https://venturebeat.com/2020/08/18/hour-one-wants-synthetic-ai-characters-to-be-your-digital-avatars/
Hour One is making synthetic people. Blockchain authenticates them. Image Credit: Hour One
If you ever wondered how we’ll populate the metaverse, look no further than Hour One, an Israeli startup that is making replicas of people with AI avatars. These avatars can be a near-perfect visual likeness of you and speak with words fed to them by marketers who want to sell you something. An avatar can speak on your behalf in a digital broadcast when you’re at home watching TV.
Such creations feel like a necessary prerequisite of the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. And the trick: You’ll never know if you’re talking to a real person or one of Hour One’s synthetic people.
“There is definitely interest in the metaverse and we are doing experiments in the gaming space and with photorealism,” Hour One business strategy lead Natalie Monbiot said in an interview with VentureBeat. “The thing that has fired up the team is this vision of a world which is increasingly virtual and a belief that we will live increasingly virtually.”
She added, “We already have different versions of ourselves that appear in social media and different social channels. We represent ourselves already in this kind of digital realm. And we believe that our virtual selves will become even more independent. And we can put them to work for us. We can benefit from this as a human race. And you know, that old saying we can’t be in two places at once? Well, we believe that that will no longer be true.”
Hour One is one more example of the fledgling market for virtual beings. Startups focused on virtual beings have raised more than $320 million to date, according to Edward Saatchi of Fable Studios, speaking at July’s Virtual Beings Summit.
But we’re a little ahead of ourselves. Metaverse plays are becoming increasingly common as we all realize that there has to be something better than Zoom calls to engage in a digital way. So the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company said it raised $5 million in seed funding this week from Galaxy Interactive via its Galaxy EOS VC Fund, as well as Remagine Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and Amaranthine. It will use that money to scale its AI-driven cloud platform and create thousands of new digital characters.
You’ve heard of stock photos. Hour One is talking about something similar to stock humans. They can be used to speak any kind of script in a marketing video or give a highly customized message to someone. The goal is to create characters who cross the “uncanny valley.”
“I think that we’ve crossed the uncanny valley because we have our likeness test, and our videos are actually live and in market and generating results for customers,” Monbiot said. “I think that’s something that’s really distinctive about us, even though we’re such a young company, we’ve had very positive commercial traction already.”
Above: Who’s real and who’s not?
“We create synthetic characters based on real people,” Monbiot said. “We do so for commercials. We take real people and we have this really simple process for converting real people into synthetic characters that resemble them exactly. And once we have the synthetic characters, we can program them to generate all kinds of new content at enormous speed and scale.”
The competition in this space will be tough. GamesBeat will be having our own conference, tentatively scheduled for January 26 to January 27, 2020, on topics including the metaverse, and we expect it to be full of interesting companies.
A Samsung spinoff, Neo, caught a lot of attention for creating human AI avatars at CES 2020 in January, and then it promptly caught a lot of bad press for avatars that didn’t look as real as expected. But Hour One also started coming out of stealth at the same time with a plan to expand business-to-business human communication. The company showcased its “real or synthetic” likeness test at CES 2020, challenging people to distinguish between real and synthetic characters generated by its AI.
Hour One is using deep learning and generative adversarial neural networks to make its video characters. The company says it can do this in a highly scalable and cost-effective way. They’re supposed to look good, and the image on top of this story looks realistic.