With deepfakes receiving a lot of media coverage recently, synthetic media is a trending topic among AI forums and a growing area of machine learning. The possible threats posed by manipulated or synthetic media has caught the attention of government officials and even led to a House of Representatives hearing in June of 2019. Like every new and emerging technology, synthetic media comes with risks. However, companies like Lyrebird are proof that the positive applications of synthetic media outweigh the negative. From chatbots to virtual assistants, research in ASR and higher-quality audio training data have led to some of the most useful tech of the current generation.

There was a primitive ocean on Mars that held more water than our Artic Sea and alien hunters believe to have spotted signs that life once inhabited the ancient sea. Nestled in the dust of the Gusev crater, appears to be a round broken sea shell that could be'evidence of Mars having an ocean with living creatures'. This is the second sighting of a sea shell this week and, combined with the fossilized fish seen in the dust, conspiracy theorists believe this is proof life did in face exist on the red planet. Nestled in the Gusev crater appears to be a round broken shell that could be'evidence of Mars having an ocean with living creatures' seen in images from the Nasa Curiosity Rover. Pareidolia is the psychological response to seeing faces and other significant and everyday items in random stimulus.

In this study we show that humans form very similar perceptual spaces when they explore parametrically-defined shell-shaped objects visually or haptically. A physical object space was generated by varying three shape parameters. Sighted participants explored pictures of these objects while blindfolded participants haptically explored 3D printouts of the objects. Similarity ratings were performed and analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques. Visual and haptic similarity ratings highly correlate and resulted in very similar visual and haptic MDS maps providing evidence for one shared perceptual space underlying both modalities. To investigate to which degree these results are transferrable to natural objects, we performed the same visual and haptic similarity ratings and multidimensional scaling analyses using a set of natural sea shells.