Virtual reality: how women are taking a leading role in the sector
Despite a well-documented gender imbalance within the tech industry, a recent survey suggests that when it comes to VR, women are starting to take up leadership roles in greater numbers
See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2019/may/28/virtual-reality-how-women-are-taking-a-leading-role-in-the-sector
How Games Conquered the Movies
Keanu Reeves stars as 'John Wick' in JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM.
I thought of this while watching John Wick 3 last night. (Which I loved, as I did 1 and 2.) It’s not just that its ballet of bullets — especially the one with the dogs — are so like video games, in both structure and form, that they seem to have been practically been torn from a controller; you can practically see health bars and Stun markets hovering over the heads of the characters.
It’s also that the series’s primary costars, after Keanu — with apologies to Halle Berry and Ian McShane — is not any other individual character, but the world of John Wick, the Continental, and the High Table. Worldbuilding has long been a first-class citizen in video and tabletop role-playing games; now it has graduated to movies as well.
Jason Bourne and James Bond were superspies, but they didn’t really get better over the course of their series, or become so ridiculously puissant that they can casually take out a dozen heavily armed/armored expert fighters in thirty seconds, singlehandedly, as Shaw does in the trailer of the new Fast & Furious movie. Most of Jason Bourne’s action sequences are escapes; most of John Wick’s are hunts. And of course “one hunting a horde” has been the basic mode of first-person shooters since long before Doom.
Ultimately, video games have expanded Hollywood’s possibility space, and to my mind that’s always a good thing. Is it a universal rule that when technology introduces a new medium of storytelling, old media soon adopts the new medium’s styles and tropes? Did plays become more like novels after Don Quixote? Did radio become more like television after TV was introduced? And if/when we figure out the most compelling structure(s) for AR/VR storytelling, will video games become more like that? It seems fairly inevitable to me that the answer is yes.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/26/how-games-conquered-the-movies/
Google Uses AI Classifier to Sanitize YouTube Home Page
The system “analyzes feedback from users who report videos that are misleading, clickbait-y and sensational … [and] also taps other data on audience retention, likes and dislikes.” A Google spokesperson noted, “It looks for titles or thumbnails that misrepresent the content of the video or include offensive language, among other things.”
According to Bloomberg, however, “current and former employees say the company has only seriously focused on the problem when money is at stake, or — in the case of terrorist content — when outside pressure has forced it to act.” The classifier system has been successful, and “Google recently told marketers that ‘watch time’ on YouTube’s homepage and app grew tenfold in the past three years.”
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/google-uses-ai-classifier-to-sanitize-youtube-home-page/
Move over Ready Player One — the future of AR might be in furniture
Modsy is developing a platform that lets property owners create virtual renderings of rooms and restyle them in real time. So that means 3D automation, plus virtually positioning furniture items, combined with a marketplace where you can buy the items. Modsy’s tech replicates rooms in 360 degrees, with furniture from dozens of well-known brands. It’s a powerful combination.
Planner 5D is a design tool that lets you create floor plans and interior designs using VR and AR. But its approach is different.
It first learns about how the house is used and then automatically creates a design. The startup claims its users have already designed more than 80 million projects without requiring any special design or software skills.
In the meantime, it’s easy to see why apps like this are taking off. The average interior design costs for a U.S. homeowner are between $2,000 and $8,300, so using these apps can be a huge cost saving.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/28/move-over-ready-player-one-the-future-of-ar-might-be-in-furniture/?ncid=tcdaily&utm_medium=TCnewsletter&tpcc=TCdailynewsletter
IBM-Maersk blockchain shipping consortium expands to include other major shipping companies
Last year IBM and Danish shipping conglomerate Maersk announced the limited availability of a blockchain-based shipping tool called TradeLens. Today, the two partners announced that a couple of other major shippers have come on board.
The partners announced that CMA CGM and MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company have joined TradeLens. When you include these companies together with Maersk, the TradeLens consortium now encompasses almost half of the world’s cargo container shipments, according to data supplied by IBM .
The hope is that by using blockchain to solve the problem, all the participants can easily follow the flow of shipments along the chain and trust that the immutable record has not been altered at any point.
The blockchain provides a couple of obvious advantages over previous methods. For starters, [Wieck said] it’s safer because data is distributed, making it much more secure with digital encryption built in. The greatest advantage though is the visibility it provides. Every participant can check any aspect of the flow in real time, or an auditor or other authority can easily track the entire process from start to finish by clicking on a block in the blockchain instead of requesting data from each entity manually.
Comcast Universal Sphere: What to know and how to get tix for the Spielberg VR experience
The interior of the 39-foot-diameter orb plays host to a short film called The Power of I. The gist? To “explore the power of ideas.”
Narratives follow the stories of “geniuses” throughout history — Beethoven, Confucius, Angelou, Earhart. At one point the movie zips you through a galaxy shaped like Albert Einstein’s eye, according to the Inquirer.
Another tack explores impactful documents of the United States, from the Constitution to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to the Title IX legislation that outlawed gender discrimination.
Stories are told on a personal level for maximum impact, like that of Emily Whitehead, a young leukemia patient at CHOP who was saved with a breakthrough drug. “I had tears in my eyes” after watching the show, a Comcast staffer told NBC10.
See the full story here: https://billypenn.com/2019/05/20/comcast-universal-sphere-what-to-know-and-how-to-get-tix-for-the-spielberg-vr-experience/
Disney-Backed VR Company Tyffon to Open ‘Free Roam’ VR Room in LA Later This Year
The Disney-backed virtual reality company Tyffon is set to open its first “free roam” VR venue in Los Angeles later this year after a new round of funding, the company announced Monday.
Tyffon has already developed three immersive experiences for their Tyffonium rooms, a VR arcade that combines VR technology and multi-sensory effects, including horror walk-through attraction “Corridor.” Looking forward, Tyffon plans to work closely with entertainment companies to bring branded IP into the VR world.
Tyffon has already developed three immersive experiences for their Tyffonium rooms, a VR arcade that combines VR technology and multi-sensory effects, including horror walk-through attraction “Corridor.” Looking forward, Tyffon plans to work closely with entertainment companies to bring branded IP into the VR world.
The Santa Monica-based company was born out of the Disney Accelerator program in 2014, where now-thriving tech startups like Atom Tickets and Epic Games have used Disney’s resources and relationships to build its portfolio. Tyffon began by building mobile gaming apps like ZombieBooth, which Tyffon says has reached 5o million downloads worldwide.
See the full story here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/disney-backed-vr-company-tyffon-150012555.html
Hollywood’s Changing As Fast As It Ever Has — Can Industry Lifers Change Too?
“Content and storytelling is the new universal truth to market all goods and services,” said Erwin. “Whether you’re retail, marketing, consumer, industrial, B2B, B2C, it’s all the same. All those executive roles being pushed out, there’s not going to be a place for them to go in Hollywood, but I do think there’s going to be roles for them in marketing, in brand management all over the world.”
And there are other unexpected opportunities. Consulting company RL Leaders, for instance, convenes “Deep Applied Creativity panels” that combine Hollywood directors and writers with subject-matter experts. Those panels work with government agencies and other large, often hidebound organizations to develop creative solutions to thorny issues far from traditional entertainment.
USC and other film schools continue to turn out hundreds of new filmmakers, actors, musicians, production and development talent, Squire said. Those skills are likely to remain in demand. The key, however is making sure that students continue to embrace the new platforms and the opportunities they present.
Chris Rico, who tracks the entertainment industry for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp, said the way that the federal government totes up entertainment jobs is “hopelessly outdated.”
“If you look at shifting demographics and what people are doing, people aren’t being classified correctly,” Rico said. “Their jobs are being classified as technology or information technology instead of (as) what’s really a media company.”
For instance, Netflix now has around 3,500 employees in Los Angeles, concentrated along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Rico said that’s nearly as many as the company has in its Bay Area headquarters, and nearly equal to the number of people just laid off at Fox.
USC and other film schools continue to turn out hundreds of new filmmakers, actors, musicians, production and development talent, Squire said. Those skills are likely to remain in demand. The key, however is making sure that students continue to embrace the new platforms and the opportunities they present.
Augmented Reality Options By Second Spectrum Added To ESPN App For NBA Playoffs
ESPN’s Branded Full Court Press, with Second Spectrum, allows viewers to watch various isolated broadcasts of the game on the ESPN app and on ESPN3. The options also include a Coach Mode, which is “a heavy X’s and O’s analytical presentation of the game, featuring on-court diagrams of the live action”.
There is also a Player Mode that offers “above-the-rim cameras and graphics displaying the scoring probability of all five offensive players on the court throughout each possession, changing in real time” and a Mascot Mode that features “a fun, entertaining presentation featuring special graphics treatments, including a fire graphic on the basket when a team goes on a scoring run, a 3D on-screen brick if a player misses badly, and more.”
See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonogus/2019/05/26/augmented-reality-options-by-second-spectrum-added-to-espn-app-for-nba-playoffs/#6a0c580d3db4
How War Photographer Julia Leeb Is Using Virtual Reality and Art to Let Comfortable People Experience the Terror of Conflict Zones
One of her most important projects was a 2017 exhibition at the Süddeutscher Verlag publishing house in her hometown of Munich, where she combined photography and VR. A groundbreaking initiative, the show enabled viewers to see a photograph and then put on a VR camera and experience what it depicts for themselves. Oftentimes, photographs from areas of conflict can seem foreign and abstract for those of us fortunate enough to be living in a secure, comfortable environment. Leeb’s exhibition brought these conflict zones, and those horribly affected by them, closer to home—and raised a new consciousness about the small world we inhabit.
Contrary to her work as a journalist, Leeb removes any context in her art that relates to the time or situation in which the photo was taken, narrowing down the focus to the most human element. She uses paint to as a base, giving images different hues to further accentuate their content. Then, she layers the photographs on top the paint. The resulting image represents a raw, unfiltered depiction of humanity. Looking at her artworks, questions of locality and time disappear as the realities of conflict and terror gain a sense of inescapable immediacy, regardless of where and when they took place.
See the full story here; https://news.artnet.com/art-world/sophie-neuendorf-on-julia-leeb-1552957