Artificial intelligence (AI) closest to humans, contact lenses that take you to the metaverse, and the world’s first NFT house. The ‘reality’ of the virtual world has come quite closer to us.
1. AI closest to humans
Have you ever imagined AI that paints the season of spring? AI EXAONE drew a picture with the theme of ‘Newly Sprouting Spring Scenery’. First, when a theme is injected into EXAONE, it interprets the text based on big data and then starts drawing. Unlike existing AI, EXAONE directly thinks, makes decisions, and understands the context of language. EXAONE learned over 600 billion texts of corpora as the world’s largest data and 250 million pieces of high-resolution images combined with language. As a result, EXAONE is able to speak both Korean and English at the level of a native speaker. It creates audio data, images, and videos by reading texts. For example, when an order is placed to EXAONE such as “make a pumpkin-shaped hat,” the existing AI was at the level of finding an image by analyzing the text as it is, but EXAONE can create a new image of the ‘pumpkin-shaped hat’ based on the analysis of the learned data. It is like taking the first step towards ‘Multi-Modality AI’, which can acquire and handle various information related to human communication, such as language, images, and videos. AI EXAONE was introduced by LG AI Research Institute to celebrate the first anniversary of its establishment. It is an abbreviation of ‘EXpert Ai for everyONE’, which means AI expert for humans. LG AI Research Institute aims to nurture EXAONE as a top 1 percent AI expert that can be used in almost all sectors, including manufacturing, research, education, and finance.
2. Contact lenses that connect to the metaverse
The technology that shows virtual reality when people wear glasses has already become a memory of the past. Now, metaverse contact lenses have been released. InWith, an American tech startup that developed lenses, showed off the ultimate metaverse wearable of contact lenses at <CES 2022>, the largest tech event held in Las Vegas. The contact lenses that are inserted with tiny circuits have no effect on the body when it is put in the eyes. It provides users with augmented reality vision mode through the compatibility of smartphone applications and contact lenses. It can also provide real-time information about the user’s surroundings and even adjust eyesight. InWith developed smart contact lenses for presbyopic patients. They can see everything clearly without glasses or a magnifying glass, and even check information in invisible virtual space faster than anyone else. The specific the product release schedule has not been disclosed, but it is expected to be formally approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sometime this year. Experts say that the metaverse could be worth trillions of dollars when the extended reality (XR) program begins to be acknowledged. Also, application technology related to content lenses dedicated to Metaverse is expected to develop further.
3. The world’s first NFT house for sale
A house that does not exist in reality was sold for 560 million KRW. This is the world’s first NFT house, ‘the Mars House’. Mars House is a virtual house presented as a 3D digital file. You can only enter the house through virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) technology. The virtual house was sold for 288 ether on the US NFT art platform SuperRare. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency worth $500,000 at the time of purchase. The creator of the Mars House is Canadian artist Krista Kim and she started this work from an inspiration of seeing herself isolated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The artist thought about how interiors can heal people’s minds, so it resulted in creating a virtual house in a digital space.
The Mars House was designed with the help of video game software Unreal Engine, architects, furniture manufacturers, and musicians. The inside of the house was designed with clean and open interiors and all walls, including the ceiling and exterior walls, are made of glass. From the house, the reddish sky of Mars outside is visible, and the soothing music creates a calm atmosphere. “I see Mars as a place that we can actually reach through scientific innovation. I wanted to convey that anything is possible,” said Krista Kim as the reason for naming it as the Mars House. Then, Krista Kim showed her will to build the Mars House in real life.
