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Intangible is the first tool that could make generative AI video truly usable. The new web appcreated by Pixar, Apple, Google, and Unity alumniis 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 its 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. Thats 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.[Image: Intangible]Spatial intelligenceMigos 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 languagean inherently imprecise translation that often results in the AI changing things and adding objects or actions that you didnt 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.”[Image: Intangible]How it worksThe 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. Theres 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 primitiveslike spheres, cubes, or pyramidsto 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 interfaceat least using Chrome in my Macbook Air 15 with M2 chipwas 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 thats it.The idea is good. I tried it (here, its 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 cant identify. There are rendering mistakes as well, and the people are wearing the wrong clothesthat 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 itselfas Nvidia demonstrated six years agoand 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 Klinga 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, Intangibles 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.
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After years of research, learning, and development, Ikea says it’s ready to release a line of products it hopes will change the smart home game. The Swedish furniture manufacturer and retailer announced Wednesday that it will release 20 smart home products in January 2026 that it calls its “biggest step” yet to make smart home technology open, simple, and affordable. Ikea has released smart light bulbs and systems before, and previously partnered with Sonos for speakers, but this relaunched smart home line was designed to be universal. [Photo: Ikea] “Our goal is to make the smart home easy to use, easy to understand, and within reach for the many,” Ikea of Sweden’s range manager David Granath said in a statement. The heart of Ikea’s smart home system will be Dirigera, a hub that’s compatible with the smart home technical standard Matter. That means Ikea’s line will work with smart home devices across different brands. It’s a system built for versatility and designed specifically to lower the threshold for consumers to get started on their own smart home systems. [Photo: Ikea] Ikea didn’t reveal much about the products other than to say the goal was not to add technology for technology’s own sake. Instead, Ikea wants to build a smarter smart home that’s supportive and adaptable. Forthcoming products will replace the functions of existing products, Granath confirmed to The Verge, and a pair of Bluetooth speakers being released ahead of the wider January launch act as a preview. Nattbad, coming out this month, was designed to look like a vintage speaker in yellow, pink, or black, while Blomprakt, a table speaker-lamp that will come in beige, black, and blue, will be released in October. Both are minimal but attractive and signal Ikea’s general direction for home tech design. [Photo: Ikea] “We understand how people want to furnish with sound in a way that adds atmosphere and feels natural in the home,” Granath says. “Our aim is to make sound accessible, functional, and enjoyable without adding complexity.” This is smart home tech made easy. And if Ikea can deliver for consumers like it thinks it can, more connected homes could soon be coming to the massesand the retailer will mark its territory in the smart home space.
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Cybersecurity and data privacy are constantly in the news. Governments are passing new cybersecurity laws. Companies are investing in cybersecurity controls such as firewalls, encryption, and awareness training at record levels. And yet, people are losing ground on data privacy. In 2024, the Identity Theft Resource Center reported that companies sent out 1.3 billion notifications to the victims of data breaches. Thats more than triple the notices sent out the year before. Its clear that despite growing efforts, personal data breaches are not only continuing, but accelerating. What can you do about this situation? Many people think of the cybersecurity issue as a technical problem. Theyre right: Technical controls are an important part of protecting personal information, but they are not enough. As a professor of information technology, analytics, and operations at the University of Notre Dame, I study ways to protect personal privacy. Solid personal privacy protection is made up of three pillars: accessible technical controls, public awareness of the need for privacy, and public policies that prioritize personal privacy. Each plays a crucial role in protecting personal privacy. A weakness in any one puts the entire system at risk. The first line of defense Technology is the first line of defense, guarding access to computers that store data and encrypting information as it travels between computers to keep intruders from gaining access. But even the best security tools can fail when misused, misconfigured, or ignored. Two technical controls are especially important: encryption and multifactor authentication (MFA). These are the backbone of digital privacyand they work best when widely adopted and properly implemented. Encryption uses complex math to put sensitive data in an unreadable format that can only be unlocked with the right key. For example, your web browser uses HTTPS encryption to protect your information when you visit a secure webpage. This prevents anyone on your networkor any network between you and the websitefrom eavesdropping on your communications. Today, nearly all web traffic is encrypted in this way. But if were so good at encrypting data on networks, why are we still suffering all of these data breaches? The reality is that encrypting data in transit is only part of the challenge. Securing stored data We also need to protect data wherever its storedon phones, laptops, and the servers that make up cloud storage. Unfortunately, this is where security often falls short. Encrypting stored data, or data at rest, isnt as widespread as encrypting data that is moving from one place to another. While modern smartphones typically encrypt files by default, the same cant be said for cloud storage or company databases. Only 10% of organizations report that at least 80% of the information they have stored in the cloud is encrypted, according to a 2024 industry survey. This leaves a huge amount of unencrypted personal information potentially exposed if attackers manage to break in. Without encryption, breaking into a database is like opening an unlocked filing cabineteverything inside is accessible to the attacker. Multifactor authentication is a security measure that requires you to provide more than one form of verification before accessing sensitive information. This type of authentication is more difficult to crack than a password alone because it requires a combination of different types of information. It often combines something you know, such as a password, with something you have, such as a smartphone app that can generate a verification code or with something thats part of what you are, like a fingerprint. Proper use of multifactor authentication reduces the risk of compromise by 99.22%. While 83% of organizations require that their employees use multifactor authentication, according to another industry survey, this still leaves millions of accounts protected by nothing more than a password. As attackers grow more sophisticated and credential theft remains rampant, closing that 17% gap isnt just a best practiceits a necessity. Multifactor authentication is one of the simplest, most effective steps organizations can take to prevent data breaches, but it remains underused. Expanding its adoption could dramatically reduce the number of successful attacks each year. Awareness gives people the knowledge they need Even the best technology falls short when people make mistakes. Human error played a role in 68% of 2024 data breaches, according to a Verizon report. Organizations can mitigate this risk through employee training, data minimizationmeaning collecting only the information necessary for a task, then deleting it when its no longer neededand strict access controls. Policies, audits, and incident response plans can help organizations prepare for a possible data breach so they can stem the damage, see who is responsible and learn from the experience. Its also important to guard against insider threats and physical intrusion using physical safeguards such as locking down server rooms. Public policy holds organizations accountable Legal protections help hold organizations accountable in keeping data protected and giving people control over their data. The European Unions General Data Protection Regulation is one of the most comprehensive privacy laws in the world. It mandates strong data protection practices and gives people the right to access, correct, and delete their personal data. And the General Data Protection Regulation has teeth: In 2023, Meta was fined 1.2 billion (US$1.4 billion) when Facebook was found in violation. Despite years of discussion, the U.S. still has no comprehensive federal privacy law. Several proposals have been introduced in Congress, but none have made it across the finish line. In its place, a mix of state regulations and industry-specific rulessuch as the Health Inurance Portability and Accountability Act for health data and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act for financial institutionsfill the gaps. Some states have passed their own privacy laws, but this patchwork leaves Americans with uneven protections and creates compliance headaches for businesses operating across jurisdictions. The tools, policies, and knowledge to protect personal data existbut peoples and institutions use of them still falls short. Stronger encryption, more widespread use of multifactor authentication, better training, and clearer legal standards could prevent many breaches. Its clear that these tools work. Whats needed now is the collective willand a unified federal mandateto put those protections in place. This article is part of a series on data privacy that explores who collects your data, what and how they collect, who sells and buys your data, what they all do with it, and what you can do about it. Mike Chapple is a teaching professor of IT, analytics, and operations at the University of Notre Dame. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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