.

In recent years, mountain communities in Chile have been facing longer and more intense dry spells thanks, in part, to rapidly shrinking glaciers in the Andes. This puts serious stress on local communities that rely on their fresh water.

But a team of Chilean climate experts have come up with a solution. In 2022, they will attempt to DIY their own glaciers, in hopes of supplying fresh water through the dry, summer months.

Four-story high rogue wave breaks records off the coast of Vancouver Island

A rogue wave measuring 58 feet (17.6 meters) tall was recorded off the coast of Vancouver Island, breaking the record for proportionality at three times the size of surrounding waves.

“Only a few rogue waves in high sea states have been observed directly, and nothing of this magnitude. The probability of such an event occurring is one in 1,300 years,” said Johannes Gemmrich, one of the lead researchers on rogue waves at the University of Victoria.

The wave made a splash in the scientific community for being proportionally the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded. Although it occurred in November 2020, the study confirming it was just released February 2 of this year.

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