More news filtering in from the Milo demo at TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Global conference in Oxford, take it away, Peter Molyneux,
“Films, TV, even hallowed books, are just rubbish because they don’t involve me,” he said. “It’s a sea of blandness.”
As previously reported, Milo will use the cloud concept to help Milo evolve,
“No two people’s Milos can be the same – you are actually sculpting a human being. Some of the things you are doing will change the course of his life.”
Molyenux went on to reveal that Milo may seem to be alive as the technology exploits psychological techniques to make you feel the character was ‘real’.
“Most of it is just a trick – but it is a trick that actually works.”
The BBC also reports that there will be many ‘adventures’ with Milo, some of which will be ‘quite dark’. Part of the demo involved egging Milo on to stamp on a snail, not exactly murdering your father with a kitchen knife but still rather unpleasant.
The demo also included teaching Milo to skim stones before he confides in you that his parents have told him off.
Source: BBC
stonyk
someone should tell Molyneaux the story about the boy who cried wolf. Lie too many times and no matter what you say it won’t be believed.
Anyway, does this start the beginning of cylon creation?
Apnomis
I’m confused, I thought Milo was a made up tech demo that involved a programmer sat in the corner of the room controlling him like a puppet? Is it a real game now?
What exactly does Kinect do that makes Milo possible? You don’t need Kinect for 99% of what Milo is – colours and drawings and all that can be done with any camera so can basic hand movements like waving, in fact EyePet does a lot of that already. Likewise any microphone could be used to feed in voice commands.
It bugs me that this ‘virtual human’ breakthrough is being linked with Kinect – it’s such a marketing ploy to con the likes of the BBC to give Kinect coverage. Kinect is a ‘dumb’ camera/mic array, it has no processors or other voodoo in the hardware.
So that just leaves the 360 – so somehow Microsoft have managed to take a 5 year old console and achieve an AI program that mimics a human in a natural way – a feat that teams of people compete (and fail) to achieve every year using the very latest PCs. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitions_and_prizes_in_artificial_intelligence)
Let’s break Milo down for a minute:
Reading colours / Scanning images – basic and can be done with any camera in the right lighting
Voice recognition – basic and can be done with any microphone
Movement recognition – can be done to a basic level with any camera and I would argue for Milo basic ‘waving’ is all that would be needed.
Emotion recognition – depends how it is implemented but Sony claim that this has always been available in the Eye development kit
Leaving…
Enhanced AI program that is able to take this data, interpret it, and form a response in a natural way regardless what data is feed by the user – this is VERY difficult and is the holy grail of AI design, I do not believe for a minute Milo does this to any more of an advanced level as the EyePet does today. Even if Molyneux had managed this it would be f**k all to do with having Kinect as the input device.
It’s like claiming your PC can now perform much more sophisticated calculations just because you attached a new keyboard…
seedaripper1973
Did i ever confess my love to you Apnomis? if not, then…er..oh!
Apnomis
LOL, I just tell it as I see it…
Elliot
Impressed by the potential of using this in different applications, but I’m still waiting for the sound of your X-box whirring as it says “Sorry? I don’t understand that. Can you say it again?” for the thousandth time.