TuSimple shut down its U.S. self-driving truck operations and delisted from the stock market in January 2024, three years after raising $1.35 billion in its IPO. The company had originally planned to restart operations in China, but earlier this year, TuSimple parted ways with most of its autonomous driving staff. Shortly after, it started hiring for roles related to AI animation and gaming. Chen owns or has ties to several other animation and gaming companies. And it appears Chen's other businesses are involved in TuSimple/CreateAI's new venture. In a recent filing, TuSimple said that the board approved a $25 million deal in November with two game development companies that are affiliated with Chen to develop and distribute 'Heroes of Jin Yong,' a role-playing video game. To reduce potential conflicts of interest, in May 2024, Chen transferred his ownership interest in those companies to a trust that he does not control, though the beneficiaries of the trust are members of his family, per the filing....

Their method generates mathematical functions known as barycentric coordinates, which define how 2D and 3D shapes can bend, stretch, and move through space. For example, an artist using their tool could choose functions that make the motions of a 3D cat's tail fit their vision for the 'look' of the animated feline. Many other techniques for this problem are inflexible, providing only a single option for the barycentric coordinate functions for a certain animated character. Each function may or may not be the best one for a particular animation. The artist would have to start from scratch with a new approach each time they want to try for a slightly different look. 'As researchers, we can sometimes get stuck in a loop of solving artistic problems without consulting with artists. What artists care about is flexibility and the 'look' of their final product. They don't care about the partial differential equations your algorithm solves behind the scenes,' says Ana Dodik, lead author of a paper on this technique....

The story began last fall in the MIT course 6.810 (Engineering Interactive Technologies) taught by Stefanie Mueller, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The students, who were mostly undergraduates, were asked to do a final group project, and they were assisted in this effort by graduate students who were helping Mueller teach the course. Now, the product of this effort, along with an accompanying paper, will be presented in August in Vancouver, Canada, at SIGGRAPH 2022, 'the world's largest, most influential annual conference in computer graphics and interactive techniques.' Ticha Sethapakdi, a third-year PhD student based at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, thought hard about a task that could be accomplished in a couple of months and would also enable students to utilize the skills they'd learned in class. Perhaps they could develop an instant camera, she thought, but instead of following the Polaroid example, it might be fun to make a camera that produced moving images. A cheap and portable device like this, Sethapakdi mused, could be a great icebreaker in social situations, and might, more importantly, open the door to other applications that were not immediately obvious to members of their research team....

Alongside the report in its Q2 2022 letter to shareholders that Netflix lost 970,000 subscribers, Netflix also announced the acquisition of Animal Logic, the Australian animation studio responsible for 'Happy Feet,' 'The Lego Movie,' 'Peter Rabbit' and more. The transaction is expected to close later this year. 'Netflix has1 been investing in animation over the past few years, and this furthers our commitment to building a world-class animation studio,' said Amy Reinhard, Netflix vice president of Studio Operations, in an official statement. 'Animal Logic is a leading animation studio with innovative technology that will strengthen our existing business and increase our long-term capacity in the animation space, so that we can better entertain our members around the world.' This puts Netflix in a better position to compete against Disney+ and its array of family-friendly animated films. Expanding the Netflix animation team is the company's attempt to advance the buildout of its 'end-to-end animation production capabilities.'...