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Meta Is Shutting Down Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest

WIRED

Meta's flailing virtual reality social experience is being discontinued in June. It's part of Meta's broader moves to slim down the business that became its namesake. Pour one out from your digital bottle, because Meta is shutting down the virtual reality experience of Horizon Worlds. Meta sent an email blast to Horizon Worlds users today stating that the social VR world will officially end on its Quest VR headsets; starting March 31, Horizon Worlds will no longer be in the Quest store. Some Horizon-specific perks, including Meta Credits, avatars, and some digital clothes and in-world purchases, will also be removed.


Digital blackface flourishes under Trump and AI: 'The state is bending reality'

The Guardian

Digital blackface flourishes under Trump and AI: 'The state is bending reality' Late last year, as a US government shutdown cut off the Snap benefits that low-income families rely on for groceries, videos on social media cast the fallout in frantic scenes. "Imma keep it real with you," a Black woman said in a viral TikTok post, "I get over $2,500 a month in stamps. I sell'em, $2,000 worth, for about $1,200-$1,500 cash." Another Black woman ranted about taxpayers' responsibility to her seven children with seven men, and yet another melted down after her food stamps were rejected at a corn-dog counter. Visible watermarks stamped some videos as AI-generated - apparently, too faintly for the racist commentators and hustlers more than happy to believe the frenzy was real.






XAGen: 3D Expressive Human Avatars Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in 3D-aware GAN models have enabled the generation of realistic and controllable human body images. However, existing methods focus on the control of major body joints, neglecting the manipulation of expressive attributes, such as facial expressions, jaw poses, hand poses, and so on.


AVATAR: OptimizingLLMAgentsforToolUsagevia ContrastiveReasoning

Neural Information Processing Systems

InIRsystems, theretrievermodule directly influences theperformance ofdownstream tasks, such as retrieval-augmented generation [20, 29, 30] and knowledge-intensive question answering [34, 52]. However, these methods do not explicitly consider targeted optimization for tool usage or the impact on complex multi-stage tasks.