philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

AWE 2019 – Augmented Reality technology gains traction in new markets

See the full writeup here: https://america.cgtn.com/2019/05/31/augmented-reality-technology-gains-traction-in-new-markets

The DeanBeat: The building blocks of better AR/VR at Augmented World Expo

See the full report here: https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/31/the-deanbeat-the-building-blocks-of-better-ar-vr-at-augmented-world-expo/

Coasters – So, What Ever Happened to Virtual Reality?

So, was VR in amusement parks a complete failure? Not exactly. For all the places that it didn’t work, other parks took the components that did work and tried to adapt them to their advantage. Only a few parks still have VR attractions—most notably Freedom Flyer at Fun Spot America in Orlando and Battle for Eire at Busch Gardens Williamsburg.

On Kraken at SeaWorld, the headsets were attached to the coaster trains, as were their syncing devices, so the ride was never out of sync. However, the loading and cleaning process was still a hassle, hence it being removed. It was a very noble effort and may have led to what I believe to be the most successful implementation of the technology, Battle for Eire.

See the full story here: https://www.coaster101.com/2019/05/31/so-what-ever-happened-to-virtual-reality/

Could virtual reality be the future of art exhibitions?

Popov, formerly the chief executive of a video-game production company, originally designed Cappasity to help businesses make digital presentations in augmented reality. However, after finding commercial success in this sphere, Popov decided to reappropriate the software in order to make it compatible with the curation of art galleries.

“The partnership between Cappasity and the New York Academy of Art began with a shared conviction that fast and qualitative production of virtual museums, galleries, and exhibitions is possible,” Popov tells me. “The experience was meant to help convert online visitors into physical ones.”

Next level

Cappasity is pushing this to the next level. “The ongoing, multi-year partnership is aimed to showcase the Academy’s Cast Collection, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as sculptures created by faculty, students and other artists,” Popov says. Because Cappasity exists in a virtual space, this collection will be made available to anybody with a VR set-up.

“We also plan to offer virtual and augmented reality tours of the Academy’s major exhibitions and galleries, allowing viewers all over the world to ‘virtually’ visit the Academy,” he adds. At present a basic version of this tour can be accessed as a demo on Steam.

“We expect Cappasity to become the industry standard for art schools’ student digital portfolios in the next few years.” As the partnership with the New York Academy of Art continues to blossom, the Cappasity for Art initiative will gain momentum, hopefully becoming a widely recognised curation tool in the near future.

See the full story here: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/visual-art/could-virtual-reality-be-the-future-of-art-exhibitions-1.3905993

Performances by Kelly Clarkson, Jamiroquai, Bullet For My Valentine and Plan B are now available to watch in virtual reality via MelodyVR

MelodyVR, the only licensed music virtual reality (VR) company, has partnered with four new artists, bringing shows from Kelly Clarkson, Jamiroquai, Bullet For My Valentine and Plan B to its platform.

MelodyVR captured Clarkson’s recent hometown show in Dallas, allowing viewers to watch the show from nine different perspectives, including from on stage, through the MelodyVR app on participating VR headsets.

Clarkson, who describes the the experience of watching the VR shows as “weird, but awesome”, says the VR platform is a good way for fans who are unable to attend her concerts to see the show.

See the full story here: https://www.iq-mag.net/2019/05/kelly-clarkson-jamiroquai-virtual-reality/#.XPFEdS2ZNPM

New York tenants fight as landlords embrace facial recognition cameras

At Atlantic Plaza Towers in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the landlord, Nelson Management Group, is moving to install a new system to control entry into the buildings. It would use facial recognition to open the front door for recognized tenants rather than traditional keys or electronic key fobs.

More than 130 tenants have, however, filed a formal complaintwith the state seeking to block the application.

“We do not want to be tagged like animals,” said Icemae Downes, who has lived at Atlantic Plaza Towers since it opened 51 years ago. “We are not animals. We should be able to freely come in and out of our development without you tracking every movement.”

“The vast majority of commercial deployments are secret,” said Alvaro Bedoya, the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.

“This turns people’s expectations upside down about their privacy. In 2019, most people expect that when they log online, they’re going to be tracked in some way,” he said. “In public, in real life, most people still think they can be a face in the crowd. And up until the deployment of facial recognition technology, they were right … This lets people be tracked in the real world like they are online, and I think that is a pretty basic invasion into our lives.”

See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/29/new-york-facial-recognition-cameras-apartment-complex?utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=73227565&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-86NaV_TuRtvn-qTX79uuxU9udRW6018z8aXKz3EdLyROQM5nyvjO06pd5dQJ1DP9WS5gcx0vzsI9OoFeTfk2m35UrX2w&_hsmi=73227565

The Looking Glass Pro might be the weirdest all-in-one PC ever

Copyright 2006 Phoebe Cheong, all rights reserved

The Looking Glass Pro is an all-in-one gaming PC that’s focused on one thing, visualizing 3D content on its bizarre lenticular display that makes you feel like you’re staring into a glass box filled with pixels. The embedded 4K display renders dozens of potential views and pipes them out as lower-res slices through some bizarre lens wizardry so that users can see the onscreen content in volumetric 60fps 3D without needing glasses.

The whole premise for this thing is weird and cool but also super expensive. The original 15.6″ Looking Glass display was $3,000; this thing is $6,000. The workstation is available for pre-order now and ships in July.

see the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/28/the-looking-glass-pro-might-be-the-weirdest-all-in-one-pc-ever/

Pokémon Company hints at a new meaning of augmented reality

The Pokémon Company has announced the next step in its augmented reality gaming future with a new direction: Pokémon Sleep, a game with the ambitious aim of turning “sleep into entertainment.”

Sleep will work by recording when players go to bed, wake, and how long they’re sleeping. According to the Guardian, the game will be accompanied by a hardware element, known as the Pokémon Plus+ (“plus plus”).

In what was an extremely wide-ranging press conference, the company went on to announce a suite of further projects in the works. These included a Nintendo Switch console game based on the new movie, Detective Pikachu, which is also yet to launch (Nintendo part-owns the Pokémon Company).

Other ideas point to an agnosticism about the particular device on which the Pokémon experience will exist: Pokémon HOME is a cloud service that “will work with Nintendo Switch and iOS and Android devices, allowing you to bring over the Pokémon that you’ve shared adventures with throughout your journey.” This takes in other new games that it has announced for the Switch console: the more traditional role-playing Sword and Shield games.

See the full story here: https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/pokemon_company_hints_at_a_new_meaning_of_augmented_reality/42151

Leap Motion, Once a Virtual-Reality High Flier, Sells Itself to U.K. Rival

Leap Motion Inc., a virtual-reality startup that helped pioneer gesture tracking technology, has agreed to sell itself to British rival UltraHaptics Ltd. for approximately $30 million, according to people familiar with the matter—about a 10th of its valuation just a few years ago.

UltraHaptics will take on Leap Motion’s patents and staff, mostly engineers who now number close to a dozen people, including co-founder and Chief Technology Officer David Holz. Leap Motion’s chief executive and co-founder, Michael Buckwald, won’t stay at the company.

UltraHaptics, a 116-person company based in Bristol, England, has been licensing Leap Motion’s technology for the past six years for its own hardware technology: using focused sound waves to create the sensation of touch in midair.

One of the company’s recent contracts is a proof of concept project for a car maker that will allow drivers to control their entertainment system by “feeling” buttons in the air above a dashboard, said Chief Executive Steve Cliffe. “Humans generally interact by talking and gesturing,” he said. “It’s about human interfaces going forwards.”

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/leap-motion-once-a-virtual-reality-high-flier-sells-itself-to-u-k-rival-11559210520

HOLLYWOOD IS QUIETLY USING AI TO HELP DECIDE WHICH MOVIES TO MAKE

Los Angeles-based startup Cinelytic is one of the many companies promising that AI will be a wise producer. It licenses historical data about movie performances over the years, then cross-references it with information about films’ themes and key talent, using machine learning to tease out hidden patterns in the data. Its software lets customers play fantasy football with their movie, inputting a cast, then swapping one actor for another to see how this affects a film’s projected box office.

Cinelytic isn’t the only company hoping to apply AI to the business of film. In recent years, a bevy of firms has sprung up promising similar insights. Belgium’s ScriptBook, founded in 2015, says its algorithms can predict a movie’s success just by analyzing its script. Israeli startup Vault, founded the same year, promises clients that it can predict which demographics will watch their films by tracking (among other things) how its trailers are received online. Another company called Pilot offers similar analyses, promising it can forecast box office revenues up to 18 months before a film’s launch with “unrivaled accuracy.”

The water is so warm, even established companies are jumping in. Last November, 20th Century Fox explained how it used AI to detect objects and scenes within a trailer and then predict which “micro-segment” of an audience would find the film most appealing.

But Kang Zhao, who co-authored the paper along with his colleague Michael Lash, cautions that these sorts of statistical approaches have their flaws.

One is that the predictions made by machines are frequently just blindingly obvious. You don’t need a sophisticated and expensive AI software to tell you that a star like Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Cruise will improve the chances of your film being a hit, for example.

Algorithms are also fundamentally conservative. Because they learn by analyzing what’s worked in the past, they’re unable to account for cultural shifts or changes in taste that will happen in the future. This is a challenge throughout the AI industry, and it can contribute to problems like AI bias. (See, for example, Amazon’s scrapped AI recruiting tool that penalized female candidates because it learned to associate engineering prowess with the job’s current male-dominated intake.)

See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/28/18637135/hollywood-ai-film-decision-script-analysis-data-machine-learning?_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9G5YyV6LtFvbShOjLSt2NyrZgKGOL9bSR_9FqeNbM4hIHJ4PxAOGVjsDjsQra6WT9Jj7jTgj16JUos457fvyzjvB-YIw&_hsmi=73140734