the president resign. they are anti—government and they are affiliated with the main opposition party. really it is more of a protest than a vigil. a �*disturbance�* at a london immigration removalfacility during a power outage — with reports suggesting it was caused by the detainees. elon musk defends his decision to sack thousands of staff at twitter, but admits revenues will drop. in britain, there's been disruption on the railways, despite a series of strikes being called off by the unions. vladimir putin publicly approves the evacuation of civilians from russian—occupied kherson — as ukraine's forces gear up for battle. now on bbc news, click investigates the latest developments being made in the so—called metaverse — immersive, connected virtual worlds — where people can

live, work and play. this week, metaverse marc tells real marc how it is. you had help from the likes of me, the trimmer, younger looking virtual version of you that has helped with all of these stories on the telly. it's true. seven decades on, facial recognition renos one holocaust survivor with a photo from her past. yeah, that is me, for sure. and spencer meets the robot doing improvised comedy. i can learn from my mistakes. ha ha ha. don't laugh, this is serious stuff.

whether we know it or not, whether we feel it or not, we are all connected. we are all made from the same stuff. and the testing ground here in london is a brief reminder of that. this collaboration between artists and scientists at kings college london is an illustration of how our physical and digital environments come together in today's society — sometimes in seemingly unconnected ways. and the sim project makes art out of the small chips that have for some years, been central to our communications, interactions, and even our identity. ultimately, this technology is about people and our connection to each other. as we prepare to exist in more than one place at a time. if the hope is to be believed, we are about to enter a whole new virtual universe.

but i think it's potentially misunderstood, mis—advertised, and pretty unknown right now. it's the metaverse — but what is it? yeah, who knows? is it the sd internet? is it a cluster of virtual spaces? or is itjust cyberspace from the 1990s? this whole thing has been muddled further by facebook which liked the idea so much that it renamed itself meta, possibly so that when we think about the metaverse we think about them. so many questions but so few definitive answers. but marc cieslak is trying to enlighten us. in the last four years we have heard lots about the metaverse and how it's going to change our lives online. i've made several stories about it and the effect it's going to have... yeah, but you had help! i beg your pardon? you had help from the likes of me — the trimmer, younger looking virtual version of you that's helped with all of these stories on the telly.

well, if you know so much about it, perhaps you'd like to explain what the metaverse actually is then? my pleasure. if we think of the current internet as something we look at, the metaverse is the next version of the net that we are inside, experiencing as a sd avatar like this one. that is the broad idea — it doesn't truly exist yet. but games like fortnite and roblox of us a glimpse of what the metaverse could be — virtual realms that play host to pop concerts, fashion shows, and sports. as well as allowing us to play games and matching up different activities across genres and industries. but why would we want to experience our online lives in this way? what advantages does it offer over the internet as we know it today?

to get the answer to that question we are back in the real world, with craig donato —he�*s chief business officer at online platform roblox. craig, are we really going to conduct our lives online in this way? our position is that for younger users, people who grew up with interactive online gaming, the metaverse is already here. it is fascinating to look at it through their eyes, they actually view reality differently from you and i, marc. you know, there is the physical world and the digital world. and for us the digital world is actually less than the physical world, but for them it is a totally different thing. but humanity won't be alone in these online virtual worlds. greg cross is co—founder and ceo of a company specialising in al called soul machines. he thinks we will be sharing these spaces with digital people. if we are going to have, spend more and more of our time, even on the internet, transacting and interacting digitally, how do we provide that human connection? and we do that by providing a digital workforce for a whole

wide range of industries. what should we start with? one of the most interesting things we have learned about deploying digital people in healthcare and education, is people often prefer to interact with digital people, because it's removes the fear of human judgement from it. a digital person doesn't care if you do the same lesson ten times. soul machines is already building digital celebrities like jack nicklaus de—aged from 82 to 35, and nba star carmelo anthony... i can't wait to see what we do next. as always, peace, and stay melo. ..ai—powered avatars designed to interact with fans online. do you have any questions for me? imagine a world where maybe you are going shopping in the metaverse, you could get served by one of our regular digital people... hi there. ..or you could have a digital version of marilyn monroe. so these are some of the things

we imagine in the future. but perhaps it's not digital people that we have to worry about, but the behaviour of real ones. i think it's about writing a whole new rulebook basically to this way of interacting. this is not something we are used to. i guess it is up to the stakeholders involved, like you have the tech companies, you have governments, and even us as a society and how we treat each other in these spaces. very little behaviour in the real world is guided by what's law. most of our behaviour is really guided by social norms and social constructs, and it's important that those are represented in the metaverse, and we are spending a lot of time working on that. perhaps it's best to consider steps to consider online safety and safety in the metaverse is a work in progress. the jury's still out when it comes to determining if the metaverse is ever going to be realised in the way mark zuckerberg thinks it will. meta has sunk $50 billion into its reality labs

since the start of 2021. whichever way you cut it that is one hell of a big bet. so i think that leaves us with plenty to think about and discuss. back to you now in the real world. that was marc, marc, and the other marc. how many spare marcs do we have? enough, i'm told. meanwhile, there seems to be a bit of a land grab going on for metaverse territory. yeah, multinational companies like nike, gucci, adidas and walmart are investing millions. but seeing it's a way off from becoming a reality... virtual reality. ..does it mean that users will follow? joe tidy has been trying to find out. there is a landgrab taking place online. people and companies are racing to plant theirflags in virtual worlds. big brands with prime real estate in the real world

are expanding fast into these crypto metaverses. but the true landgrab is taking place in virtual worlds powered by bitcoin—style cryptocurrency technology. in these virtual worlds, everything's for sale. you can buy land as non—fungible tokens or nfts. this is like virtual real estate. in the same way that you own the deeds to a house when you buy it, if you own the nft of the land, the plot is yours. and there has been an explosion in interest. according to metaverse platform analysts at dappradar, nearly $2 billion has been spent in the past year on metaverse land. but it's notjust big corporations. i bought my first metaverse parcel in july 2020. it was about $1,500 that i've paid. i'd bought it really for exhibiting my own work, but also for running events, metaverse events that would promote my art,

but also other people's art. angie taylor is an artist who has been creating, buying, and selling visual art for years. she owns plots in a platform called voxels, previously known as cryptovoxels. this is my gallery, it's called the london gallery, and i built it myself. as well as expressing herself through her gallery, angie also makes clothing for avatars. when i first entered cryptovoxels i thought, "i need an outfit", so i started making my own outfit and i decided to base it on myself at about the age of 18. at the time i had a huge red mohican and i used to wear sedition—made t—shirts. you'll find little places like this gallery here where you could come in and buy a hat for your avatar. the fabricant, in amsterdam, is going all in. they only make digital clothes here. what is your favourite? this one, the one i'm wearing is my favourite.

the sort of feels to me like it is elizabethan maybe... yeah, yeah. amberjae slooten is the co—founder and lead designer. when we started, everybody called us crazy, because they were like "why would you need this?" but we strongly believed in the idea that in the future people would wear the digital items. what we wanted to do is take the two things that clothing is, apart. so on the one hand you have clothing which is functional which keeps you warm, and protects you, and on the other hand, clothing is a form of self—expression that basically lets you share the message of who you are, and what everybody around you would say so. to take those two apart is basically what we did, and that we can do with technology only. we don't need anything else. the company is selling digital garments to customers for anywhere between $100 to thousands. their record sale was for a digital dress that someone

spent $17,000 on. the company has just raised $14 million in funding and is hoping to grow as the metaverse materialises. like a lot of the people and companies we are talking to, you're investing in the metaverse. are you hopeful that you are early and the masses will come? yeah, i think there will be, for sure, like a mass market in this, because if you think about the younger generation already, they already play games. for them there is no distinction between virtual and real. it's a natural evolution that we will be able to communicate from anywhere in the world anytime with each other. but it still needs to be built. mateen is a successful metaverse landowner and nft collector. i don't think people truly realise or companies truly realise how much money, capital, resources, passion it takes to build out this metaverse, or part of the metaverse. there isjust so much momentum you need to be something that can stand the test of the next five years.

the big tech vision of the metaverse is well on its way to achieving mainstream adoption. roblox, fortnite, and minecraft have hundreds of millions of users and are developing more metaverse style utility all the time. the crypto metaverses, despite being more true to the fully open vision of the metaverse, are clearly not drawing in the crowds yet. where is everybody? as you will moving through you will notice there are a lot of big white boxes. so these are the spaces that people buy up and then don't do anything with. it makes the area feel dead. in horizon worlds, meta's flagship virtual world, leaked internal reports also suggest the people are not being engaged for very long. some analysts predict that these worlds will explode in the next ten years, the people spending six hours a day plugged in. but which version, and which land these people will choose to populate, is very much unknown.

that wasjoe tidy, and now it's time for a look at this week's tech news. there has been a lot of speculation this week about what twitter look like under its new owner, elon musk. for one, he has suggested it will cost verified accounts $8 a month to keep their blue tick. what will he think of next? no idea — for the latest on this moving story, check out the bbc news website. some of the world's biggest venues are using weapons scanners that can't detect some knives. the company making them says they can spot all weapons, but the bbc has seen documents showing that they may fail to spot some blades and parts of bombs. evolv says it told venues of, "all capabilities and limitations". there needs to be more public information and evaluation of these systems before they are rolled out. production of the iphone 1a may be impacted by a fresh covid lockdown in china's henan province. the measures will last seven days in the industrial area that houses apple's largest assembly line. don't forget, china still has very strict covid measures.

and this is india's first 24/7 solar powered village. more than 1000 panels are keeping the lights on in madera in the west of the country, at a cost of nearly $10 million to install. the project has been hailed by the un for giving locals electricity at next to no cost, and helping to tackle climate change and poverty. as soon as my aunt heard the boots, she knew that she has to hide me. blanche fixler was a child in poland when the nazis came looking for her. she put me in a bed and germans came and they looked every little place, they looked in every corner, they even tapped on the bed. so i felt them tapping on the bed, and i said, you'd better not breathe or sneeze or anything, or you'll be dead.

blanche's mother and her siblings were murdered, but thanks to her aunt rose, who hid her, blanche incredibly, miraculously, survived the holocaust. today, she has few photos from her childhood. many pictures from the 1930s and 40s do survive, though, and hundreds are on display here in the museum of jewish heritage in new york city. butjust like many other museums devoted tojewish heritage, a lot of the people in the photos here are unnamed. here, three men are being deported to a concentration camp — perhaps they don't know where they are going. we don't know, the museum says they don't know who they are or what happened to them. it's a common story. we don't have the names for everybody. that is part of the problem, and i can't stress enough how important these photos are of individuals. we all know the figure, 6 million, 6 millionjews

were killed, but it is really one person 6 million times. every person has a name, every person has a face. but as members of that community have died, so too has the ability to directly identify others in archival photos. software engineer daniel patt has been working to help solve this problem, using artificial intelligence. he calls the project from numbers to names. the way it works is, let's say, for example, you're looking for a photo of yourfamily member. you have a picture of them from before. and you upload it, and we scan through hundreds of thousands of photos, millions of faces in seconds, to find the photos that have the most likely chance of being of your family member. his algorithm has scanned hundreds of thousands of pictures. using facial recognition technology his program links faces. a single picture of one person whose name we know, can help identify that same person in another photo

where we don't. so what we're looking at here on the left, this is a photo of a bronja bruner, whose name now is blanche fixler. so i uploaded this photo on the left and it actually identifies all the faces in the photo, but blanche is the one in the bottom left. looking through all the search results, this is the original, and here is this photo. if i click on it, it will zoom into where blanche might be. this is not a photo that to the best of our knowledge blanche has ever seen before, and to the best of our knowledge the museum is not aware that blanche is actually in this bottom. but the algorithm only gives probabilities of matches, so today, dan is going to meet blanche to see whether the picture he found, taken in france, is really her. hi, nice to meet you. so, here we go, this is a picture that i found of you. this picture, i don't know if you've seen this before. does this look...

that's me, yeah. the one here? yes. you can tell? yeah, that's me, yeah, for sure. i'll zoom in so you can get a closer look. oh, wow. 0h, some of these guys i remember. one was my boyfriend! and in the picture, her aunt rose — the aunt that saved her. here is my aunt, rose. oh, wow! wow, so i think to the best of my knowledge there's only three people in this group that have been identified so far. there are hundreds of thousands of people murdered by the nazis for which there are pictures but no names. scott miller is not part of the numbers to names project, but says at least trying to identify victims, even 80 years later, is vital. it's so important to identify these photos. because by focusing in on these photos, and evenjust to name somebody, to give somebody a name, you are restoring some semblance of dignity to them,

families, some comfort to theirfamily, and it's a form of memorial for the entire jewish community. for blanche, the pictures bring back memories — a song that she learnt in her brief time in france. # quand j�*etais mademoiselle, mademoiselle, mademoiselle. # quand j'etais, mademoiselle, mademoisellej�*etais. # et comme ci, et comme ca, et comme ci, et comme ca. # et comme ci, comme ca!# that was james, and now...this. put your hands together and welcome, improbotics! welcome to the midlands art centre in birmingham, where i am taking in a spot of improv comedy. in the troop we have piotr,

sarah, marouen, roel, boyd, paul, and a.l.ex. unlike you humans, i can learn from my mistakes. ha ha ha. yeah, this is improbotics. a.l.ex is the artificial language experiment — and although the robot is the physical presence on stage, it is the ai chatbot on piotr�*s computer that is feeding it. i am not listening. essentially you are improvising this really rogue element, someone who can't say yes to you and can't really take your suggestions on board. it is doing an extra level thing and that you are trying so hard to make this robot look good. sometimes that is harder than others. i have been searching for you too, a.l.ex! i am afraid for the future. i have to say, yes it is impressive that a.l.ex is doing what it's doing, but i see

you are working hard to deal with what you are getting back from the robot. that is what i like, i like the challenge of that because it is an extra level of improv, it's like another muscle you are working and it is so much fun. the neighbours had to break. the door down to get us out... to avoid even more complications, they are not using speech recognition here. instead, piotr types in the words spoken by the cast and then manually selects the best response from a list of suggested next lines. the fire was started suddenly. laughter. a.l.ex is running the dialogue prediction program called gpt—3, which was trained on gigabytes of websites, conversations and movie scripts. so in theory, if you give it a topic and a line of dialogue, it should be able to give you something reasonable to say next. six years ago, i realised that there was a strange

connection between those statistical machine learning models that were trained to do the most obvious thing, and improv comedy, which was about, as humans, trying to give the simplest answer and stop thinking, and ratherjust follow our intuition. partway through the show the robot body is ditched, and instead the chatbot feeds lines through an earpiece directly to one of the actors, who can then add some human flair to the unusual dialogue. i think i can trust everything in the capable hands of this young man. i am really unusual. i believe him! if a! was better at improv, do you think it would be as funny? i actually don't, because another thing about improv, we talk a lot about celebrating failure. so the idea, those kind of tangential things and those odd things we as humans have to kinda overcome, that is where a lot of the comedy is for us. so if it was all really smooth and perfect, the audience

are listening but not necessarily reacting. so yeah, i think the odd stuff is what we enjoy. after the show, and with the audience at a safe distance, it's my turn to be the voice of a.l.ex. the only problem is the past lives in the body of the fiancee. what? the whole performance is of course worthy of an award, and if you would like to see it before anyone else, iam putting it on my twitterfeed, details on screen now please try not to injure yourself laughing. then he jumped out of the cake into a clinking wineglass. all right, now you are just being ridiculous, what is going on! how did it feel to be fed words by a machine? well, in some ways it took the pressure off because i didn't have to think of my own words. the problem was that those lines took a while to arrive in my ear, so i had to look busy and physically perform, which was a bit awkward.

please be kind, it was my debut performance. anyway, thanks for watching, we will see you soon. bye— bye. hello there. we will all see a spell of rain at some point today. it has been a fine and bright start to the day across northern and eastern scotland and eastern england. some lovely sunrise pictures earlier on this morning but the cloud is gathering. this is rain bearing cloud and the rain stretches out into the atlantic. it would be more heavy rain to eastern england for tomorrow as well so it is going to stay pretty unsettled. this radar picture shows you where the rain has been over recent hours.

moving across northern ireland, rain easing here but we've got wet weather heading across scotland, england and wales. it will tend to turn lighter and patchier in nature so no huge amounts of rain across central and eastern areas and across the north—west of the country will brighten up through the afternoon with some sunny spells. all the while, south—westerly winds were being mild air, gusting into the 30mph. and for bonfire celebrations, it looks like it will be quite cloudy, still a few spots of drizzle. and clearer and drier weather for scotland and one or two showers for western scotland and perhaps western counties of northern ireland but for most it is a reasonable night. temperatures holding on double figures, colder into scotland. tomorrow, the zone of heavy rain working across eastern england.

i suspect the rains will be more extensive across the eastern parts and it will be persistent and heavy. behind that feature, there will be breaks in the cloud and some sunshine between the showers. some of them, though, are likely to be heavy showers with a rumble or two of thunder and it will turn quite windy with the threat of gales across the north west later in the day. mild again, though. 12—14 degrees for many. into next week low pressure stays firmly in charge. rain moving through on monday into monday night. followed by showers from tuesday onwards so it is an unsettled looking weather picture, often quite windy but those south westerly winds will bring very mild and 17 degrees later next week which is about four above average.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines. extreme right—wing terrorist ideology was behind the firebombing of a migrant processing centre in dover last sunday, say the police. a "disturbance" at a london immigration removalfacility during a power outage, with reports suggesting it was caused by the detainees. disruption on the railways, despite a series of strikes being called off by the unions. thousands of people gathered in seoul to remember the victims of last week's halloween crush — many are demanding the president resign. they are anti—government and they are affiliated with the main opposition party. really it is more of a protest than a vigil. elon musk defends his decision to sack thousands of staff

at twitter, but admits revenues will drop.