The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $5.8 million contract to the Paolo Alto Research Center (PARC) to collaborate with several key universities to develop augmented reality (AR) technologies, it was announced on Thursday.
The Xerox company will work on projects with AR firm Patched Reality as well as two institutions—the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Rostock—to build artificial intelligence systems designed for completing complex tasks greater than a workforce’s capacity, the company said.
The new Autonomous Multimodal Ingestion for Goal Oriented Support (AMIGOS) for DARPA’s Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance programme is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to execute tasks such as converting text and video manuals to instruct users with AR solutions as well as monitor tasks.
The work @PARCinc does with @DARPA and other government agencies is key to developing new technologies to market. With the new AMIGOS project, PARC is using #AI to develop a system that will guide users in complex physical tasks using #AR. Learn more: https://t.co/xxNHfYdw6i
— Xerox (@Xerox) December 16, 2021
Its innovative algorithms can also extract knowledge from content, reason on physical tasks, offer conversational and AR guidance routines tailored to individual users based on their skill sets and emotional responses, and perceive data from environments, PARC explained.
The new technology will allow specialists such as mechanics and medics to perform duties above their skilsets with the AI algorithm’s guided feedback and instructional assistance.
Dr Charles Ortiz, Chief Investigator for AMIGOS, said,
“Augmented reality, computer vision, language processing, dialogue processing and reasoning are all AI technologies that have disrupted a variety of industries individually but never in such a coordinated and synergistic fashion”
Ortiz added that leveraging existing instructional material to create AR guidance would help the AMIGOS project to “accelerate this movement, making real-time task guidance and feedback available on-demand.”
According to the company, DARPA will receive an offline system for learning using multiple sources such as visual and language data to extract information used to complete tasks and create content.
The programme will also use an online hybrid AI system, which combines “symbolic and neural AI elements” to build interactive AR guidance with information from offline data tailored to users capabilities and emotional feedback.
AI Developments in the XR Market
The development comes as DARPA and the US military have reached several milestones in building XR solutions to train and monitor personnel, allowing divisions to reach new targets to tackle issues.
Brooklyn’s Moth+Flame created a trainer for US Air Force soldiers and staff to address concerns over rising sexual assault cases in recent years, with the virtual reality (VR) solution working to both guide trainees to essential resources for reporting crimes and raise bystander prevention skills.
The programme, which received an AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award, incorporated conversation-based technologies to allow trainees to resolve conflicts in real-time.
In business and across the Pacific, Russian telecoms giant MTS acquired Dutch tech firm VisionLabs on Monday for $100 million USD to incorporate the company’s AI-based computer vision and machine learning (ML) products for use with VR/AR technologies, facial recognition, and others.
