
Big Techday 23
Exhibits
Here you can find an overview of our exhibits of our last Big Techday 22 on July 15th, 2022.
Blobby VR
This multiplayer game in Virtual Reality takes you to a virtual beach where you'll be one of two blobs taking part in a volleyball tournament in the style of the legendary "Blobby Volley" game. You'll need a lot of skill to catapult the ball into the opponent's field with your head, while your human opponent tries to prevent that from happening. Wireless Virtual Reality glasses are used to prevent you from stumbling over a cable.
Kesselhaus
Confluence Translator
As a growing company, TNG is starting more and more operations internationally. One challenge is also the internationalization of our knowledge base in Confluence, historically grown in German. TNG's solution is the Confluence Translator, which enables users to translate Confluence pages from German to English with only one mouse click. The highlight: The data never leaves our infrastructure. Potentially sensitive documents don't have to go through external servers, so feel free to translate pages all day!
Kesselhaus
EDAG CityBot
EDAG CityBots are multifunctional, fully automated robotic vehicles that move emission-free around the clock in urban areas.
Here, EDAG CityBots solve almost all the challenges of our cities and represent the mobility backend of the smart city. Thanks to their modularity and multifunctionality, EDAG CityBots are operational around the clock and can act as needed via add-on modules.
Turntable in the entrance hall
Music AI
This exhibit offers relaxing background music, in the style of LoFi Hiphop and based on samples generated by artificial intelligence.
Composing music yourself with the help of artificial intelligence, live 24/7 without repetition, that is the goal of this project. We have chosen a genre that is already known for YouTube continuous streams, namely LoFi Hiphop. Maybe the term "LoFi-Girl" already rings a bell, an animated girl scribbling in a notebook in front of a rainy backdrop to pleasant warm sounds.
Composing this kind of music automatically has advantages, but also challenges: on the one hand, the structure is relatively simple, on the other hand, most available AI solutions in the music field tend to work with classical or pop music, since a lot of data is available here.
In addition, this genre lives from its soft but also noisy sounds that need to be reproduced. For fully automated audio processing, some tools had to be integrated, with the difficulty that music production usually happens in so-called DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) while our software does not need a cluttered GUI from the beginning to the final livestream on YouTube.
Our solution works on the basis of MIDI files generated by various neural networks such as transformers and VAEs. These are combined, processed into audio files with selected synthesizers and then provided with Lofi-typical effects. In the last step, the result is streamed to YouTube, where everyone can listen to it.
Kesselhaus
Nao Showcase
With the help of humanoid robots and 3D camera sensors for gesture recognition, a humanoid robot can be controlled remotely without contact, imitating your movements. The Innovation Hacking Team has implemented such a gesture control system based on a Nao robot and a Kinect One. This showcase will in the near future be displayed in the new robotics exhibition of the Deutsches Museum Munich, but can already be tested today at the Big Techday.
Kesselhaus
Parrot Attacks
Gesture control used to require powerful computers and special capturing hardware, but nowadays it can be done on any conventional laptop with a webcam. Parrot Attacks is a gesture-controlled duck hunt clone that runs completely in the browser. This is made possible by AI-based hand tracking, which works with normal 2D cameras.
Kesselhaus
PowerPoint-Karaoke-Generator
How good could an AI-generated PowerPoint presentation actually be? We tried it and found out: Not too shabby at all.
In the age of digitisation and AI, many tasks in our everyday lives can be automated very easily. But until recently, the everlasting torment of the average white collar, the PowerPoint presentation, had to be painstakingly created and presented by hand. But all of that ends now! The TNG Innovation Hacking Team presents the PowerPoint Ghostwriter. Give it only the title and it automagically generates a complete slide deck, from headlines to matching images. Even the performance is taken over by artificial intelligence: a realistic deep fake avatar - trained with the knowledge of the entire Internet - takes you through the slides.
Kesselhaus
Real-time Deepfakes
Imagine standing in front of a mirror where you are no longer looking into your own face, but rather into that of Donald Trump or Olaf Scholz. In real time, your own facial expressions are transferred to the other person's face. With this showcase you will experience yourself from a
completely different perspective. Using neural networks, faces are recognized in the video input, translated into another personality and integrated back into the video output, while their facial expressions remain unchanged.
Kesselhaus
Schafkopf AI
Here, it is possible to play the bavarian card game "Schafkopf", and to compete against the AI from the BTD talk "Next Level Schafkopf AI".
The first player is controlled by the human player, while players 2 to 4 are each controlled by the AI.
Kesselhaus
Shitposting AI
More often than not, online discussion is tedious, toxic and doesn't lead anywhere. A fruitless obligation that has controlled humans for far too long. Luckily the Innovation Hacking Team found a salvation: Automation.
We trained an AI (GPT-2) on comment threads of the social media platforms with the worst discussion culture: Twitter and Reddit. Using this AI, we can now take the human entirely out of the loop and have have an authentic, endless, AI-generated online discussion. Finally the human can return to higher duties such as learning about clean code, while resting assured that the important topics of today's society are still being discussed in authentic internet fashion. The discussion is brought back to the physical world by a group of talking robot heads that take turns presenting their arguments. For those preferring written discussion, the discussion is simultaneously carried out in a telegramesque group chat.
Disclaimer: The AI was trained to authentically replicate all facets of online discussion, including the ugly ones. It was trained on unfiltered internet data, any opinion or bias of the model is based on real comments posted to social media. The AI doesn't have a mind of its own and its statements are not to be taken seriously.
That being said, the AI does - by design - not represent TNG's opinions or values.
Kesselhaus
Style Transfer: ArtVision / InstaArt
What if Virtual Reality glasses could transform your environment into a huge 3D painting and everything would appear in the style of a work of art by Van Gogh, for example? In this showcase this vision becomes reality. A technique from the field of Artificial Intelligence called "Style Transfer" creates a kind of patchwork from two images that shows reality in the style of an artwork. The resulting images are either displayed in real time in 3D using Virtual Reality glasses (ArtVision) or can be printed as Polaroid images (InstaArt).
Kesselhaus