Latest news with #Intangible
Fast Company
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
These Pixar and Apple alums want to change the way you create generative AI video
Intangible is the first tool that could make generative AI video truly usable. The new web app—created by Pixar, Apple, Google, and Unity alumni—is trying to change the user experience of generative AI video by letting you fully control your video using a 3D interface, thus solving the lack of control of current text prompts. Think about it as a 3D animation program that lets you control the stage, characters, and camera in your film, with a generative AI rendering engine that will turn those elements into reality. Intangible's current version feels half-baked, and it will not produce The Godfather yet, but it's definitely a step in the right direction for the generative AI video user experience. 'To deliver professional-grade results in creative industries like film, advertising, events, and games, the directors, producers, and every creative on the team needs control over set design, shot composition, art direction, pacing, cameras, and more to deliver on the creative vision,' Intangible chief product officer Charles Migos tells me over email. 'Current AI models are reliant on extensive prompting, and language alone isn't enough to convey creative intent. By providing generative AI models with spatial intelligence, Intangible allows creatives to get closer to professional-grade results with less prompting, more feel, and more control.' Migos is right that we need a better way to control the imagination of generative AI video engines. While generative AI video is getting to the point at which it is truly indistinguishable from reality, creating it is like rolling the dice. There's still a chasm between the vision in your mind and what comes out of Google's Veo 3 or Kling. This makes it pretty much unusable for everything but memes, skits, storyboards, and the occasional ad stunt. While some AI models let you set camera paths or define some characters and objects using images, the prompts that 'create' the videos are inherently limited by the interpretable nature of language. Every person and AI visualizes any given text differently. That's the beauty of reading a book, but it's a limitation when it comes to creating what you have in mind. That's why Alfred Hitchcock meticulously planned his films using storyboards, so that everyone in the production could truly visualize the 'intangible' nature of his imagination to faithfully capture Cary Grant's desperation as a biplane tried to kill him in North by Northwest. Spatial intelligence Migos and CEO Bharat Vasan believe that to truly unleash the power of generative AI for video production, we must add 'spatial intelligence' to the interface. Computer vision expert Fei-Fei Li, known as the godmother of artificial intelligence, has defined spatial intelligence as the ability, both in humans and artificial intelligence systems, to perceive, interpret, reason about, and interact with the three-dimensional world. This involves not just recognizing objects, but understanding their positions, relationships, and functions within a physical space, and being able to act upon that understanding. 'By building in interactive 3D from the outset, Intangible's world model gives generative AI image and video generation models the ability to be more precise, without extensive prompting,' Vasan says. This precision is what current text-to-video tools fundamentally lack. When you describe a scene in words, you're forcing the AI to interpret spatial relationships through language—an inherently imprecise translation that often results in the AI changing things and adding objects or actions that you didn't have in mind. Intangible grounds generative AI models in structured 3D scenes with real camera control and spatial logic, which Vasan says 'provides best-in-class coherence in the results, which we further improve with object descriptions, reference imagery, and fine-tuning models [LoRAs, or low-rank adaptations]. The goal is to address one of the biggest complaints about current AI video tools: the lack of coherence and continuity between frames.' How it works The platform allows users to build custom 3D scenes using drag-and-drop objects, set up cameras, and control them. The interface is pretty simple: You can start from a preset scene or with a blank world. There's a general viewport that shows you the scene, with a ground ready for you to start dropping buildings, characters, and other objects from a library of more than 5,000 assets. At the bottom of the interface, a toolbox gives you access to all you need. To the left, icons allow you to open a scene panel in which you can add and reorder all the shots that will form your final video. In the center, a central prompt allows you to add new objects using text. To its left, there are three icons to add objects to the scene. The first one allows you to display a palette to pick an object from the library of premade assets. Then there is an icon to add primitives—like spheres, cubes, or pyramids—to create your own basic objects. Finally, a third button lets you add what the company calls 'interactables': cameras, characters, waypoints to tell the camera where to move, and 'populators,' which will fill your scene with variations of the same objects, like bushes or shrubs in a forest. Working in this interface is pretty straightforward. Objects in the scene can be moved around with standard 3D handles, with arrows to move, cubes to scale, and arches to rotate the objects in all three axes. The interface—at least using Chrome in my Macbook Air 15 with M2 chip—was sluggish but usable, with some serious pauses at the beginning of the session, which got better later on. To the right of the prompt field, there are two icons that switch between edit and visualization modes. The latter opens a side panel on the right of the screen that contains all you need to tell the generative AI how to render your scene: how the objects look, how they interact with each other, what the lighting and the atmosphere look like, and anything else you want to define. There are also options to set up the time of the day or the final look of your video, which includes modes like photorealism, 3D cartoon, or film noir. Once you write your prompt, click the 'generate' button . . . and that's it. The idea is good. I tried it (here, it's free for now), and it works- ish. I started from one of the templates, a Roman urban scene. I quickly added an elephant, positioned and scaled it up with the object handles, and then I clicked on the visualization icon to set the prompt (a premade one was already there), and clicked on 'generate.' The results were just okay. Intangible does what the company claims, but it still makes mistakes. You can see it in the way it rendered this scene with a giant elephant in a Roman street. The Colosseum is gone, replaced by a mountain and some pointy things I can't identify. There are rendering mistakes as well, and the people are wearing the wrong clothes—that is, unless I missed the history class in which they teach that Romans wore jeans and Daisy Dukes. Once you have your shot, you can turn it into a video. This is where things get disappointing. I thought Intangible would use its own generative AI engine to directly interpret the 3D scene itself—as Nvidia demonstrated six years ago —and turn it into a final photorealistic video using the objects to guide the final rendering. In reality, it feeds your still image to the latest version of Kling—a popular, pretty realistic rendering engine from China that can turn any image into a living video, following a prompt. If you are a 3D artist, you will be better off combining your current workflow using Kling or any other image-to-video generative AI (as some people are already doing). If you are starting from scratch with 3D software, Intangible can work for you even if it is nowhere near perfect. The software will get better: 'In the next three years, we expect tools like Intangible will be able to cover all aspects of preproduction and digital production for existing forms of media,' Migos and Vasan tell me. They also believe that 'AI tools bring an opportunity to expand visual storytelling as an art form, creating new categories that human creativity thrives in, as linear, interactive, and immersive media blend. . . . We expect tools like Intangible to be both simple and powerful enough that it empowers a new generation of creatives, not just those who are technical or prompting experts.' For now, despite the glitches, Intangible's premise is the right one: People need a better way to control AI video because text is not a good interface when you are trying to visualize an idea. Spatial intelligence may be the key to solving it. At the very least, this new software shows that, when it comes to artificial intelligence, we still need to work on a better, more natural, and precise user experience. The super-early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, July 25, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Intangible Launches Public Beta, Merging Generative AI, Game Engines, And Cinematic Design
A new generation of creative tools is arriving in the form of Intangible, a generative AI platform that lets artists build entire scenes in 3D, as if they were on a real set, placing their camera wherever they want in the virtual world, and then composing images and videos of professional quality. Now in open beta, Intangible blends the real-time responsiveness of game engines with the cinematic precision of film production and the flexibility of generative AI. Its browser-based platform offers directors, art teams, and creative producers a new way to generate visuals in 3D, in minutes. Intangible co-founders Charles Mingos and Migos Bharat Vasan 'We think in space, in movement, in light,' said Charles Migos, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Intangible. 'Most AI tools still rely on words, but that's not how creatives work. Intangible lets you guide AI the way you would direct a scene.' The company's leadership spans decades of experience at Apple, Unity, Pixar, Netflix, and Google. Migos himself designed Apple's first-party iPad apps and led design at Unity. Co-founder and CEO Bharat Vasan started his career in video games at Electronic Arts, before scaling multiple startups likeBasis and August Home (both acquired) and was most recently a venture investor at the Alphabet-backed incubator founded by David Friedberg (All-In Pod). Lead product designer Philip Metschan spent 20 years at Pixar working on The Incredibles and Inside Out, a resume that speaks to the company's creative ambitions. With Intangible you can prompt a 3D city park where you can place characters, cars or other assets ... More and film them with a virtual camera like you would with a game engine. At its core, Intangible is a spatial intelligence platform, embedding spatial reasoning and camera logic directly into its design.. While most generative AI models interpret prompts as loose instructions, Intangible integrates a dynamic world model, AI agents, and cinematic camera controls to deliver precise, editable results. Users can create virtual scenes with drag-and-drop tools or quick text commands, and then refine them with professional tools: shot framing, camera paths, lighting, and style filters. "Ideas move faster here," said Vasan. 'Language is fundamentally lossy—it can't capture spatial reality. That's why prompting AI often fails when building visual creative concepts. Intangible changes this by giving AI models spatial intelligence so you get speed and control without extensive prompting.' With a prompt this Jeep could be on a city street. Intangible is designed for creative industries where 3D spatial composition matters for storytelling, a $2 trillion sector that includes film, advertising, events, marketing and games. Intangible runs in any browser and is free to try. The current open beta is free through July 31, with pricing plans starting at $15 per month after that. Credits are used for video and image generation, with pay-as-you-go options also available.
Yomiuri Shimbun
08-05-2025
- General
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Japan's Washi Paper Used to Mend Historical Documents at U.S. National Archives, Overseas Museums
The Yomiuri Shimbun Yoonjoo Strumfels, a conservator at the National Archives, uses washi paper to repair a document in College Park, Md. WASHINGTON — The U.S. National Archives in Washington is making good use of traditional Japanese washi paper to repair historical documents. Washi is light, strong, water-resistant and endowed with a beautiful texture. Since washi can last more than 1,000 years if kept correctly, it is highly appreciated among those in charge of preserving international documents. The National Archives, which was established in 1934, houses as many as 13.5 billion pages of documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the original document of the Constitution of the United States. There are records that Japanese paper has been used to protect documents since the early 20th century. In the 1980s, washi was already an indispensable material in the field of preserving and mending documents. The craft of washi is inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list and utilized to repair cultural properties at institutions throughout the world, such as the Louvre Museum and the British Museum. Washi is used to repair ancient documents at the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine as well. The value of washi is also attracting attention from the viewpoint of art. 'Washi excels in durability, which is proven by history on a timescale in millenniums,' said New York-based artist Hiroshi Senju. '[Washi] is more than just a culture. It is also recognized for its value as a civilization.' Increased value of paper originals The U.S. National Archives in Washington is proceeding with a large-scale project to digitize about 500 million pages of documents and make them public online by 2026. Yet the institution also regards the preservation of the originals as important as well. Japanese washi is highly valued for this purpose. The Yomiuri Shimbun Yoonjoo Strumfels, a conservator at the National Archives, uses washi paper to repair a document in College Park, Md. According to the National Archives, documents were not scanned in color in the early days of the digitization project. Therefore, the documents were digitized in black and white, without color information even if some text or seals were in color. There are concerns about the risk of blackouts and damage to digital files as well, so washi seems to give conservators peace of mind because it makes them feel assured that they can go back to paper anytime. Yoonjoo Strumfels, a conservator at the National Archives, said that washi is essential to their preservation work because properly made washi can be used for a long time. Washi is characteristically less prone to degradation than other paper and also relatively resistant to environmental changes. Such traits make washi highly trusted for the conservation of documents. Strumfels repaired a document that George Washington, the first U.S. president, wrote to the Congress by removing a silk cloth adhered for reinforcement and attaching a very thin piece of washi on the damaged area. The washi that was attached did not do any damage to the letters on the document and looked naturally blended to the point it was almost invisible, she said. Of the different types of washi the National Archives utilizes for conservation, washi made from the kozo paper mulberry is the most commonly used because it has long fibers and excels in flexibility and strength. Washi made from the mitsumata shrub in the daphne family is suited to repair delicate items, such as photos, and washi made from the ganpi shrub of the daphne family has a pearly sheen that makes the paper preferred for occasions when the appearance of materials on display takes on importance. Apparently, the glue used at the National Archives to apply washi is made inside the facility using starch powder imported from Japan. 'While digitization is proceeding further, the degradation of data storage media and the demise of reproduction equipment are creating the problem that people cannot extract the contents from them,' Senju said. 'When that happens, people go back to paper because they can read it without any equipment.' Senju then stressed the significance of washi as a material that brings human memories to the future. 'Since this is the digital age, the multifaceted charm of washi is being rediscovered,' he said.
Al Etihad
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Al Etihad
DCT Abu Dhabi announces cultural events for Ramadan 2025
7 Mar 2025 12:54 ABU DHABI (WAM)The Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi) has unveiled a month-long programme of cultural events, activities, and workshops for Ramadan 2025, offering residents and visitors a chance to celebrate the traditions and spirit of the holy part of its commitment to preserving and promoting Abu Dhabi's cultural heritage while fostering creativity and community engagement, DCT Abu Dhabi has curated a diverse programme that highlights the emirate's traditions, arts, literature, and culinary heritage. Whether through immersive storytelling, thought-provoking discussions, or hands-on workshops, these events enable visitors to connect with the essence of Ramadan in meaningful and memorable the heritage-focused events, Al Ain Oasis will host Ramadan's Harees every Friday, reviving the tradition of preparing and distributing Harees, a staple Emirati dish. Visitors can learn about its cultural significance and preparation methods while enjoying this dish, which was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Before Suhoor at Bait Mohammed bin Khalifa will offer a blend of cultural entertainment and interactive experiences every weekend until 15th March. The evenings will feature themed nights showcasing Emirati, Syrian, Pakistani, and Iraqi music and dance, as well as a range of traditional games such as chess and Al Jahili Fort, the Traditional Games Championships from 12th to 15th March will celebrate Emirati heritage through individual and group games, public challenges, and educational workshops, with prizes for competition Al Dhafra, Ramadan at Al Dhafra Fort on 11th and 12th March will bring together the community for iftar gatherings, panel discussions, children's activities, and a contest highlighting traditional Emirati Ramadan Nights at Heritage Village, running from 14th to 21st March, will provide a deep dive into UAE heritage through interactive entertainment, workshops, and culinary addition to heritage activities, the programme features several community events aimed at fostering togetherness. Ramadan at Al Hosn, from 8th to 23rd March, will offer a nostalgic glimpse into Abu Dhabi's past with Majalis Ramadan gatherings, retail stalls, workshops, and entertainment suitable for all ages.A special session at the Cultural Foundation on 8th March will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Salon Al Multaqa literary platform, featuring a discussion with Nujoom Al-Ghanem and Asma 15th March, The Prophetic Etiquette discussion at Zayed Central Library will explore etiquette values from the Prophet's biography, led by author Dr. Ghosna Al-Amri in an exclusive women's panel discussion, The Language of the Qur'an and Early Arab Beliefs, will take place at the Cultural Foundation on 20th March, with Dr. Nizar Qublan and Reem Al-Kamali examining the linguistic and philosophical aspects of the Qur' those looking for a lively and interactive experience, Ramadan Arcade at Manarat Al Saadiyat will return from 15th to 25th March. This modern community gathering will blend arcade and board games, live performances, art installations, and creative and storytelling will also feature in the Ramadan programme, including Al Ain in the Memory of its People on 14th March at ZOI Café, celebrating World Poetry Day with Mohammed Al-Neyadi, Al-Hath Al-Kuwaiti, and Sheikha Ramadan Islamic Philosophy Talks at Louvre Abu Dhabi on 8th and 15th March will explore the influence of Islamic thought on global narratives. Held in collaboration with NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, these discussions will be introduced by traditional Hakawati storytelling performances, reviving the oral heritage of the Islamic the literary session with author Dr. Omar Al Amiri, hosted by MAKTABA on 13th March, will explore his journey as a writer and highlight the pivotal role of reading in shaping his career as a short story author and workshops will further enhance the Ramadan experience. Suhour wa Fanoon, a series of artist-led workshops by Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, will encourage artistic exploration and 13th March, artist Khalid Al Banna will lead a monoprinting workshop at the Cultural Foundation, where participants can experiment with layering colours and textures to create unique 18th March, calligraphy artist Diaa Allam will guide a session on abstract Arabic calligraphy, allowing participants to explore expressive lettering styles. Meanwhile, on 20th March, artist Asma Belhamar will conduct a workshop on abstract architectural drawing, combining structured techniques with freehand expression to explore the relationship between space and form.
Japan Times
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
Japan to again propose calligraphy for UNESCO heritage list
A panel of experts under Japan's Cultural Affairs Agency on Tuesday selected Japanese calligraphy again as a candidate for UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The government is expected to submit the fresh proposal to UNESCO by the end of the month. The U.N. agency's intergovernmental committee will decide whether to add shodō to the heritage list at a meeting around winter 2026. The government had proposed adding shodō to the list in March last year, but UNESCO postponed a review of the proposal. According to the Cultural Affairs Agency, shodō is defined as the act of writing kanji and kana characters using traditional brushstrokes and techniques. | Jiji According to the Cultural Affairs Agency, shodō is defined as the act of writing kanji and kana characters using traditional brushstrokes and techniques. It is a social custom in Japan, including being performed for signatures on occasions such as weddings and funerals. The Council for Cultural Affairs judged that shodō is suitable for informing the world about the diversity and depth of Japanese culture. On the UNESCO list, there are currently 23 items from Japan, including kabuki traditional plays and washoku Japanese cuisine. Most recently, traditional sake brewing was added last December.
