For about three weeks, Samsung has announced that it intends to present a mysterious "artificial human" project at the upcoming CES2020 in Las Vegas. On the eve of the event, the first rumors appear, and leave you 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 one of the project's avatars looks like. Mistry says the company's "Core R3" technology can now "autonomously create new expressions, new movements, new dialogues 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 has saved one and put it on YouTube. Take a look at it:
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 indeed the question is this: to what extent are these "artificial humans" computer generated? Or are they based on high fidelity video capture which is then animated? And above all: how do they manage in the generation of dialogues? 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 where AI is introduced to our world", said the researcher. “In Blade Runner 2049 Agent K develops a relationship with a hologram, Joi. Virtual or digital human beings will be reality. A digital human could extend his role to become part of our everyday life: a virtual news presenter, a virtual receptionist or even an AI-generated movie star. ".
There is only to wait, and there are less than two days, to understand if the Samsung Neon avatars can meet these expectations.
