Firefly’s first model focused on creating images and text effects. A sample video from Adobe included a product demo for a “Generate Variations” option, for example. By highlighting an element in a multilayer work of art — a lighthouse, in the demo video — Adobe Firefly uses AI to generate different versions of the lighthouse.

Adobe also shows how one can take a picture of a summer scene and write “change scene to winter day” to change the image without any user editing.

Firefly can also automatically change the photo or image the user is working on, using generative artificial intelligence to create a paintbrush based on something already in the image.

However, new AI tools face ethical problems. With ChatGPT and similar products, these concerns relate to the tendency of models to “hallucinate” plausible-sounding but inaccurate information.

In image processing technologies, such as DALL-E or Stable Diffusion, concerns have been raised that models steal artists’ content, reconstruct it, and present it without acknowledgement or permission from the creator.

Adobe said Firefly will focus on giving creators “opportunities to leverage your skills and creativity and protect your work.” The company already offers non-artificial intelligence platforms that do this.

It’s currently only available for the Unity engine, which is widely used in VR. Support is planned for Unreal Engine, Wwise, and FMOD.

Presence Platform
The Presence Platform is a collection of development tools and programming interfaces that enable hands and voice interaction and augmented reality capabilities with Quest 2 and Quest Pro, for example.

Applications of the new immersive audio features include virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. For the latter, Meta’s Quest 2 and Quest Pro VR headsets add computer graphics to the video image from their front-facing cameras.

In addition to Meta devices, the new audio SDK supports “almost any standalone mobile VR device” as well as PC VR (e.g. Steam VR) and third-party devices.

New features
New features include better handling of the head, outer ear, and torso filtering effects that greatly affect sound in the real world: The Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) is designed to mimic authentic audio perception accurately. Without it, sounds in your immediate environment will sound unnatural.

The Spatial Audio Rendering and Room Acoustics features build on the previous Oculus Spatializer and will continue to be developed. The system is much better suited for use in VR than the built-in audio systems in popular game engines, which are primarily designed for consoles and PCs, Meta said in its developer blog.

The new Audio SDK offers both flexibility and ease of use. According to Meta, even developers with no audio experience will be able to mix audio, which is essential for immersion.

What else we need to know
The previous Oculus Spatializer will continue to be supported in Unreal Engine, FMOD or Wwise or for those who prefer a native API solution. Meta does not recommend upgrading in these areas yet.

For new projects in Unity Engine, Meta recommends using the new “XR Audio SDK” to better maintain applications in the long run or to try out experimental features.

Algebraic effect handlers are a first-class abstraction designed to represent and manipulate control flow in a program. In their most immediate form, effect handlers provide an exception restart mechanism that can be used for error recovery. Due to their flexibility, they are also the basis for other abstractions, such as generators, asynchronous input/output, concurrency, etc.

Effects are associated with effect handlers, which are written with three fields: a retc function that accepts the result of a completed computation; an exnc function that is called when an exception is thrown; and a generic effc function that handles the effect.

Channels, on the other hand, are a mechanism that allows domains to communicate with each other as their name implies. Channels are blocking, meaning that if a domain tries to receive a message from a channel but the message is not ready, the domain can block. Similarly, a send operation may cause a domain to block until another domain receives that message if the channel has reached the maximum number of messages it can hold.

Currently, one of the limitations of the OCaml 5 compiler is that it only supports x86-64 and arm64 architectures on Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows/migw64. The OCaml team is working to restore support for the other traditionally supported architectures in 2023.

Concurrency and parallelism support are not the only new features in OCaml 5, which also includes improvements to the runtime system, standard library, and several optimizations. Don’t miss the official release notes to get all the details.