A new AI-powered avatar of Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne could make its first UK appearance in Birmingham. Osbourne's wife Sharon and son Jack announced plans for the hyper-real version of the Birmingham-born singer at an expo in the US last week. Talking to Ed James on BBC Radio WM, she said that plans for the avatar were brilliant. I've seen the tests that they've done of Ozzy and you can see every pore on his face, his beard's coming through, it's that detailed, she said. Osbourne died in July aged 76, less than three weeks after he had performed at Villa Park with Black Sabbath.

Film-maker James Cameron and Disney are being sued by an actress who has accused the director of using her likeness as the basis for one of the lead characters in his hit film series Avatar. German-born US actress Q'orianka Kilcher, who is of indigenous Peruvian descent, alleged that in 2005 - when she was 14 - Cameron extracted her facial features from a photograph of her portraying Pocahontas in another film, The New World. In court documents filed on Tuesday in California, her team claimed Cameron directed his design team to use it as the foundation for the character of Neytiri, depicted on screen by Zoe Saldaña. BBC News has contacted Cameron and Disney for a comment. The Avatar movies contain a hybrid of live-action performance mixed with computer-generated characters.

We present DreamWaltz, a novel framework for generating and animating complex 3D avatars given text guidance and parametric human body prior. While recent methods objects, creating have sho high-quality wn encouraging and animatable results for 3D text-to-3D avatars remains generation challenging. of common To create high-quality 3D avatars, DreamWaltz proposes 3D-consistent occlusionaware Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to optimize implicit neural representations with canonical poses. It provides view-aligned supervision via 3D-aware skeleton conditioning which enables complex avatar generation without artifacts and multiple faces. For animation, our method learns an animatable 3D avatar representation from abundant image priors of diffusion model conditioned on various poses, which could animate complex non-rigged avatars given arbitrary poses without retraining. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that DreamWaltz is an effective and robust approach for creating 3D avatars that can take on complex shapes and appearances as well as novel poses for animation. The proposed framework further enables the creation of complex scenes with diverse compositions, including avatar-avatar, avatar-object and avatar-scene interactions.

Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey have different visions for how to use AI for management purposes, but both imagine a system of heightened control. Silicon Valley moguls have lately complained that too many people are too negative about artificial intelligence. They're likewise frustrated by stalled AI adoption among major corporations that aren't seeing the lucrative efficiencies promised by Big Tech. But if consumers and corporations are proving resistant to AI's acceleration, it hasn't stopped billionaire CEOs from charging ahead with their personal fantasies of what the technology can do. On April 13, the Financial Times reported that Meta is working up a photorealistic, three-dimensional AI avatar of chief exec Mark Zuckerberg, according to several people at the company.

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' 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.

We present DreamHuman, a method to generate realistic animatable 3D human avatar models solely from textual descriptions.