philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Bigscreen Partners With Paramount for Ticketed VR Movie Screenings

San Francisco-based virtual reality startup Bigscreen has teamed up with Paramount Pictures to bring the theater experience to VR headsets: Bigscreen will begin showing classic Paramount movies like “Interstellar” and “Star Trek” in a virtual movie theater, where users can watch the films together with friends.

Much like a traditional theater, Bigscreen won’t overwhelm users with on-demand choices. Instead, the company will show only 4 movies every week, with showings starting every 30 minutes. Viewers can personalize their avatars, hang out in the lobby together, and even voice chat with each other.

“Bigscreen’s virtual reality platform offers a new way for fans to experience films in their homes,” said Paramount worldwide home entertainment president Bob Buchi. “We’re excited to be a part of this experiment using cutting-edge technology to give fans a new entertainment option.”

There’s one more way Bigscreen’s new cinema offering is just like your regular movie theater: Consumers will have to pay tickets gain entrance, with each film costing between $4 and $5. Ticket sales begin this Monday. “It’s our first business model,” said Bigscreen founder and CEO Darshan Shankar in a recent conversation with Variety.

Bigscreen Cinema with Paramount movies will be available on the Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, HTC Vive, Valve Index, all SteamVR headsets, and all Microsoft Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and will cater to consumers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and Japan.

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/bigscreen-social-movie-vr-paramount-1203439355/

You Can Make Movies With Drones and CGI, Sure. But Why Not Make Them the Stars?

In that film, autonomous drones follow characters through bleak 70’s-era public housing over a soundtrack of demonic, industrial music. The film, shown through the drone’s point of view, tells the story of a young woman and her boyfriend who send surreptitious and illegal messages with the drones. In addition to shooting and starring in the films, the drones directed it, too. Their flight algorithms, navigation system, and facial recognition software allowed them to decide where to go and what to film. Young edited the footage into the final story, following the whims and foibles of the drones. “The technology has its own tendencies and personality,” he says. “We’re trying to see the world through their eyes.”

In Renderlands, Young creates a dark collage of live-action shots of computer renderers—their faces glowing in the light of their monitors—working in India and the CGI visions of Hollywood they’re creating. It’s a misty, neon-lit place replete with long piers, hilltop vistas, and other Southern California clichés that the workers have never seen and only imagine. The process of rendering imagined worlds becomes an important part of the film’s look, structure, and plot.

See the full story here: https://stockdailydish.com/you-can-make-movies-with-drones-and-cgi-sure-but-why-not-make-them-the-stars/

Cybersecurity: Truth is the attack vector for the ’20s

The World of Disney Gaming

With Jeff exploring digital worlds, we thought it would be fun to take a look at some of our favorite “Disney” games and Virtual Reality experiences.

See the full story with many videos here: https://www.laughingplace.com/w/articles/2019/12/14/the-world-of-disney-gaming/

Talking horses and perfect faces: The rise of virtual celebrities

Kizuna AI has 2.3 million YouTube followers. She post videos nearly every day, talking to camera about life, love and video games.

But she is also a CGI construct; a fictional character made to look like a young woman, voiced by an actor, claiming to be an advanced artificial intelligence.

Her channel is part of a growing trend in Japan for so called virtual YouTubers, or VTubers.

...Another virtual Instagram star is , who caused a great deal of confusion when she first appeared on the scene in 2017 with highly stylised images featuring a golden iindzila; neck rings sometimes worn by the Ndebele people of South Africa. The pictures were staged and lit like fashion photography, even though they had actually been created using a 3D software programme.

“Fashion is so retouched and filtered, that our expectation of what a fashion photograph looks like is completely different from our expectation of what a person on the street looks like,” Cameron-James Wilson, the photographer who created Shudu Gram, tells me. “We have this idea that supermodels are perfect anyway, so a 3D supermodel doesn‘t stand out that much.”

Behind the mask

In the world of virtual personalities, anonymity can be a powerful force. What would the reaction to Shudu Gram be if the identity of its creator remained a secret? Would Kizuna AI be as popular as she is if the account wasn‘t built on the fantasy of an autonomous artificial intelligence?

One subculture within this subculture, which Hirota calls ‘Virtual-Bishoujyo-Juniku‘, or ‘virtual beautiful girl incarnation‘, is based around male illustrators drawing female characters that they then inhabit using a voice changer.

“Japan has very strict internet laws, and very strict broadcasting laws,” she says.

“If you use motion capture to turn yourself into an animated character, you can be critical, cheeky; you can bypass censorship.”

At a time when facial recognition technology is becoming ever more accessible, it has never been so easy to inhabit a fiction. Whether virtual YouTubers and Instagrammers become part of the internet‘s make-up, or fade as a short-lived fashion, for now the lines around reality continue to blur.

See the full story here: https://dentondaily.com/talking-horses-and-perfect-faces-the-rise-of-virtual-celebrities/

Why Magic Leap might live up to its augmented reality promises

Magic Leap, an augmented reality, or mixed reality, company based in Plantation, Florida, has been under pressure following reports it vastly under-delivered on sales of its first product, the Magic Leap 1. The founder and chief executive Rony Abovitz originally projected his company would sell 100,000 units within the first year of its launch. But only 6,000 units were sold in the first six months since it was released, according to The Information.

“People who don’t wear glasses, will they start wearing glasses?” says Mr Jijiashvili. “It’s a very tricky market, actually, to get right. Once the technology miniaturises, then it’ll get interesting.”

“One More Night”: Laura Rizzotto relaunches as a hologram on the Metastage app for her new single

Laura Rizzotto has been chosen as the featured artist for the official release of Metastage — a new augmented reality app, which allows fans to watch exclusive, private, virtual shows from anywhere in the world, as if they were on stage with the artist.

Metastage CEO Christina Heller told Forbes magazine that the premiering of a holographic performance with Laura Rizzotto is groundbreaking. This project is a big deal!

Augmented Reality Activations Offer Teams A New Source Of Revenue

• Despite more examples of AR and even mixed reality popping up around the sports industry to boost the fan experience, the market remains largely underpenetrated, experts say.
• There is ample opportunity for teams and leagues to cash in on AR activations by selling ad inventory to brands looking to connect with consumers differently.

See the full story here: https://www.frntofficesport.com/augmented-reality-sports-advertising/

Also see https://finance.yahoo.com/news/houston-sabercats-rugby-team-signs-113000910.html

Intel’s latest acquisition is a $2 billion push into AI

In Dark Data Center: Male IT Specialist Stands Beside the Row of Operational Server Racks, Uses Laptop for Maintenance. Concept for Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Supercomputer, Cybersecurity. Neon Lights

Habana Labs makes programmable deep learning accelerators. Its Gaudi AI Training Processor, for instance, is expected to deliver up to four-times the throughput of systems built with the equivalent number of GPUs. For mobile and web-based apps that use Intel's AI data center offerings, the acquisition will, ideally, lead to faster and more accurate AI for features like photo and speech recognition.

Intel hopes to use its AI capabilities to do things like reconnect damaged spinal nerves in paralyzed patients and create wheelchairs that can be controlled with facial expressions. It has experimented with neuromorphic chips, or AI chips that mimics the human brain, and it says its ultra-efficient AI chips can power everything from prosthetics to self-driving cars.

See the full story here: https://www.engadget.com/2019/12/16/intel-ai-acquires-habana-labs/

Ring security camera installed in a children’s room for ‘peace of mind’ is hacked, 8-year-old daughter harassed

In a chilling exchange caught on video last week, the LeMays say the man was able to interact with their daughter after hacking into a Ring security camera that had recently been installed in the bedroom shared by Alyssa and her two younger sisters. Over the course of several minutes, the man repeatedly directed a racial slur at Alyssa and tried to persuade her to misbehave, according to a copy of the video obtained by The Washington Post.

“I can’t even put into words how badly I feel and how badly my children feel,” Alyssa’s mother, Ashley LeMay, told The Washington Post on Thursday. “I did the exact opposite of adding another security measure. I put them at risk and there’s nothing I can do to really ease their mind. I can’t tell them I know who it is. I can’t tell them that they’re not going to show up at our house in the middle of the night.”

See the full story here; https://www.boston.com/news/national-news/2019/12/13/ring-security-camera-installed-in-a-childrens-room-for-peace-of-mind-is-hacked-8-year-old-daughter-harassed