philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Augmented reality is eating the real-world! The substitution of physical products by holograms

Thus, we still do not know if consumers can imagine replacing real products – and if so, what products and why.

See the full story here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026840122031478Xhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026840122031478X

Welcome To Hyperreality: Where The Physical And Virtual Worlds Converge

TheFor kids growing up today, it’s hard to imagine a time without computers, smartphones, Google, Netflix or Instagram. A time when boredom existed, where we needed to memorize phone numbers and ask complete strangers for directions. Today, the ubiquitous use of social media and digital devices has made the web look and feel like the real world. The division between reality and imagery has collapsed.

global pandemic has further blurred the lines between the physical and digital world. We are now seeing the virtual world compete with the physical for resources. In the next decade, the two worlds will converge, creating a state of hyperreality: a simulation of reality without origin. Although it can be easy to dismiss hyperreality as some kind of sci-fi fantasy. We only have to look at the radical changes in human behavior and technological adoption during the current lockdown. In truth, elements of the hyperreal have already entered mainstream culture. This point takes on extra significance considering the leaders of the new world—Gen-Z—are equally, if not more comfortable living online. To quote Marshall McLuhan, “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kianbakhtiari/2021/12/30/welcome-to-hyperreality-where-the-physical-and-virtual-worlds-converge/?sh=437f3fe50283

New AI Tool Can Predict Movie Rating Before Any Scene Is Shot

Shrikanth Narayanan, University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering, and a team of researchers from the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) at USC Viterbi, demonstrated that linguistic cues can efficiently indicate violent behavior, drug abuse, and sexual content about to be taken by a film's characters.

The AI tool processes the script through a neural network and scans it for semantics and sentiment expressed. By classifying the sentences as positive, negative, aggressive, and other descriptors, it churns out a rating at the end.

Victor Martinez, the lead researcher on the study, said, "Our model looks at the movie script, rather than the actual scenes, including e.g. sounds like a gunshot or explosion that occur later in the production pipeline. This has the benefit of providing a rating long before production to help filmmakers decide e.g. the degree of violence and whether it needs to be toned down."

Tools like these will help raise societally-meaningful awareness, for example, through identifying negative stereotypes."

See the full story here: https://interestingengineering.com/new-ai-tool-can-predict-movie-rating-before-any-scene-is-shot

IMVU: Making the coin of the realm for the metaverse

IMVU has been a relatively quiet and unnoticed company in the online gaming and social media worlds. But the company did something recently that could benefit the whole industry: It received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to enable payments in its virtual world through a blockchain-based cryptocurrency dubbed VCoin.

With its ruling in November 2020, the SEC enabled IMVU to allow users to buy and sell goods with VCoin and also to cash out and convert it to Ethereum, a well-known cryptocurrency, or into U.S. dollars. 

Having something like VCoin is important because the metaverse isn’t expected to be a single world operated by a single company. It will likely be a collection of virtual worlds, all interconnected in a way that makes travel between the worlds easy and seamless. If you buy something in a virtual world from a company or from another user, you want to be able to trust that transaction and take the object to another world. If you sell an item, you want to be able to get paid and then cash out. And from the viewpoint of companies, creating a marketplace where users can supply the digital items could be far easier than one company’s own developers trying to populate a metaverse full of digital items.

Like other virtual worlds like Second Life, over the past 16 years IMVU has built a flourishing economy, with a marketplace driven by creators. 

With IMVU, any Ethereum wallet will be able to hold VCoin.

“That’s what we’re leveraging,” Tsui said. “Most gaming companies wouldn’t go out and secure all those licenses because it’s not their core business. Secondly, if IMVU were ever to go out of business, you could still have the Ethereum.

See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/28/imvu-making-the-coin-of-the-realm-for-the-metaverse/?fbclid=IwAR3WVoaVWdKpxsDHWBIj3WGpldxQKgd_Vc9P469K3Lzu4caz2TBUqh_FKb0

India’s first artificial intelligence community center launched in Hyderabad

Hyderabad: Hexagon Capability Center India (HCCI), the largest product development unit of the technology major Hexagon AB, on Monday, has launched the nation’s first Artificial Intelligence Community Centre, HexArt, was launched in Hyderabad.

Established at a cost of INR 64 Lakhs, the institute incorporates state-of-the-art infrastructure, IT hardware & software and a well-designed curriculum. HCCI will invest a further 30 Lakhs YoY to manage the AI community center.  The center will train more than 350 students every year across multiple batches.

See the full story here: https://www.siasat.com/indias-first-artificial-intelligence-community-center-launched-in-hyderabad-2055889/

Hamilton song written by AI features odd reference to Hillary Clinton

To come up with the song's lyrics, Eli Weiss, a film production student at California's Chapman University, used Shortly Read, an AI application designed for writing that incorporates GPT-3, the powerful third-generation machine learning language model used by OpenAI,  a nonprofit artificial intelligence research group backed by Elon Musk. 

GPT-3 has been supplied with 45TB of text data, presumably including the full lyrics to Hamilton, and can generate a range of written content with simple inputs.  

Weiss and team entered this one sentence: "Here are the lyrics to a new song from the hit musical Hamilton: An American Musical." The program then created lyrics to a tune with four verses, a chorus and a bridge that correctly identifies characters in the story and their relationships to each other. 

"It messes up a few times, like when Hillary Clinton makes a brief appearance," says Weiss, a huge Hamilton fan, "but overall it's incredibly convincing."   

Weiss' friend Michael Gribble, a film music student, put the AI-written song to music and performs it in the video above. This isn't the first time AI has written a new Hamilton song, however. A few years ago, creative Max Deutsch trained a neural network on the musical's lyrics and asked it to come up with a new tune. 

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/hamilton-song-written-by-ai-features-odd-reference-to-hillary-clinton/

How the future looked, before the pandemic

Six books, all written before the coronavirus pandemic, explore how different aspects of technology may shape our lives in 2021 and beyond.

In Parenting for a Digital Future, LSE academics Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross watch numerous real-life parents navigate the tricky, shifting digital landscape. The parents they meet -- some the same ones they visited four years ago for Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green's The Class (2016) -- all hope that digital technologies will give their children better lives, but are unclear about how this will happen at a time when two children in the same family, just five years apart, may be grappling with very different technologies.  

Today's 14-year-olds, for example, may choreograph video dances for TikTok, which didn't exist in 2015 when, at that same age, their 19-year-old siblings were testing out Instagram filters...which in turn didn't exist in 2010 when today's 24-year-olds were deciding whether they preferred Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit. Today's 29-year-olds grew up without smartphones and tablets. As Livingstone and Blum-Ross write, "The question was not just 'What kind of future will my child have?' but also 'What kind of world will they live in?'" 

See the full story here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/holiday-reading-roundup-how-the-future-looked-before-the-pandemic/

Volkswagen unveils R2-D2-like charging robot that autonomously steers and refills parked electric vehicles while making noises similar to the Star Wars character

• Volkswagen's robot that autonomous charges parked electric vehicles
• The robot tows a battery pack to a vehicle and communicates with the EV
• It prompts the vehicle to open its charging socket flap and plugs right in
• The robot will be activated with a companion app and will roll out in 2021 

See the full story here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9093665/Volkswagen-unveils-R2-D2-like-charging-robot-autonomously-steers-refills-electric-vehicles.html

Maestro Dudamel takes virtual reality Symphony on tour

The Venezuelan's latest project is a virtual reality film, Symphony, which aims to take participants to the beating heart of music and sound through technology, remarkable visuals and the genius of Beethoven, Mahler and Bernstein. And it has just premiered in Madrid.

'Language without words'

Dudamel wants the film to help inspire young people to plunge into classical music, and for the symphony eventually to be the sound of a world of different ideas harmonising together. 

"Music is a language without words: it comes to each of us in a unique way and yet it also unites us even though we appreciate it in different ways. For me that is a beautiful symbol for these times - we can embrace each other through music," says the 39-year-old music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Symphony is a four-year project organised by Spain's La Caixa Foundation involving 250 people, including 100 musicians from 42 countries.

Mr Dudamel takes on the role of virtual guide on a tour that takes us from the creation of instruments and how they vibrate and channel sound to the synapses of the brain where sound is processed as the orchestra plays around us.

See the full story here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55344970

Project to use virtual reality technology to teach Nisga’a culture and language (Indigenous Canadian)

Parent said that no one in the Nisga'a Nation has yet used virtual reality to facilitate traditional language learning. That portion of the project will feature interviews with Nisga'a speakers and land-based walking tours.

Wal-aks (Keane Tait) teaches Nisga'a language and culture at Nisga'a Elementary Secondary School in Gitlax̱t'aamiks, B.C., 775 kilometres northwest of Vancouver. 

Sim'oogit (Chief) Duuḵ, from Lax̱g̱altsʼap, B.C., is a key advisor on the project regarding the cultural and historical significance of totem poles. He said that each family has a totem pole of their own and they are the only ones that can tell the story on it.  

See the full story here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/nisga-a-vr-technology-language-culture-1.5846341