At the Oculus Connect expo in 2016, Oculus announced it had partnered with Warner Bros. to create a trilogy of virtual reality experiences set in the iconic world of Blade Runner 2049. Based on the sci-fi film directed by Denis Villenuve, the first experience, Replicant Pursuit,was released in July. In this program, you pilot a spinner through the streets of Los Angeles on a hunt for a rogue replicant.
The latest installment, created by Magnopus, is Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab. It was released on October 19, with a Gear VR version coming October 26. The free 25-minute experience (dubbed a “demo” by Oculus) is not much of a game, nor much of a film either, but it’s a fascinating look at the possibilities of the future of VR entertainment.
As a replicant Blade Runner, your job is to hunt down runaway replicants in service to the Wallace Corporation. It turns out you’re no Rick Deckard, as you accidentally kill a human, mistaking him for a replicant. As a result, you must return to the scene of the crime and erase all evidence of what occurred.
The game uses the Touch controllers for Rift, and it was photographed using Microsoft’s Holographic capture rig (but no cell phones).
Magnopus got designs and raw assets from the film production to create the realistic environments. Most of it was built from scratch, although developers did use scans and photographs from the actual movie production. The entire project took about eight months to create.
In an interview with Venture Beat, executive producer at Magnopus Ben Grossman said they wanted to use live actors and create a new storyline to explore. “We tried to use new characters that weren’t in the film,” he said. “If someone saw the VR experience before they saw the movie, we wouldn’t be giving anything away.”
The experience is more cerebral in nature than many VR ventures, with a film noir detective feel to it. “In this case we wanted it to be more about exploration,” he explained. “We know that storytelling is a challenge in VR, but stories about exploring may be the new frontier.”
If you snagged a VR setup during the Summer of Rift promotion, this is a great way to experience the future of entertainment in this evolving technology, especially if you’re a fan of the films. “We were pretty happy about the level of faithfulness, both to the new movie and the old movie,” Grossman said.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.