Project PLATEAU, led by Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, aims to develop and expand access to 3D models representing the diversity of cities across the country, enhancing urban resilience and addressing local challenges.
The model's other capabilities, including support for multimodal inputs, multiple reasoning modes, and parallel sub-agents for complex queries, could help enterprises build faster, task-focused AI for customer support, automation, and internal copilots without relying on heavier models.
Earlier we did episode one of this with Grady Booch where we discussed the principled view of that what's changing and what remains unchanged, what is hyped and what is actually naturally coming with the AI changes. We also spoke about that what is the difference between the design and the architecture and what teams are focusing and what they might be missing.
"It's not an overstatement to declare another VR winter," said J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. "I think we might even go as far as to say there's only a handful of successful scenarios where people are using VR." This assessment reflects the industry's struggle to find practical applications beyond niche markets.
According to Digi Capital augmented and virtual reality are about to explode as VCs and corporates get in on the act. Facebook's multi-billion dollar acquisition of Oculus got everyone's attention early last year, but it's only really in the last 12 months that investments have accelerated, with more than $1bn pouring into the sector. Meanwhile Mashable reports Nokia's virtual reality camera is now available for pre-order for a cool $60,000.
Manufacturing environments are becoming more advanced, automated, and electrified-but they are also becoming more dangerous. High-voltage (HV) systems, robotics, advanced machinery, and tightly coupled production lines introduce risks that traditional training methods are no longer equipped to address effectively. Instructor-led classroom training, PDFs, videos, and even supervised shadowing have long been the foundation of manufacturing training. However, when the consequences of error include severe injury, fatal accidents, equipment damage, or production downtime,
Baron traces the origin story back to his time building high-scale systems at Instana (which exited to IBM in 2020), where the reality of "always-on" platforms made one thing obvious: the tooling we rely on is often too low-level, too rigid, and too disconnected from real-world use cases. That gap has only widened as environments have exploded in complexity-more cloud providers, more managed services, more hybrid setups, more internal APIs, and "gillions" of tools stitched together into brittle workflows.
No app required: browser-based AR as the go-to for brand content Web-based AR, or WebAR, will see a significant increase in adoption in 2023. The simple, compelling promise of WebAR is that it allows consumers to access AR content via their browser, from anywhere in the world, with no app required. Whether you're on Android, iOS, or a future headset, all you'll need is web access to engage with the infinite possible experiences brands can bring to life through this technology.
That's today's project. In this article, I'll show you how I started with a picture of me, used some intermediate AI, and turned it into a physical 3D plastic me figurine. Do I need a me figurine? No. Is it cool? Yeah. Does it show off another AI capability? Yep. I'll be honest. I didn't expect my editor to sign off on this pitch.
This past summer, Google DeepMind debuted Genie 3. It's what's known as a world world, an AI system capable of generating images and reacting as the user moves through the environment the software is simulating. At the time, DeepMind positioned Genie 3 as a tool for training AI agents. Now, it's making the model available to people outside of Google to try with Project Genie.
