The world's longest-living vertebrates maintain their vision for centuries. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Greenland shark () is well-known for its impressive lifespan. Marine biologists believe the world's longest-living vertebrate often reaches over 400 years old, and possibly lives even longer. But while the shark isn't known for its vision, a lot could be learned from the deep-sea predator's eyes. According to new research recently published in the journal, the Greenland shark retained its visual organs throughout millions of years of evolution for a reason.

We propose a novel 3D gaze redirection framework that leverages an explicit 3D eyeball structure. Existing gaze redirection methods are typically based on neural radiance fields, which employ implicit neural representations via volume rendering. Unlike these NeRF-based approaches, where the rotation and translation of 3D representations are not explicitly modeled, we introduce a dedicated 3D eyeball structure to represent the eyeballs with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our method generates photorealistic images that faithfully reproduce the desired gaze direction by explicitly rotating and translating the 3D eyeball structure. In addition, we propose an adaptive deformation module that enables the replication of subtle muscle movements around the eyes. Through experiments conducted on the ETH-XGaze dataset, we demonstrate that our framework is capable of generating diverse novel gaze images, achieving superior image quality and gaze estimation accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Humans do not passively observe the visual world -- we actively look in order to act. Motivated by this principle, we introduce EyeRobot, a robotic system with gaze behavior that emerges from the need to complete real-world tasks. We develop a mechanical eyeball that can freely rotate to observe its surroundings and train a gaze policy to control it using reinforcement learning. We accomplish this by first collecting teleoperated demonstrations paired with a 360 camera. This data is imported into a simulation environment that supports rendering arbitrary eyeball viewpoints, allowing episode rollouts of eye gaze on top of robot demonstrations. We then introduce a BC-RL loop to train the hand and eye jointly: the hand (BC) agent is trained from rendered eye observations, and the eye (RL) agent is rewarded when the hand produces correct action predictions. In this way, hand-eye coordination emerges as the eye looks towards regions which allow the hand to complete the task. EyeRobot implements a foveal-inspired policy architecture allowing high resolution with a small compute budget, which we find also leads to the emergence of more stable fixation as well as improved ability to track objects and ignore distractors. We evaluate EyeRobot on five panoramic workspace manipulation tasks requiring manipulation in an arc surrounding the robot arm. Our experiments suggest EyeRobot exhibits hand-eye coordination behaviors which effectively facilitate manipulation over large workspaces with a single camera. See project site for videos: https://www.eyerobot.net/

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you step on a snail, you'll know it. Despite their slow speeds, and simple bodies, apple snails (Pomacea canaliculata) have eyes that are anatomically similar to human eyes. Both species have complex camera-like eyes with a lens, cornea, and retina that visually capture the world around them. Unlike humans, apple snails can regrow their peepers if they are injured or amputated.

-- Ophthalmic surgical robots offer superior stability and precision by reducing the natural hand tremors of human surgeons, enabling delicate operations in confined surgical spaces. Despite the advancements in developing vision-and force-based control methods for surgical robots, preoperative navigation remains heavily reliant on manual operation, limiting the consistency and increasing the uncertainty. Existing eye gaze estimation techniques in the surgery, whether traditional or deep learning-based, face challenges including dependence on additional sensors, occlusion issues in surgical environments, and the requirement for facial detection. T o address these limitations, this study proposes an innovative eye localization and tracking method that combines machine learning with traditional algorithms, eliminating the requirements of landmarks and maintaining stable iris detection and gaze estimation under varying lighting and shadow conditions. Extensive real-world experiment results show that our proposed method has an average estimation error of 0.58 degrees for eye orientation estimation and 2.08-degree average control error for the robotic arm's movement based on the calculated orientation. Ophthalmic surgical robots demonstrate significant stability and precision compared to human surgeons when performing surgical tasks. The design of robotic arms effectively eliminates or substantially reduces natural hand tremors during surgery, enabling more refined and controlled operations in extremely confined surgical spaces, such as those encountered in retinal surgery.

The boss of the AI tool ChatGPT has revealed that his eyeball-scanning orbs are coming to the US, as questions still swirl around this dystopian step into the future. Sam Altman announced Wednesday that the identity verification technology will now be available in six cities - Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco. The expansion into the US is all part of Altman's plan to create a new global identity and financial network. Currently, Altman's cryptocurrency company World has rolled out the orb devices in more than 35 cities across over 20 countries worldwide. The main purpose of these eyeball scanners is to verify that each user is a'unique human,' not a bot or duplicate account.

Several robotic frameworks have been recently developed to assist ophthalmic surgeons in performing complex vitreoretinal procedures such as subretinal injection of advanced therapeutics. These surgical robots show promising capabilities; however, most of them have to limit their working volume to achieve maximum accuracy. Moreover, the visible area seen through the surgical microscope is limited and solely depends on the eye posture. If the eye posture, trocar position, and robot configuration are not correctly arranged, the instrument may not reach the target position, and the preparation will have to be redone. Therefore, this paper proposes the optimization framework of the eye tilting and the robot positioning to reach various target areas for different patients. Our method was validated with an adjustable phantom eye model, and the error of this workflow was 0.13 +/- 1.65 deg (rotational joint around Y axis), -1.40 +/- 1.13 deg (around X axis), and 1.80 +/- 1.51 mm (depth, Z). The potential error sources are also analyzed in the discussion section.

Football coaches desperate to boost their team's performance could soon find an answer in an artificial intelligence system aimed at conjuring the next superstar. A kind of sporting Aladdin's lamp is within reach, technologists claim, which could allow managers to simply wish for a new player with the aggression of Erling Haaland or the poise of Jude Bellingham and for an AI to suggest the perfect prospect. A system that uses video and automated tracking to monitor the performances of nearly 180,000 mostly teenage footballers around the world underpins the services of Eyeball, a digital scouting company that already has relationships with more than a dozen Premier League clubs and other elite teams in Europe and North America. Using what it claims is the largest video database of global youth football – with players logged from 28 countries – the company says it can now determine which young players most fit the description of current or recent top stars as defined by one of eight archetypes. The characteristics of the ideal midfielder are a blend of Steven Gerrard, Kevin De Bruyne, Dominik Szoboszlai, Federico Valverde, Dani Olmo and Bellingham – all top-ranked internationals.

Google announced this week that it would begin the international rollout of its new artificial intelligence-powered search feature, called AI Overviews. When billions of people search a range of topics from news to recipes to general knowledge questions, what they see first will now be an AI-generated summary. Google touted AI Overviews at its annual I/O developer conference as a way of delivering customers quick answers and simplifying the online search experience, but it also has another effect on the way that people engage with the internet: keeping users, and advertisers, on Google.com. "Google will do the googling for you," said Liz Reid, head of Google Search. While Google was once mostly a portal to reach other parts of the internet, it has spent years consolidating content and services to make itself into the web's primary destination.

Worldcoin wants to prove I am "actually human". At least that is the explanation a staff member gives for a cryptocurrency venture scanning my eyeball in a London office building. Without the optical scan, Worldcoin will not verify your "humanness" – you could be a robot and you won't get any crypto. Welcome to financial security in the age of artificial intelligence. Concerns have been voiced about the privacy implications of Worldcoin, which was co-founded by Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI.