This study is the first to explore whether multi-modal large language models (LLMs) can align their behaviors with visual personas, addressing a significant gap in the literature that predominantly focuses on text-based personas. We developed a novel dataset of 5K fictional avatar images for assignment as visual personas to LLMs, and analyzed their negotiation behaviors based on the visual traits depicted in these images, with a particular focus on aggressiveness. The results indicate that LLMs assess the aggressiveness of images in a manner similar to humans and output more aggressive negotiation behaviors when prompted with an aggressive visual persona. Interestingly, the LLM exhibited more aggressive negotiation behaviors when the opponent's image appeared less aggressive than their own, and less aggressive behaviors when the opponents image appeared more aggressive.

It was about as meta as it gets. After donning VR headsets, Stanford University Professor Jeremy Bailenson and I "stood" in front of his students in a virtual classroom, our avatars watching theirs discuss the nature of virtual existence. The discussion was a recording. The professor and I stood as living avatars among ghosts. Bailenson, who founded Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, then paused the recording and walked through the class. His avatar gliding, he explained how these playbacks will produce insights into what social life will mean in the "metaverse."

One week into shelter-in-place last year, Jeremy Bailenson was talking to a BBC reporter and had an epiphany. There's no need for us to be on Zoom," he thought. A phone call would have sufficed. This kernel of realization became an op-ed article that Bailenson penned in the Wall Street Journal titled, "Why Zoom Meetings Can Exhaust Us." Bailenson, a professor of communications and founder of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, wanted to dig deeper. So he wrote an academic paper, published Tuesday in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, that boils down four underlying causes of videoconferencing fatigue.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Loom.ai, the provider of best-in-class mobile solutions for building and animating personalized, 3D avatars at scale, today announced a $3M seed investment from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The new funding will be used to fuel recruiting, additional partnerships and the continued development of its fully embedded SDK solution. "We are incredibly proud of our partnership with Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. This strategic investment represents an important step in our growth as a company," said Mahesh Ramasubramanian, co-founder and CEO of Loom.ai. "We will immediately ramp up our recruitment efforts to attract the world's top talent in deep learning and computer vision to join our journey. Augmented Reality experiences built with Loom.ai's personalized 3D avatars will unlock new mediums of communication, entertainment, and e-commerce."

Year 1999, The Matrix introduced your neighbor, your dad, and pretty much every hacky-sacking college kid in the country to the idea that the real world around us … might not be so real. In the film, our trenchcoated protagonist Neo discovers that the world as he knows it is only an illusion, piped into his brain while his body sits submerged in a gooey chemical broth. The idea that we are not really here at all -- that life is just an illusion – is as old as Plato's Allegory of the Cave. But The Matrix had that special sauce that made this mind-bending concept palatable to high schoolers shuffling around in JNCO jeans: guns, Keanu Reeves, and a soundtrack anchored by Rage Against the Machine. "Entering the Matrix" became pop-culture shorthand for the notion that technology could eventually deliver us from our mind-numbing reality and allow us to live in a faux universe of our own creation. Want to learn kung fu in seconds? Just take the red pill. A kid born in 1999 is just now old enough to rent the R-rated Matrix -- or more likely, stream it. Yet in those intervening 17 years, entering the Matrix has gone from a dystopian sci-fi dream to a waking reality. These days, a pair of $800 goggles can convince you to duck as dinosaurs shamble over you, drop the pit of your stomach as you peer off the ledge of an artificial skyscraper, and make you puke -- in real life -- after one too many loops in a computer-generated space fighter. And yup, you can freeze time and stop bullets, too.

As the price-performance ratio of artificial intelligence improves, business software companies are building deep learning and other new tools into mainstream products, extending the reach of automation into once-human realms and giving people a powerful decision-support system. Salesforce.com Inc. said it would add an AI-based component called Einstein to its sales software. "The new offering is a set of online AI services designed to automate tasks, predict behavior and spotlight relevant information," the WSJ's Rachael King reports. Other companies from Microsoft Corp. to International Business Machines Corp. are investing heavily into the development of AI-powered platforms for business users. AI is taking off after years of promise, and the market is expected to grow to 16.5 billion in 2019 from 1.6 billion in 2015 with a compound-annual growth rate of 65.2%, the WSJ says.