Umesh Kumar, Author at Jet Developers Blog

Metaverse

The Metaverse refers to a virtual reality space where users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other participants in real-time. It is a concept often associated with a fully immersive and interconnected digital universe, where people can engage in various activities, such as socializing, working, gaming, creating, and exploring. It typically incorporates elements of augmented reality, virtual reality, and the internet to create a shared and persistent virtual world that goes beyond traditional two-dimensional online experiences. The vision of the metaverse is to provide a highly immersive and interactive environment where individuals can have a sense of presence and engage in diverse virtual experiences that mimic or transcend aspects of the physical world.

Brief History

The term Metaverse is derived from the Greek words ‘meta’ (beyond) and ‘verse’ (universe). Consider it a universe beyond reality that will be capable of replacing every activity in our lives.

The word “metaverse” originally appears in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science-fiction novel Snowcrash, which depicts a future in which millions of individuals interact in a cyberspace environment using virtual avatars. This notion was popularized further in Earnest Cline’s 2011 sci-fi novel Ready Player One, in which ordinary individuals strap on VR headsets and log into a virtual world to play out their imaginations.

Later in the early 1990s, a firm called Sega launched VR gaming devices, such as the SEGA VR-1 motion circular, which aimed to provide exciting experiences for arcade gamers. All of these technologies are thought to be the origins of the metaverse, however, the metaverse became popular among the general public once Facebook announced its rebranding to the Meta.

Technology in Metaverse

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR): VR and AR technologies play a crucial role in creating immersive and interactive experiences within the metaverse. VR headsets, like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or Valve Index, provide users with a fully immersive virtual environment, while AR devices, such as Microsoft HoloLens or smartphone AR capabilities, overlay digital elements onto the real world.
3D Modeling and Animation: Creating the virtual environments and objects in the metaverse requires 3D modeling and animation tools. Software like Blender, Autodesk Maya, or Unity’s 3D modeling features enable artists and developers to design and build lifelike virtual assets.
Game Engines: Game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine provide the foundation for developing interactive experiences in the metaverse. They offer powerful tools for rendering graphics, physics simulations, scripting, and creating interactive gameplay mechanics.
Networking and Cloud Infrastructure: The metaverse relies on robust networking and cloud infrastructure to enable real-time interactions and seamless experiences across different users and devices. Technologies like cloud computing, edge computing, and distributed networking protocols facilitate the scalability, reliability, and synchronization required for a shared virtual world.
Blockchain and Digital Assets: Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and transparent nature, can be utilized in the metaverse for secure ownership and trading of digital assets. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can represent unique virtual items, artwork, or virtual real estate within the metaverse, allowing users to buy, sell, and collect digital possessions.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI plays a role in creating dynamic and intelligent virtual characters or NPCs (non-player characters) within the metaverse. AI algorithms can enable realistic behavior, natural language processing for interactive conversations, and procedural generation techniques for generating diverse and lifelike virtual environments.
Social Platforms and Communication Tools: Social platforms and communication tools, such as Discord, Zoom, or VRChat, provide the means for users to interact and socialize within the metaverse. These platforms facilitate voice and text communication, community building, and shared experiences among users.

Student Builds an AI Model to Translate Sign Language into English in Real-Time

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used to develop various kinds of translation models to improve communication amongst users and break language barriers across regions. Companies like Google and Facebook use AI to develop advanced translation models for their services. Now, a third-year engineering student from India has created an AI model that can detect American Sign Language (ASL) and translate them into English in real-time.

Indian Student Develops AI-based ASL Detector

Priyanjali Gupta, a student at the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), shared a video on her LinkedIn profile, showcasing a demo of the AI-based ASL Detector in action. Although the AI model can detect and translate sign languages into English in real-time, it supports only a few words and phrases at the moment. These include Hello, Please, Thanks, I Love You, Yes, and No.

Gupta created the model by leveraging Tensorflow object detection API and using transfer learning through a pre-trained model called ssd_mobilenet. That means she was able to repurpose existing codes to fit her ASL Detector model. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the AI model does not actually translate ASL to English. Instead, it identifies an object, in this case, the signs, and then determines how similar it is based on pre-programmed objects in its database.

In an interview with Interesting Engineering, Gupta noted that her biggest inspiration for creating such an AI model is her mother nagging her “to do something” after joining her engineering course in VIT. “She taunted me. But it made me contemplate what I could do with my knowledge and skillset. One fine day, amid conversations with Alexa, the idea of inclusive technology struck me. That triggered a set of plans,” she told the publication.

Gupta also credited YouTuber and data scientist Nicholas Renotte’s video from 2020, which details the development of an AI-based ASL Detector, in her statement.

Although Gupta’s post on LinkedIn garnered numerous positive responses and appreciation from the community, an AI-vision engineer pointed out that the transfer learning method used in her model is “trained by other experts” and it is the “easiest thing to do in AI.” Gupta acknowledged the statement and wrote that building “a deep learning model solely for sign detection is a really hard problem but not impossible.”

“Currently I’m just an amateur student but I am learning and I believe sooner or later our open-source community, which is much more experienced and learned than me, will find a solution and maybe we can have deep learning models solely for sign languages,” she further added.

You can check out Priyanjali’s GitHub page to know more about the AI model and access the relevant resources of the project. Also, let us know your thoughts about Gupta’s ASL Detector in the comments below.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI Chatbot developed by Open AI. The chatbot has a language-based model that the developer fine-tunes for human interaction in a conversational manner.

Effectively it’s a simulated chatbot primarily designed for customer service; people use it for various other purposes too though. These range from writing essays to drafting business plans, to generating code. But what is it and what can it really do?

What is ChatGPT?

It is an AI chatbot auto-generative system created by Open AI for online customer care. It is a pre-trained generative chat, which makes use of (NLP) Natural Language Processing. The source of its data is textbooks, websites, and various articles, which it uses to model its own language for responding to human interaction.

This chatbot system provides information and responses to inquiries through AI. The popular version of ChatGPT is the GPT-3 model.

What is ChatGPT used for?

The main feature of Chat GPT is generating responses like those humans would provide, in a text box. Therefore, it is suitable for chatbots, AI system conversations, and virtual assistants.

However, it can also give natural answers to questions in a conversational tone and can generate stories poems and more. Moreover, it can:

Write code
Write an article or blog post
Translate
Debug
Write a story/poem
Recommend chords and lyrics

To make the AI carry out one of these demands, all you need to do is type the command into the chatbot.

What is Chat GPT Pro?

Chat GPT Pro, is a rumored professional subscription plan for OpenAI’s Chat GPT. The service was hinted to cost around $42 per month. Surprisingly, the professional plan has not yet been introduced since the reports were first spread at the start of the year.

However, OpenAI has recently released a subscription service, but under a different name – Chat GPT Plus. This plan offers users exclusive benefits including priority access and faster response times. Costing only $20 a month, this option is significantly cheaper than Pro.

What is Chat GPT trained on?

It relies on NLP (Natural Language Processing). It’s an excellent tool for researchers and developers working on various NLP projects, and it has many specific tasks, domains, and applications available to work within.

It is well-trained on biased and unbiased data, in the form of text from books, articles, and websites. Chat GPT can reproduce data outputs and reliability – crucial for many sensitive apps and other valuable Al systems. However, it is still prone to error, and biases and depends on its training data – provided in 2021.

As humans we are, more and more, interacting with Al-powered machines, and Chat GPT is a revolution in the field of Al. It is a robust model and particularly advanced thanks to its deep-learning capabilities and NLP. Ultimately, it can generate human-like answers and is easily understandable to users. Thought that doesn’t always make it right.

Can I use Chat GPT on my phone?

Yes, you can use Chat GPT on your phone. There’s nothing preventing you from doing so, as the mobile web version of the app will allow you to carry out the same actions as on a desktop browser.

Of course, you actually need a phone number for Chat GPT if you want to log in. And the ability to use it on a smartphone makes mobile use very easy – as long as you can connect.

Is there Chat GPT for Android?

There is no official Chat GPT app from Open AI, and there is no information as to whether there will be. There are purported ‘Chat GPT apps’ available in the Play Store, but these are not from the company.

Importantly, Chat GPT makes use of the GPT-3 model which is only accessible via the OpenAI Chat GPT page. But although there is no Android (or iPhone) app from OpenAI, you can access Chat GPT on your mobile device by going to the same URL.

What is Chat GPT good for?

Chat GPT is pretty good at generating text which mimics human speech. This is useful if you need a post for a website or social media page, but don’t have the time to write it out yourself. It can also produce code – again, useful if you don’t have the time to write it out yourself.