philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

THIS ROBOT RAPPER HAS 9M FOLLOWERS ON TIKTOK. THE COMPANY THAT CREATED HIM THINKS TRADITIONAL A&R IS ‘INEFFICIENT AND UNRELIABLE’

Is being human still a prerequisite for being an ‘artist’?

We don’t mean the ability to display humanity. We quite literally mean: does an artist really need to be a human to be considered an actual artist, who can perform and record music, generate streams, market singles and albums, and build a fanbase?

The answer to that question, according to Anthony Martini, co-founder of ‘virtual’ record label Factory New, is no.

Factory New describes itself as a “first of its kind, next-generation music company, specializing in virtual beings”. Its roster is comprised exclusively of virtual artists.

The firm’s first ‘signing’ was AI-powered robot rapper, FN Meka, who has 9 million followers (and over a billion views) on TikTok.

Technically speaking FN Meka is voiced by a human. But as you’ll learn here, everything else about him – from his lyrics to the chords and tempo underpinning his music – is based on AI.

... If a song is good, people will listen to it. Maybe the fact that it’s made by a robot makes it even more interesting. Not to get all philosophical but, what is an “artist” today? Think about the biggest stars in the world. How many of them are just vessels for commercial endeavors?

Most hits are written by teams of people who get paid to make music that will “sell”. We think machines can eventually run this process more efficiently than humans. How many fans ever actually meet the stars they idolize anyway?

See the full story here: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/this-robot-rapper-has-9-million-followers-on-tiktok-his-creator-thinks-traditional-ar-is-inefficient-and-unreliable/

Verizon and Dreamscape Immersive ink 5G innovation partnership

• The partnership aims to innovate 5G and Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) virtual-reality applications for enterprise, public sector, education and entertainment
• Verizon and Dreamscape Learn will form a 5G innovation lab to develop immersive VR learning experiences for various education levels and environments
• As part of the partnership, Verizon Ventures has taken an equity stake in Dreamscape

Verizon and Dreamscape Immersive today announced a partnership aimed at innovating virtual reality (VR) applications using 5G and mobile edge computing (MEC). The partnership’s first priorities will focus on 5G immersive-learning and training innovations for use in enterprise, public sector, and education environments.

“Verizon’s partnership with Dreamscape shows how innovative tech built on our 5G network can revolutionize industries,” said Tami Erwin, CEO of Verizon Business.

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Outside of the classroom, Verizon and Dreamscape will collaborate to develop and market avatar-driven synthetic training and simulation experiences for government and specialized professional learning uses. The experiences will combine Verizon's 5G capabilities and Dreamscape’s ADEPT (Avatar Driven Educational and Practical Training) Platform, which leverages Dreamscape’s proprietary tracking and rendering technologies, to deliver vivid and life-like VR scenarios. ...

See the full press release here: https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-dreamscape-immersive-5g-innovation-partnership?fbclid=IwAR25xasj5awXdqbOnosjTyMTwZBCX5skl0yTcrWlyFSrwpHjG4xEjpYLlHY

Indigenous virtual reality company looking for knowledge keepers, storytellers, artists to promote culture

A virtual reality company based in Fort William First Nation in Ontario that is using their technical know-how to promote Indigenous cultures.

Partnering with Uber and the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business (CCAB), ORIGIN is hosting a competition called Share Your Roots, looking for more people to share their culture.

The company started out as an interactive way for kids to learn more about jobs, primarily in the trades industry.

There are four prizes of $35,000 dollars each and each winner will get a personalized virtual reality experience that will be a part of the ORIGIN library. Along with the money, winners will also receive a one year membership to CCAB.

The library includes both career and cultural experiences including learning how to be a boilermaker, electrician, and millwright among other careers. On the cultural side, experiences include fancy shawl dance, scraping a moose hide and smudging with medicines just to name a few.

Hardy-Giles said the cultural side of ORIGIN is not business generated, rather they use the profits from their career experiences to fund the cultural experiences, and that one day she hopes ORIGIN can become international and have VR experiences from around the world from various Indigenous cultures.

See the full story here: https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/indigenous-virtual-reality-company-looking-for-knowledge-keepers-storytellers-artists-to-promote-culture/

Google Alliance to Speed Up Launch of Digital Wallets, Keys

Google recently formed the Android Ready SE Alliance with the goal of enabling the speedier distribution of Secure Element (SE) technology for digital wallets and digital car and home keys among other products. In Google’s Pixel phones, the SE is a Titan M chip which, separate from the phone’s processor, stores encryption keys and validates the operating system. The Android Ready SE Alliance’s device manufacturers and SE sellers hope to speed up the timeline to bring a variety of these digital products to market.

Engadget reports that members of the Alliance, which will “work together to create a collection of open source and ready-to-use applets for SE chips,” have debuted StrongBox, its applet that is a “tool for storing cryptographic keys.”

StrongBox is “also available on WearOS, Android Auto and Android TV devices.” Initially, “the Alliance will focus on use cases like digital car keys and mobile driver’s licenses.” With regards to the former, “Google is playing catch-up to Apple.”

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/google-alliance-to-speed-up-launch-of-digital-wallets-keys/

Filmmakers Around the World Team on Cloud Production Test: “It’s Part of Our Future”

The effort, led by veteran color scientist Joachim “JZ” Zell through the Hollywood Professional Association, grew as filmmakers in more and more countries found cloud collaboration to be critical to working amid the pandemic. The result is six shorts made by using the cloud, filmed in five cities around the world — Hollywood, Dubai, Brisbane, London and Mexico City — plus with an animated entry from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Postproduction involved collaborators from the countries involved in the shoots, as well as additional countries including Brazil, Colombia and Lithuania. Additionally, diversity is a priority and each short was directed, lensed and/or produced by women filmmakers.

The broad takeaway: Cloud production has arrived, though the project identified areas where more technological advancement is needed.

Each production implemented COVID safety procedures and used different combinations of technologies, allowing the participants to experiment with numerous workflows that enable remote, cloud-based production tasks including live review of camera footage, dailies, and participation in editorial, color grading and mixing sessions. The experiment involved the Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds, as well as a range of technologies from participating manufacturers including 5th Kind, Adobe, ARRI, Avid, Bebop, Blackmagic, Colorfront, Evercast, Frame.io, Moxion, Sohonet, Teredek and Teradici. The shorts were also made with the collaboration of many companies from VFX house Framestore and Skywalker Sound (which mixed four of the shorts).

See the full story here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/filmmakers-around-the-world-team-on-cloud-production-test-its-part-of-our-future

Fable Studio opens its virtual beings Wizard Engine to collaborators

Fable Studio is opening its virtual beings Wizard Engine to collaborators in fashion and nursing. The San Francisco company built the engine to manage its virtual character Lucy, an 8-year-old animated girl from the Wolves in the Walls virtual reality experience.

The Wizard Engine lets creators schedule events on different platforms for a virtual being and create new milestones in the lives of the characters, Saatchi said.

 You’ll be able to create the AI characters, distribute them on Twitch, Instagram, and YouTube. We use it to create these monthly beats in Lucy’s life.”

The tool lets Fable take a virtual being as conceived — the bible and backstory of their life, a synopsis of what will happen to them — and uses that to generate on an ongoing basis the content of their life. It generates the voice, animation, text dialogue, and video. These things would realistically make up the virtual beings life (what their knowledge base about their past is, what happened yesterday, what’s happening right now, what are they looking forward to etc).

One of the tools the Wizard Engine uses is OpenAI’s GPT3 technology to generate Lucy’s responses.

You could almost think of the Wizard Engine as an AI game engine, he said. It allows collaborators to generate and deploy interactive experiences with virtual beings to delight millions of users. So far the interactive/gaming and deep learning worlds have remained very separate, but virtual beings will only exist if they can work together.

See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2021/03/26/fable-studio-opens-its-virtual-beings-wizard-engine-to-collaborators/

Levi’s Katia Walsh on AI: You can do a lot with 168 years of data

Dr. Katia Walsh, Chief Strategy and AI Officer at Levi's, is looking to combine fashion, data science and the creative process to improve everything from the customer experience and demand to supply chain and design.

Levi's is best known for its denim, but the company's master plan is to redefine itself with artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science. And the apparel company has 168 years of data to become more efficient, predict and create trends and improve the customer experience. 

ZDNet caught up with Dr. Katia Walsh, Chief Strategy and AI Officer at Levi's, to talk about implementing AI, machine learning and data science at a 168-year-old company during a pandemic. Here are a few highlights. The full conversation is in the video.

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In the case of Levi's all the products that the company has created and manufactured in the past 160 years are data. The Bing Crosby jacket that he wore in Canada is data. Once it's photographed, and that photograph is digitized, that's data. The Einstein jacket that he was photographed as man of the year by Times Magazine in 1939 that we created a replica of in the past year, that's data. So we are now using images of products to predict demand for new products based on using computer vision that can tell us based on similarity between certain products that have been sold in the past new products that have never been sold, what the demand for new products would be. So the opportunities are absolutely endless when it comes to data and Levi's. 

We are absolutely predicting right now what demand for products will be like. The further you go into time, the less accurate the model will be because there are just so many unknowns that happen to accumulate as time goes by. And we are looking to predict demand in the next half of the year, in the next month, in the next three months. 

The role of algorithms in product design. Walsh said: 

Well, product design is a very creative process. I've worked in financial services, I've worked in telecommunications, I've worked in technology. This is my first time leading AI and helping drive digital transformation in the creative company, in a fashion company. It is incredibly creative. It is a highly imaginative process. What we are doing is partner with designers, partner with planners, planning is the original data science function in a company like Levi's and retail and apparel, and bringing the latest tools and this combination, this flywheel of digital data and AI to be able to drive demand, to predict demand, to optimize costs, and to also really deepen the connection with consumers.

...

See the full story here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/levis-katia-walsh-on-ai-you-can-do-a-lot-with-168-years-of-data/

Restored Ghent Altarpiece returns to Saint Bavo’s Cathedral with a temperature-controlled case and AR headsets

One of the masterpieces of European Medieval art, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece by the brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, is being unveiled today in its new home in the Cathedral of Saint Bavo in Ghent, for which it was created in 1432.

All the interpretation has been moved to a new visitor centre in the crypt, where visitors will learn of its creation, the complex allegorical scenes and its later history, through augmented reality headsets, before moving up into the main cathedral to see the real thing. 

See the full story here: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/ghent-altarpiece-unveiled

Gimmick watch: Augmented reality ice cream has arrived

Chin Chin, Soho’s cutting-edge ice-cream scientists, ...

Chin Chin’s special Easter pudding is a (checks notes) Augmented Reality Sundae. Let's start with the food: it’s a spring/summer bunny sundae. The dessert is fully vegan, featuring a rabbit made of milk jelly, perched on a coconut-and-rose ice cream, all plonked on a bed of edible chocolate-and-matcha clay. The non-food bit: once you’ve procured one of these bad boys, whip out your phone, slap on the special filter and behold! Computer-generated flowers sprout from the plate like magic. As the poet Jay Kay almost once said: this dessert... it’s virtual insanity!

See the full story here: https://www.timeout.com/london/news/gimmick-watch-augmented-reality-ice-cream-has-arrived-032521

Research says 29% of US adults used Augmented Reality

29% of consumers have used mobile augmented reality (AR). More importantly, they are using it often with 59% of mobile AR users engaging at least weekly and 78% at least monthly. This is a telling indication of mobile AR’s potential, given that active use is a key mobile app success factor. It is also tied closely to revenue metrics.

The top mobile AR app category today is gaming, followed by social. 

“Gaming and social are typically where new consumer technologies germinate,” said Mike Boland, Chief Analyst of ARtillery Intelligence. “But history tells us that sustained value will develop around utilities that solve everyday problems. This is boosted during a pandemic when eCommerce has inflected and AR can add a valuable dimension to remote shopping.”

See the full story here: https://www.enterprisetimes.co.uk/2021/03/26/research-says-29-of-us-adults-used-augmented-reality/