Is this an avatar I see before me? Audience takes to stage in virtual Shakespeare play
Playhouses may be dark, but the Royal Shakespeare Company is to bring immersive theatre to audiences wherever they are in the world by combining revolutionary virtual reality and video games technologies with traditional live performances.
Real-time animation will be created by actors interacting with a live audience, who will in turn influence a story inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Mischievous Puck and his fellow fairies will be conjured up by actors whose every movement will be translated by cutting-edge technology into virtual avatars that mirror them as extraordinary creatures.
In a pioneering project, to be announced tomorrow, specialists from the worlds of theatre, music and gaming have shared their expertise, developing a “prototype” that could be adopted for future live performances.
Headed by the RSC, the project’s key players include the Philharmonia Orchestra, Marshmallow Laser Feast, virtual reality creators, and Epic Games, developers of the Unreal Engine video games software.
Dream is an “Audience of the Future Demonstrator” project, part of the government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. It will be performed between 12 and 20 March. Audiences can either buy a £10 ticket, to interact directly, or view the performance passively for free. Tickets will be available via dream.online
See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/feb/07/is-this-an-avatar-i-see-before-me-audience-takes-to-stage-in-virtual-shakespeare-play
AI Dungeon-maker Latitude raises $3.3M to build games with ‘infinite’ story possibilities
“How does the AI know what’s a good story?” said co-founder and CEO Nick Walton. “Because it’s read a lot of good stories and knows the patterns involved in that.”
AI Dungeon actually started out as one of Walton’s hackathon projects. While the initial version didn’t win any prizes, he kept at it, assisted by improvements in OpenAI’s language generator, of which the most recent version is GPT-3.
“The very first version of AI Dungeon I built was coherent on a sentence level, but on a paragraph level it made no sense,” Walton said. “Once you get to GPT-2, it makes a lot more sense. Once you get to GPT-3, it’s a lot more coherent on a story level. And so I think to a degree, these issues with coherency, the story not making sense, get solved as the AI gets better.”
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/latitude-seed-funding/
Wolves In The Walls’ Lucy Steps Beyond VR Into Sundance Film Festival
PhilNote: AI Lucy at Sundance, including videos
See the full story here: https://www.vrfocus.com/2021/02/wolves-in-the-walls-lucy-steps-beyond-vr-into-sundance-film-festival/
The State of the Virtual Reality Movie in 2021
In Rodney Ascher’s latest documentary, A Glitch in the Matrix, the filmmaker explores the increasingly widespread belief that what we perceive to be the real world is, in fact, some type of complex simulation.
The scarier implications of simulation theory’s desensitizing effects are also examined through one of the documentary’s interviewees, Joshua Cooke, who chillingly recounts how he murdered his parents in 2003 because he thought he was living in The Matrix.
In Mike Cahill’s Bliss—which, in what is either a strange coincidence or a minor hiccup in the simulation we call life, was released the same day as A Glitch in the Matrix—Owen Wilson plays Greg, a sad-sack divorcée who’s having the worst day of his life. Greg is called into his boss’s office and promptly fired, and then he accidentally (and somewhat comically) kills his boss. After hiding the body, Greg goes to the bar across the street where he meets Isabel (Salma Hayek), an eccentric homeless woman who tells him they’re living in a virtual world and almost everybody around them is, in video game parlance, a non-player character—including Greg’s children.
It’s easier to buy Isabel’s story once she uses telekinetic powers to shape their reality; Greg is able to do the same after he takes these mysterious orange crystals.
Read the full story here: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/2/5/22264715/virtual-reality-movies-tv-glitch-in-the-matrix-bliss
How Metalenses Can Advance Virtual Reality
A principal advantage of meta-optics in general is that the phase, amplitude and polarization state of transmitted light can be manipulated with subwavelength resolution by choosing the shape of the elements and the way they are arranged within the structure. In this way, Li and his colleagues were able to design a multizone dispersion-engineered metalens that achieves controlled focusing at different frequencies of light and eliminates chromatic aberration.
see the full story here: https://www.osa-opn.org/home/newsroom/2021/february/how_metalenses_can_advance_virtual_reality/
