About three weeks ago, Samsung announced that it wanted to present a mysterious "artificial human" project at the upcoming CES2020 in Las Vegas. On the eve of the event the first rumors emerge, and they leave people speechless.
Samsung Neon, this is the name of the project, was hypothesized as a new voice assistant that arose from the ashes of the bad Bixby, a flop of the Korean house. We would have seen it in addition to a thousand inventions of the Samsung C-Lab and stop.
What turns out is an AI-based system that produces hyper realistic human avatars.
A tweet from the project and some leaked videos confirm it, although they don't give us enough information to judge how impressive Samsung Neon is.
Indistinguishable from reality
The head of the Samsung Neon project, the researcher in the field of human-computer interaction Paranav Mistry tweeted the image below, showing what appears to be one of the project's avatars. Mistry says the company's "Core R3" technology now can “autonomously create new expressions, new movements, new dialogues that are completely different from the data acquired at the beginning”.
Peeking at the source code on the home page Neon there are video addresses in which there seems to be even more of these human figures. The videos had originally been published on Reddit and linked in the code but have now been removed.
But someone saved one and put it on YouTube. Check it out:
What amazes about these avatars created by Samsung NEON is that they really look like high definition videos, not computer generated graphics and AI.
Samsung Neon, how is it made?
And in fact the question is precisely this: to what extent are these “artificial humans” generated by the computer? OR Are they based on a high-fidelity video capture that is then animated? And above all: how do they manage to generate dialogue? Many say that Samsung Neon brings out avatars that are indistinguishable from real humans, but it would be a giant leap forward.
In a recent interview, Mistry made it clear that he thinks “digital humans” will be an important technology of this decade.
“Movies are full of examples of AI being introduced into our world”, said the researcher. “In Blade Runner 2049 Agent K develops a relationship with a hologram, Joi. Virtual or digital humans will be the reality. A digital human could extend his role to become part of our everyday lives: a virtual news presenter, a virtual receptionist or even an AI-generated movie star”.
We just have to wait, and there are less than two days left, to understand if the Samsung Neon avatars can meet these expectations.
