Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Chris Heinrich will never forget the winter day he and his family evacuated their home in Altadena, California, as a vertical wall of flame was slowly bearing down on their neighborhood from the mountains. "It was dark," he told Slate. "There was no internet, my daughter was crying, the wind was blowing." Even as the fires approached, he said, he didn't really believe that their house would burn.

In this article, we will be taking a look at the 11 best metaverse stocks to buy. To skip our detailed analysis of these stocks and the rise of the metaverse, you can go directly to see the 5 Best Metaverse Stocks to Buy. With the rise of the Internet, many other new developments have come to the forefront. This includes the rise of the metaverse, which is a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal, and immersive virtual world. Such a world includes the use of virtual reality and augmented reality technology, to facilitate its growth and development.

Where does your enterprise stand on the AI adoption curve? Take our AI survey to find out. In 2019, Facebook open-sourced AI Habitat, a simulator that can train AI systems embodying things like a home robot to operate in environments meant to mimic real-world settings, like apartments and offices. Today Facebook announced that it's extended the capabilities of Habitat to make it "orders of magnitude" faster than other 3D simulators available, allowing researchers to perform more complex tasks in simulation, like setting the table and stocking the fridge. Coinciding with this, Facebook collaborated with 3D space capture company Matterport to open-source what it claims is the largest dataset of indoor 3D scans to date.

To train a robot to navigate a house, you either need to give it a lot of real time in a lot of real houses, or a lot of virtual time in a lot of virtual houses. The latter is definitely the better option, and Facebook and Matterport are working together to make thousands of virtual, interactive digital twins of real spaces available for researchers and their voracious young AIs. On Facebook's side the big advance is in two parts: the new Habitat 2.0 training environment and the dataset they created to enable it. You may remember Habitat from a couple years back; in the pursuit of what it calls "embodied AI," which is to say AI models that interact with the real world, Facebook assembled a number of passably photorealistic virtual environments for them to navigate. Many robots and AIs have learned things like movement and object recognition in idealized, unrealistic spaces that resemble games more than reality.

Temporarily forgetting she is sitting beside me, I shout to my wife: "I'm in the children's bedroom." We can't go to the Republic of Ireland ourselves to do this. Travellers from Great Britain need to restrict their movements for a fortnight, so nipping over and back is off the cards. But I can take several paces through a virtual seaside flat in Dublin's Dún Laoghaire, while based in our south London home. Circles appear on the floor of the Dublin flat and, using hand controls, I can glide between them and explore.

This is a guest post. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the blogger and do not represent positions of Automaton, IEEE Spectrum, or the IEEE. When Microsoft was developing its Kinect 3D sensor, a critical task was to calibrate its algorithms to rapidly and accurately recognize parts of the human body, especially hands, to make sure the device would work in any home, with any age group, any clothing, and any kind of background object. Using a computer-based approach to do the calibration had limitations, because computers would sometimes fail to identify a human hand in a Kinect-generated image, or would "see" a hand where none existed. So Microsoft is said to have turned to humans for help, crowdsourcing the image-tagging job using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, the online service where people get paid for performing relatively simple tasks that computers are not good at.