Pico 4 revealed, Nvidia launches Omniverse Cloud & Sparrow is a more secure Deepmind chatbot

Pico 4 revealed, Nvidia launches Omniverse Cloud & Sparrow is a more secure Deepmind chatbot

Our weekly recap: Bytedance company Pico officially introduces Pico 4. Nvidia also had a lot to talk about this week.

Pico 4 Hands-on and all the facts

Pico is attacking Meta's VR business with its Pico 4 VR headset unveiled on September 22, 2022. Pancake lenses and a significantly reduced weight as well as a competitive price could make Pico popular among Meta's target group and attract more users. You can find our Pico 4 preview and all facts about the Pico 4 here.

Pico 4 und Controller liegen auf einem weißen Tisch, im Hintergrund eine Graslandschaft.

The Pico 4 is one of the lightest and slimmest VR headsets currently available. | Picture: Pico

Nvidia's Omniverse show & new GTX graphics cards

Nvidia unveiled Omniverse Cloud for the Industrial Metaverse at its in-house tech conference GTC, a network built on the Universal Scene Description to connect 3D worlds. According to Nvidia, 700 companies and 200,000 people use the Omniverse software.

In other Nvidia news, the upcoming RTX 4080 and 4090 graphics cards support innovations like DLSS 3, which will also benefit VR games but are costly.

At GTC, Nvidia otherwise focused on artificial intelligence and announced, among other things, a language model service and new AI hardware, as well as GET3D, an AI model that can create a textured 3D mesh based on a single 2D image.

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PSVR 2: All VR games at a glance

Apart from the exact launch date in early 2023 and the price of Playstation VR 2, almost all details about Sony's next VR hardware are known. Time to take a closer look at the software: Here are all the PSVR 2 games announced so far. Sony also released a new PSVR 2 trailer that focuses on the headset's innovations.

Full-body tracking with Quest 2

AI researchers from Meta show how they can use AI prediction to believably animate a full-body avatar using only sensor data from the Quest 2 headset. The avatar still has limitations - latency is high, and it doesn't cover all movements - but at least social VR applications could benefit from the technique. Does Meta's proto-metaverse Horizon Worlds soon have 100% more legs?

Meta shows impressive full-body tracking via quest headset only. | Image: Meta

Deepmind’s chatbot Sparrow is supposed to be helpful and harmless

Deepmind's latest chatbot is called Sparrow: it's designed to turn only the helpful, correct, and harmless sides of the Internet and human language into a dialogue. Sparrow has access to Google for this purpose to research better answers. In addition, the model has been trained with human feedback. For Deepmind, Sparrow is a research project on AI security. Read more about Deepmind Sparrow in our AI sister magazine THE DECODER.