Human imagination has long been occupied with the question of how advances in computing will change the future. With the new technologies and app development services employed by the IT vendors like MLSDev, shortly, we will be offered new user experiences and digital products that would change our behavioral patterns.
From the first theater play by Karel Capek in the 1920s to the latest sci-fi fiction and TV shows like Black Mirror and Upload, humans have speculated on what aspects of our life will change.
This time, we want to talk about four main AI technology advancements that were not quite predicted but will definitely affect our future.
1. Non-fungible Tokens: Blockchain
The non-fungible tokens give birth to a whole new era where digital art gets equal to real-world art, and this is happening right these days.
NFT is a sort of technology like blockchain and was used long ago to prove the authenticity of digital works of art like images or soundtracks.
How it works: NFT technology allows converting digital artworks into unique items, usually meant to be regarded as originals. Although, any copy of a painting can be coded in NFT and thus becomes a unique item. Of two copies of a book in NFT, each is unique.
We may say, non-fungible tokens solved the problems of copyright, as they add authenticity and uniqueness to a thing that can be endlessly copied.
The technology started long ago with the Ethereum based service Crypto Kitties. Each of them was unique and stored in a blockchain. Today, the first CryptoKitty is valued at USD 600,000, as reported by CNN Business.
Yet the NFT wasn’t that popular before recently, a London-based artist Beeple sold a digital painting for nearly USD 70 million.
The sale of an NFT collage is a truly historic moment.
Osinachi, a digital artist from Africa, told in an interview CNN: “The historic sale by Beepl is actually going to open the eyes of the art world as we know it, and digital art is going to be prized as much as traditional art. As a digital artist, I say I deserve it; my work deserves to be on the same shelf as digital art and not below it.
Last year Osinachi could barely ask USD 250 for his work. After the epoch-changing Christie’s sale, he sells his works for USD 20,000 per piece. So, it is highly likely there will be more NFT art in the nearest future, as the interest is only growing.
2. Deep Nostalgia in Photography
Recently, the AI-powered service Deep Nostalgia rocked the web with their new service: animating old photos.
The concept is simple. Imagine you have a picture of your great-grandmother, and you wonder how she would look in a video. Deep Nostalgia can enliven the photo making it change the facial expression and move the head.
How it works: Deep Nostalgia uses a vast library of videos of facial expressions, picks the ones that are most similar in complexion to the face on the target photo, and creates a video mask.
For now, Deep Nostalgia is used to animate pictures of relatives and historical people.
How to get it: if you want to play with Deep Nostalgia technology, you need to create an account on the MyHeritage platform. You get five free uses of software, and you have to pay for more.
For now, the service works with pictures of the head only. Yet, it is being advanced.
3. Deep Fake
Deep fake caused turbulence in the press in 2018 when the scandalous video with Barack Obama blaming Donald Trump was released.
The fake was created with the help of an AI-powered tool that overlapped the facial expressions of Barack Obama and an actor reading the text. The result was so real that it caused concerns among the officials who started calling for technology regulation.
How it works: Deep fakes use the machine learning algorithms that create a mask over the video of some real person, altering how the area around the mouse looks. It usually takes real-time webcam streaming of an actor whose voice and facial expressions will be used in a video and a video of a target person you want to fake.
For example, an illustration below shows how an actor’s facial expression is transformed into the facial expressions of George Bush.
The faked videos appear so real that an average internet user cannot spot the difference between fake and reality. Therefore, there are fears that deep fakes can be used to damage the reputation of some politicians or manipulate elections.
For now, the uses of deep fake go as far as the adult videos on Reddit and Twitter featuring TV stars like Emma Watson, Gal Gadot, and Katy Perry. However, we hope deep fake creators will find nobler applications of the technology.
How to get it: If you want to try to create a deep fake yourself, here’s a list of software to try:
- FakeApp
- Adobe After Effects
- Face2Face
- VoCo by Adobe
4. Virtual Homes for Real Estate Industry
Science fiction told us little about digital real estate. Yet, the reality took an unexpected turn.
In 2021, the Canadian artist Krista Kim was asking 30 Ethereum tokens for the first digital house ever sold. Whether regarded as a sort of a game or a piece of art, the item was eventually sold for 288 Ethereum tokens that equal USD 500 K.
How it works: The Mars House is an amalgamation of a virtual reality game and the mentioned NFT technology, which makes it unique. An owner of the souse has an exclusive ownership right and can access this sort of property via a computer or a VR headset.
Although it seems there is nothing new about it, as it looks like an ordinary VR game setting (and it is so, as it is built with Unreal Engine, used to design VR games), we described it separately, as it has a peculiar feature. The work is tied to a contract with an Italian glass manufacturer that can produce the house’s real-life copy on customer demand.
Therefore, we have an amalgamation of blockchain, virtual reality, and real estate. Quite an unpredicted trend!
Summing Everything Up
Two epoch-changing episodes marked the beginning of 2021: the sales of Beeple’s NFT collage and Kim’s VR house. These events started the unforeseen interest in blockchain and showed us the unexpected uses of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and blockchain. The software development companies will more and more adopt these and other technological developments like that of mlsdev.com
