Cornell University researchers have developed a robot, called ReMotion, that occupies physical space on a remote user’s behalf, automatically mirroring the user’s movements in real time and conveying key body language that is lost in standard virtual environments.

“Pointing gestures, the perception of another’s gaze, intuitively knowing where someone’s attention is—in remote settings, we lose these nonverbal, implicit cues that are very important for carrying out design activities,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student of information science.

Sakashita is the lead author of “ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment,” which he presented at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany. “With ReMotion, we show that we can enable rapid, dynamic interactions through the help of a mobile, automated robot.”

And, imagine if every penny sank into this was available for AI research right now.

Meta sank tens of billions into its CEO’s virtual reality dream, but what will he do next?

Make a template based on a 1980s virtual reality game, create 25 AI characters, give them personalities and histories, equip them with memory, and throw in some ChatGPT—and what do you get?

A pretty impressive representation of a functioning society with compelling, believable human interactions.

That’s the conclusion of six computer scientists from Stanford University and Google Research who designed a Sims-like environment to observe the daily routines of inhabitants of an AI-generated virtual town.