We envision the "virtual eye" as a next-generation, AI-powered platform that uses interconnected foundation models to simulate the eye's intricate structure and biological function across all scales. Advances in AI, imaging, and multiomics provide a fertile ground for constructing a universal, high-fidelity digital replica of the human eye. This perspective traces the evolution from early mechanistic and rule-based models to contemporary AI-driven approaches, integrating in a unified model with multimodal, multiscale, dynamic predictive capabilities and embedded feedback mechanisms. We propose a development roadmap emphasizing the roles of large-scale multimodal datasets, generative AI, foundation models, agent-based architectures, and interactive interfaces. Despite challenges in interpretability, ethics, data processing and evaluation, the virtual eye holds the potential to revolutionize personalized ophthalmic care and accelerate research into ocular health and disease.

Automotive prognosticators tend to agree that vehicles in the future will be autonomous and electric, with highly connected cabins that allow riders to watch films, shop or get ahead on work. It's a big and exciting vision, but car companies are still figuring out what those vehicles might look like and how exactly they'd function. Mercedes-Benz attempted to fill in some of the blanks this week by unveiling a concept vehicle that reimagines how people will interact with autonomous vehicles. The true novelty of the vehicle -- a pill-bug-like van known as the Vision Urbanetic -- is that it's designed for interchangeable bodies that can be swapped out in minutes, depending on the circumstance. The idea, the company said, is to create vehicles that can adapt to urban settings in the future, when there may be fewer vehicles on the road but when those vehicles are expected to do more than merely ferry passengers from one place to another.

Automotive prognosticators tend to agree that vehicles in the future will be autonomous and electric, with highly connected cabins that allow riders to watch films, shop or get ahead on work. It's a big and exciting vision, but car companies are still figuring out what those vehicles might look like and how exactly they'd function. Mercedes-Benz attempted to fill in some of the blanks this week by unveiling a concept vehicle that reimagines how people will interact with autonomous vehicles. The true novelty of the vehicle -- a pill-bug-like van known as the Vision Urbanetic -- is that it's designed for interchangeable bodies that can be swapped out in minutes, depending on the circumstance. The idea, the company said, is to create vehicles that can adapt to urban settings in the future, when there may be fewer vehicles on the road but when those vehicles are expected to do more than merely ferry passengers from one place to another.

First responders could send a pair of camera-equipped drones or robots into a burning or unstable building, place them in separate locations, and let the software take over. Running on a laptop with a dual NVIDIA K20 GPUs, it fuses the images into a live virtual scene, using extrapolation to fill in the missing pixels. While the images aren't as pretty as Intel's FreeD replays, users get a continuous video feed that they can rotate around in real time, unlike the still images from the replay tech. The resulting synthetic view would help personnel find someone trapped in a fire by looking around objects, or even through them, as shown above. Soldiers could also peer over and around obstacles to spot enemies or booby traps.