AI painting, AI generation of digital humans, AI design of clothing, exoskeleton robots, metaverse games and office... The most cutting-edge AI technology gathered in Shanghai Lingang Center in the past two days.
On February 25, the 2023 Global Artificial Intelligence Developer Pioneer Conference (GAIDC) opened, the theme of the conference is "AI developers walking towards the light", and the conference is held in Lingang, the first place to welcome the sunrise in the east of Shanghai, the echo of the two makes the conference more meaningful.
Coinciding with the popularity of ChatGPT, the direction of AIGC (AI-Generated Content) has become the focus of attention. In the interactive experience area of nearly 1,000 square meters of this conference, many companies focused on AIGC technology display. In addition, representative projects in popular fields such as intelligent robots, AI large models, and metaverses were also exhibited, and many projects needed to queue up for experience.
Wearable robots are the highlight
Walking into the exhibition area, the first booth is the exoskeleton robot of Shanghai Aoshark Intelligent Technology, and the three inner and outer layers are full of interested people.
After squeezing into the front row, the first financial reporter found that the very eye-catching selling point of this robot is that it has appeared in the Spring Festival movie "The Wandering Earth 2", in the movie's rescue, cargo delivery and other scenes, wearing this kind of mecha can transform into a "strong man".
Exoskeleton robots provide a wearable machine mechanism, also called wearable robots. The person in charge of the booth introduced that the robot can be installed on airport workers and automobile assembly workers, and reduce the handling pressure of manual workers through mechanical assistance. This is actually an external bracket system that integrates integrated technologies such as sensing, control, information, fusion, and mobile computing.
The person in charge of the booth revealed that the exoskeleton robot has been iterated several times and has long been on sale, but the price of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment is not low, and the main customers are currently B-side.
The first financial reporter stepped forward to experience the upper limb exoskeleton robot of the Aoshark, and the introduction showed that this robot can reduce the labor burden of workers by more than 50%, but after putting it on, the reporter tried to lift the 7.5kg barbell and failed to challenge. Although the robot can help reduce the pressure of the arm lift, the reporter's wrist cannot bear this weight.
After the exchange, the staff said that although the exoskeleton robot can reduce the pressure, it still needs the operator itself to have a certain basis for lifting capacity. In addition, this equipment weighs about 6.5kg, and it also needs to have a certain load capacity.
At the CETC Robot booth, an exoskeleton robot was also displayed. According to reports, it can be used to assist the human body walking, running, up and down stairs and bending over to carry and other sports, can be used in fire relief, industrial manufacturing, logistics handling and other fields, long-distance running assistance, prevent lumbar muscle strain, material handling and other functions.
Walking to the SenseTime booth, a child is intently playing chess with the AI chess teacher opposite, this "teacher" looks like an astronaut, and the position of the chess player is not bad.
This is SenseTime's Yuan Radish SenseRobot, the staff said that this robot is mainly for C-end users, the application scenarios mainly help children learn chess, including AI chess learning, endgame challenge, chess power breakthrough, peak challenge and other modes. The price of such a chess teacher is about 2,000 yuan.
In addition, SoftBank Robot also demonstrated the ordering robot in the unmanned ordering scene, which can complete the ordering process by interacting with the tablet in front of the robot Pepper by voice.
However, the reporter's feeling after the experience is that the robot speaks too slowly in the ordering scene, and the cold and impersonal is inhuman, and the back and forth operation instructions are complicated, so ordering may not be as good as manual. The person in charge of the booth told First Finance and Economics that the price of such a robot is tens of thousands of yuan.
The all-round "Internet celebrity" AIGC
There is no doubt that in this GAIDC, AIGC is an absolute "Internet celebrity", including Microsoft Xiaoice, Baidu, Himalaya, Midu and other companies have brought their own AIGC product experience, not only text generation, image generation, but also music generation and digital human generation, AI can be poets, painters, composers, and even clothing designers.
Baidu previously announced that it will complete the internal test of Wen Xin Yiyan in March, but in the field of AI painting, Baidu has already launched Wen Xin Yi Style. Enter your own appeal on the official website of Wen Xin Yige, select the desired painting style, and you can get the painting generated by Yi Ge.
AI painting is one of the important directions of AIGC, which has low creative cost, fast speed and mass production. The person in charge of Baidu's booth told reporters that AI painting can inspire painters, artists, etc., assist in artistic creation, and also provide efficient pictures for media and other text content creators.
The same AI painting, Midu's booth is filled with more people, this is a language intelligence technology company, and the interaction with visitors is relatively designed to be more experienced: users can scan the code on the mobile phone to "place" their own creative needs, and then Midu's AI receives it and creates, waiting for a while and printing it out for visitors to commemorate and generate digital collections.
An experiencer who got the painting told CBN that he chose a relatively simple text description, "too complex AI can't be generated", and most of the experiencers' descriptions are within the cross.
In addition to images, according to reports, Midu's AI intelligent software can generate audio according to the picture, and integrate the picture with the audio to generate a video. Through multimodal fusion generation technology, the whole process of "literate video" is realized.
Because of the popularity and too many people waiting in line, the first financial reporter did not wait for the AI painting he customized in Midu, but turned to the next AIGC display enterprise Xiaoice.
The first AI poetry collection in human history, "Sunlight Lost Glass Window", was written by AI poet Xiaoice and was first published in May 2017. According to the booth staff, Xiaoice has learned from 519 modern Chinese poets since 1920, and after 10,000 iterative learnings, they have gained the creativity of modern poetry.
To test Xiaoice's creativity, scientists have published work on major platforms under 27 pseudonyms, but no one has found that the authors of these poems are "not human."
In addition to writing poetry, Xiaoice can also design costumes, and the Chinese style long dress displayed in the experience area of this conference is originally designed by Xiaoice.
Born from the framework of artificial intelligence Xiaoice, AI painter Xia Yubing has constructed his own creative techniques by learning the paintings of 236 human artists over the past 400 years, and "The Spirit of Landscape" that was exhibited at the Dubai World Expo is Xia Yubing's masterpiece.
Yingyan Technology, which focuses on the research of the underlying technology of digital humans, has brought the latest breakthrough in AI generation of digital humans.
By entering a description of the persona on the platform, the digital avatar can be generated on the screen. The person in charge introduced that this is the latest hyper-realistic digital human AIGC technology developed by Yingyan, which can generate 3D face models and PBR materials that meet CG industry production standards by entering natural language text, and is the first AI algorithm framework that can complete the generation of product-level digital assets.
In the field of audio, the Himalaya booth exhibited the audio creation tool "Xiyun Yinfang", which helps anchors co-create audio programs with AI through TTS technology.
Yang Hongchun, head of the Himalayan Everest Intelligent Laboratory at the booth, told First Finance and Economics that this creation tool can automatically unpack chapters, automatically identify novel characters, batch synthesis, and allow AI to play supporting roles for anchors and achieve multi-timbral performance of the entire drama at zero cost. With the "AUGC" production mode of human-machine combination, the creation of audio novels and other works can be accelerated.
The metaverse is not over
After the explosion of ChatGPT, the industry once ridiculed that the metaverse has become a thing of the past. However, at GAIDC this time, Meta, Phantom Technology, Unity and other companies have brought their own scene layouts in the meta-universe field.
In the Meta exhibition area, many people lined up to experience the Meta Quest 2 all-in-one VR headset, and after wearing it, they can collaborate in the virtual reality of the exhibition area, discover fitness and game programs, and so on.
In 2021, Meta officially announced that it changed its name from Facebook to Meta, which led to the concept of the meta-universe and also heralded Meta's shift from 2D screens to immersive worlds based on AR and VR technology, promoting the next evolution of social network technology.
Meta Quest 2 is Meta's first integrated consumer VR headset, the reporter found after the on-site experience, weight is still one of the pain points of VR equipment, after wearing the face, especially the eyes of the weight is not small, wearing experience is not comfortable.
As a bridge between the real world and the metaverse, the experience of the device is still the problem. However, this experience found that Quest 2 can abandon the controller and operate the visual interface smoothly through gestures, compared to the previous progress in perceptual interaction, perhaps VR in the near future can solve the current problem.
One of the most difficult items to queue in this exhibition area is the VR game of Phantom Technology.
In addition to VR glasses, Phantom Technology also equips the game with intelligent somatosensory clothing, built-in vibration points to simulate the real force feedback effect, and can also control directional movement through body tilt to achieve running and other actions, so as to achieve a truly immersive meta-universe game experience.
"Wandering Space" is a well-known VR game under Phantom Technology, where experiencers are immersed in the space station and restore the truth of the story through plot reasoning. Since its launch, the game has repeatedly ranked in the top three of the Steam platform hot selling list and won the award for best content creation at AWE Asia Industry Expo 2022.
Shen Pengyan CMO of Phantom Technology told First Finance and Economics that VR games have developed to a certain extent in recent years, but there are still not many domestic players, and nearly ninety percent of users of Phantom Technology games are overseas, compared with domestic, overseas players will be more accepting and adaptable to VR games.
In the field of metaverse, Shanghai eVision Technology also exhibited the latest lightfield naked-eye 3D/XR intelligent terminal, which can have a large field of view, long depth of field, and realistically reproduce 3D spatial structure, which is suitable for digital precision minimally invasive medical applications in the metaverse, such as ophthalmic internal eye surgery, neurosurgery, etc.
Unity exhibited the metaverse space with 10,000 people on the same screen at this GAIDC. This is the metaverse space-time party "Star Plaza" launched by China Mobile during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. In this metaverse space, Unity China uses distributed real-time rendering to create the main stage of Star Plaza that supports 10,000 people on the same screen in the cloud, using the cloud computing power network to achieve the effect of 10,000 people on the same screen, unlocking immersive viewing and social interaction experience.
The hot spot has changed from blockchain to metaverse to ChatGPT, the concept comes and goes, but AI as the core technology runs throughout.
At the opening ceremony of GAIDC, Ren Aiguang, deputy director of the Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that the recent popularity of ChatGPT chatbots shows that the future intelligence must be ubiquitous and universal, and in recent years, there have been new breakthroughs in the fields of meta-universe, human robots, brain-computer interfaces, etc., and the cross-integration of artificial intelligence and various cutting-edge technologies is the general trend.