this is bbc news. the headlines: with just a couple of days to go until the us midterm elections, president biden and barack obama have hit the campaign trail in philadelphia in a final effort to win votes in the critical contest, while donald trump has held his own republican rally in pennsylvania. iran has admitted supplying what it calls "a limited number" of drones to russia, but iranian state media has said there's "no evidence" they've been used in ukraine. president zelensky has called on tehran to come clean about the extent of its involvement in the conflict. british police say an attack on an immigration processing centre in dover last sunday was a terrorist incident. authorities believe andrew leak, who is thought to have killed himself after the attack last sunday, was motivated by an extreme

right—wing ideology. those are our top stories this hour. now on bbc news, click. 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 recognises one holocaust survivor with a photo from her past. —— seven decades on, facial recognition reunited one holocaust survivor with

a photo from her past. yeah, that is me, for sure. and spencer meets the robot doing improvised comedy. but unlike you humans, 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 king's 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 —— if the hype is to be believed, we are about to enter a whole new virtual universe. but i think it's potentially misunderstood, misadvertised and pretty unknown right now. it's the metaverse, but what is it? yeah, who knows? is it the 3d 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 of them. so many questions but so few definitive answers, but marc cieslak is trying to enlighten us. in the last few years, we've ave 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're inside, experiencing as a 3d avatar, like this one. that's the broad idea — it doesn't truly exist yet. but games like fortnite and roblox offer 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.

—— us to play games and mashing 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're 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 that grew up with interactive online gaming, the metaverse is already here. they actually view reality differently from you and i, marc. we see, you know, there is the physical world and the digital world. and for us, the digital world is actually less but for them, it's 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'll be sharing these spaces with digital people. if we're going to have to spend more and more of our time, even on the internet, you know, transacting and interacting digitally, you know, 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've learned about deploying digital people in healthcare and education is people often prefer to interact with digital people because it removes the fear of human judgement from it. you know, a digital person doesn't care whether you do the same lesson ten times. soul machine is already building digital celebrities, such as 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.

but do you have any questions for me? imagine a world where maybe, you're 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 that 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. so, i guess it is up to the stakeholders involved. like, you have the tech companies, you have governments, and just 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're spending a lot of time working on that.

perhaps it's best to consider steps to improve online safety, and safety in the metaverse as 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's sunk $15 billion into its reality labs since the start of 2021. whichever way you cut it, that's a hell of a big bet. so, i think that leaves us with plenty to think about and discuss. horns blare. back to you now in the real world. that was marc, marc, and the other marc. yeah, how many spare marcs do we have? enough, i'm told. right. going on for metaverse territory. yeah, multinational companies like nuki, —— 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. people and companies are racing to plant theirflags are expanding fast into these crypto metaverses. you can buy land as non—fungible tokens, or nfts. when you buy it, if you own the nft of the land, the plot is yours. and there's been an explosion in interest. according to metaverse platform analysts at dappradar, on metaverse land. but it's notjust big corporations. i bought my first metaverse parcel in july 2020.

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 — so 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's your favourite? this one, i think — the one i'm wearing is my favourite. the sort of feels to me like it's 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. what we wanted to do is take the two things that clothing is apart. so, on the one hand, you have clothing that is functional, which keeps you warm and, you know, it protects you. and on the other hand, clothing as 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's just raised $14 million in funding and it's hoping to grow as the metaverse materialises. like a lot of the people and companies we're talking to, you're investing in the metaverse. are you hopeful that you're 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. like, 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, any time, 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'sjust 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're moving through, you'll notice there's 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 hours a day plugged in. but which version, and which land these people that wasjoe tidy, and now it's time for a look at this week's tech news. there's been a lot of speculation this week about what twitter look like under its new owner, elon musk. for one, he's 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�*s 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 this 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, et 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. a bit more sunshine around for many as we go through sunday, but it won't be completely dry day by any means. we'll see plenty of showers around and for one or two, a particularly wet morning. we've got low pressure that is creeping in ever closer off the atlantic and here it is on the shorts. around that, we are going to see strengthening winds

pushing to the west. but before it properly arrives, the weather front that was with us yesterday today has developed a little bubble on it. and into the start of sunday, could produce some very heavy rain. very mild conditions towards the southeast corner. cooler elsewhere some clear skies and one or two showers. let's focus on the first part of the morning. channel islands through to set these england and parts of east anglia with the heavy rain, some of or seen a months worth of rain is the last five days. it could be some further flooding around. that rain eventually easing. away from that though, showers mainly in the west there will be some spots of northeast england that stay dry and brightening up to scotland into the afternoon with more in the way of drier weather. winds will be picking up throughout the day, particularly towards the southwest where you could see winds gusting in excess of a0 miles an hour through the afternoon and temperatures the degree or so up on saturday's values, ten to 15 degrees. now as you go through sunday evening and overnight, we all see the showers continue with an area of low pressure

pushing its way towards the northwest of scotland, strongest winds across the west and perhaps some longer spells of rain to take us into monday morning. it shouldn't be too chilly at night though as we go through the night into monday morning, thanks to the strength of that breeze which is coming in from a mild south—westerly direction but it will bring plenty of cloud around on monday. a scattering of showers again just about for anyone, but not a huge amount of sunshine between them and even though we haven't got the sunshine, temperatures continue to climb under those southwest winds around 13 to 16 degrees. later in the day though, the winds really will be starting to pick up. 40, 50, 60 mile an hour gusts possible out towards the west. those winds strengthen even further as we go through monday night as this weather front pushes its way eastwards. one low pushes out and another one approaches from the west as we go through the coming week. but this next one is going to be dragging our air all the way from the mid—atlantic. so, the second half of the week, will continue to see those temperatures climb. so, after a rather chilly weekend, there will be temperatures around normal for this week ahead, temperatures will climb but as high pressure builds into the south and east, there will be more in the way of dry weather. see you soon.

this is bbc world news. i'm rich preston. our top stories: with the us midterm elections just days away, president biden and former presidents obama and trump have all hit the campaign trail in the push for victory in a critical contest. it's a choice — a choice between two vastly different visions of america. this tuesday, you must vote republican in a giant red wave. iran admits supplying "a limited number" of drones to russia. ukraine says tehran has yet to come clean on the full extent of its involvement in the conflict. the un urges elon musk to ensure twitter respects human rights as concerns grow about the platform spreading more hate speech since his takeover.