This work represents the initial development of a haptic display system for increased presence in virtual experiences. The developed system creates a two-way connection between a virtual space, mediated through a virtual reality headset, and a physical space, mediated through a robotic manipulator, creating the foundation for future haptic display development using the haptic proxy framework. Here, we assesses hand-tracking performance of the Meta Quest Pro headset, examining hand tracking latency and static positional error to characterize performance of our system.

Semantic representations in higher sensory cortices form the basis for robust, yet flexible behavior. These representations are acquired over the course of development in an unsupervised fashion and continuously maintained over an organism's lifespan. Predictive learning theories propose that these representations emerge from predicting or reconstructing sensory inputs. However, brains are known to generate virtual experiences, such as during imagination and dreaming, that go beyond previously experienced inputs. Here, we suggest that virtual experiences may be just as relevant as actual sensory inputs in shaping cortical representations. In particular, we discuss two complementary learning principles that organize representations through the generation of virtual experiences. First, "adversarial dreaming" proposes that creative dreams support a cortical implementation of adversarial learning in which feedback and feedforward pathways engage in a productive game of trying to fool each other. Second, "contrastive dreaming" proposes that the invariance of neuronal representations to irrelevant factors of variation is acquired by trying to map similar virtual experiences together via a contrastive learning process. These principles are compatible with known cortical structure and dynamics and the phenomenology of sleep thus providing promising directions to explain cortical learning beyond the classical predictive learning paradigm.

Haptic feedback is an important component of creating an immersive mixed reality experience. Traditionally, haptic forces are rendered in response to the user's interactions with the virtual environment. In this work, we explore the idea of rendering haptic forces in a proactive manner, with the explicit intention to influence the user's behavior through compelling haptic forces. To this end, we present a framework for active haptic guidance in mixed reality, using one or more robotic haptic proxies to influence user behavior and deliver a safer and more immersive virtual experience. We provide details on common challenges that need to be overcome when implementing active haptic guidance, and discuss example applications that show how active haptic guidance can be used to influence the user's behavior. Finally, we apply active haptic guidance to a virtual reality navigation problem, and conduct a user study that demonstrates how active haptic guidance creates a safer and more immersive experience for users.

The Metaverse is being touted as the next iteration of the internet, supporting ongoing online 3D virtual environments where virtual experiences, real-time 3D content and other related media are connected and accessible through VR/AR, as well as through classic devices such as PC or mobile. It's essentially an immersive Web3 internet – Web3 being the idea of a new kind of internet services that is built using decentralised blockchain. With this new technology, users can meet in virtual spaces, represent themselves as avatars and share virtual objects.. Gartner predicts that by 2026 a quarter of people will spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse for work, shopping, education, social or entertainment. And 30% of organisations will have products and services delivered via the metaverse. However, despite the predictions, a recent YouGov survey revealed that just 37% of UK adults claim to be confident about describing the metaverse to others.

Extended reality technologies aren't new, but the way that we interact with them has changed rapidly within the last several years. As businesses compete for supremacy in this space, the landscape of these new innovations has become confusing and uncertain for many. What is the Metaverse, where is it taking us next, and what are the key technologies driving its development? Before we get into the details, let's first understand what we're talking about. Recently, the concept of a Metaverse has been popularized by Facebook's rebranding to Meta, but the story doesn't start there.

Years ago, while on vacation in the Northwest, my husband and I rented a room in the home of a middle-aged couple, one of whom had recently retired. The house was old, beautiful, and cozily laden with objects that signalled domestic inertia. It sat on a lush, wild sprawl of farmland that immediately inspired fantasies of leaving San Francisco and our tech jobs, foraging for mushrooms, administering to septic systems, and turning over soil. One morning over breakfast, conversation shifted to our host's retirement. He was glad to have more time at home with his wife and their dog.

When the novel coronavirus startled the world earlier this year, San Francisco quickly took action by suspending large public gatherings in the city. The order meant many artists -- and art exhibitors -- had to quickly consider how they must pivot and prepare for a society that exists with the virus, one that might not allow the same artistic interactions we've come to take for granted. As such, the pandemic is accelerating technology's already rapid transformation of visual arts, from their creation process to their discovery and experience. Within visual arts, artificial intelligence (AI) has already redefined who can be an artist. In 2018, a portrait created by an AI was sold at auction for $432,000, reaching a new milestone for conceptual and generative art.

Predictive power allocation is conceived for power-efficient video streaming over mobile networks using deep reinforcement learning. The goal is to minimize the accumulated energy consumption over a complete video streaming session for a mobile user under the quality of service constraint that avoids video playback interruptions. To handle the continuous state and action spaces, we resort to deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm for solving the formulated problem. In contrast to previous predictive resource policies that first predict future information with historical data and then optimize the policy based on the predicted information, the proposed policy operates in an online and end-to-end manner. By judiciously designing the action and state that only depend on slowly-varying average channel gains, the signaling overhead between the edge server and the base stations can be reduced, and the dynamics of the system can be learned effortlessly. To improve the robustness of streaming and accelerate learning, we further exploit the partially known dynamics of the system by integrating the concepts of safer layer, post-decision state, and virtual experience into the basic DDPG algorithm. Our simulation results show that the proposed polices converge to the optimal policy derived based on perfect prediction of the future large-scale channel gains and outperforms the first-predictthen-optimize policy in the presence of prediction errors. By harnessing the partially known model of the system dynamics, the convergence speed can be dramatically improved. I. INTRODUCTION Mobile video traffic is expected to account for more than 75% of the global mobile data by 2021, and video-on-demand (VoD) services represent the main contributor [2]. This paper was presented in part at IEEE Globecom 2019 [1]. To avoid video stalling for a user experiencing hostile channel conditions, a base station (BS) can increase its transmit power for ensuring that the video segment is downloaded before being played.

Each year, I take a look at the major digital transformation trends hitting every industry. Next up are the big digital transformation trends in retail for 2020. Before getting into this year's trends, I want to go over some of the hits and misses we chose for 2019. While we did see major and necessary improvements in omni-channel retail and AI/cognitive computing, I'd say we still have some work to do with cardless checkout and smart beacons. Yes, those technologies are still percolating and will likely continue to mature in the coming year.

Here's a science fiction premise you've probably heard before: a person encounters a shadowy company that sells hyper-realistic virtual experiences. They're put into an incredibly vivid simulated reality through some kind of brainwave helmet or injected drug. Then something goes wrong and the protagonist discovers -- say it with me now -- that the experience isn't virtual at all. The new film Empathy, Inc. is nominally one of these stories. Written by author Mark Leidner and directed by Yedidya Gorsetman, the film premiered at the Cinepocalypse festival in 2018, and it's getting a wider theatrical release this week.