No one else is able to do that," says Jack Saunders, a researcher at the University of Bath, who was not involved in Synthesia's work. The full-body avatars he previewed are very good, he says, despite small errors such as hands "slicing" into each other at times. But "chances are you're not really going to be looking that close to notice it," Saunders says. Synthesia launched its first version of hyperrealistic AI avatars, also known as deepfakes, in April. These avatars use large language models to match expressions and tone of voice to the sentiment of spoken text.

Would you like to live forever? Well, some experts say you might. Last week, a former Google engineer said he believes that humans will achieve immortality within the next eight years. Ray Kurzweil - who has an 86 per cent success rate with his predictions - thinks that advances in technology will quickly lead to age-reversing'nanobots'. While it sounds far-fetched, scientists have been looking for years into ways we can regenerate our cells, or upload our minds to a computer.

Advances in computer vision and machine learning techniques have led to significant development in 2D and 3D human pose estimation from RGB cameras, LiDAR, and radars. However, human pose estimation from images is adversely affected by occlusion and lighting, which are common in many scenarios of interest. Radar and LiDAR technologies, on the other hand, need specialized hardware that is expensive and power-intensive. Furthermore, placing these sensors in non-public areas raises significant privacy concerns. To address these limitations, recent research has explored the use of WiFi antennas (1D sensors) for body segmentation and key-point body detection.

Using a miniature camera and a customized deep neural network, Cornell researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind wristband that tracks the entire body posture in 3D. BodyTrak is the first wearable to track the full body pose with a single camera. If integrated into future smartwatches, BodyTrak could be a game-changer in monitoring user body mechanics in physical activities where precision is critical, said Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science and the paper's senior author. "Since smartwatches already have a camera, technology like BodyTrak could understand the user's pose and give real-time feedback," Zhang said. "That's handy, affordable and does not limit the user's moving area."

Full body tracking makes your VR experience a lot more immersive, bridging your body movements perfectly to virtual space. So far Quest 2 only has trackers on the head and hands. But with the help of AI, Meta has developed the ability to estimate body poses with QuestSim. Body tracking tracks users' body movements through sensors. Full body tracking makes your interactions in virtual reality more realistic using more accurate models of human bodies.