philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Viewers Not Warming to Recommendations by Video Services

According to research from UserTesting, the personalized viewing recommendations offered by video streaming services are failing to gain traction with most consumers. While results varied across services, only 29 percent of participants indicated that they watch content recommended to them. In addition to relevant recommendations, the study rated services based on metrics such as speed, availability of content, episode scanning, and overall ease-of-use. With a total score of 89.5, Netflix led the field, followed by Hulu (86.8), Amazon Prime (85) and YouTube TV (80.7).

UserTesting found that 45 percent of viewing “takes place on TV or via streaming media devices like Roku, Apple TV or Amazon Fire TV,” reports TechCrunch. “Thirty-seven percent preferred laptops, and 11 percent said their smartphone or tablet was their primary streaming device. For some services, TV viewing is even higher — Hulu recently said that the majority — 78 percent — takes place on TVs.”

See the full story here; http://www.etcentric.org/viewers-not-warming-to-recommendations-by-video-services/

Nvidia Emphasizes Software at Technicolor Experience Event

At the Technicolor Experience Center in Culver City, Nvidia held an event highlighting its decisive move into software, with artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other areas. Vice president of developer programs Greg Estes noted that the company has 850,000 developers all over the world in universities and labs as well as companies like Adobe. Its developer program provides hands-on training in AI and parallel computing, impacting the media and entertainment industry, as well as smart cities, autonomous vehicles and more.

Andrew Edelsten, Nvidia director of developer technologies for deep learning, described the company’s efforts in AI, including its Deep Learning Institute, which has trained 100,000 developers in AI. He defined deep learning as the ability to add “hidden layers” to neural networks to solve complex problems. “We’re focusing on what makes deep learning successful,” he said, stressing that deep learning is not magic. “If a human being can’t map it, neither can DL,” he warned. He encouraged developers to pick a task that will bring a return on investment. “Put your ideas through the wringer,” he advised.

He focused on the ways that AI and VR can be used to create an end-to-end platform for self-driving cars, and to create simulations to train robots. The team is also experimenting with cable physics that helps articulate virtual hands. “We can now simulate things that are right and don’t just look right,” he said.

See the full story here; http://www.etcentric.org/nvidia-emphasizes-software-at-technicolor-experience-event/

MIT’s Super-Efficient Dispatching Algorithm Minimizes a City’s Taxi Fleet

Times Square, New York City, New York State, Night, Taxi

By giving due weight to minimizing the distance between a taxi’s destination and the origin of its next potential trip, the model moves more passengers per vehicle over a given period of time.

A perfect solution would lay to rest the famous Traveling Salesman Problem, which tries to find the shortest path a salesman must take to hit every spot on his route. That problem quickly becomes intractable, however, as the number of spots increases. You could solve it for Mayberry, but not for Manhattan.

Instead, the MIT researchers created what they call a vehicle sharing network, similar to the network they used in 2014 for optimizing ride sharing. It looks like a graph in which each node represents a trip and each line linking two nodes represents a pair of trips that one vehicle can handle. Manipulating the layout of the graph provides ways of improving (if not perfecting) the solution.

See the full story here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/mass-transit/mit-finds-mathy-way-to-minimize-taxi-fleet

AI may have outwitted itself with fake video

The US military is funding an effort to determine whether AI-generated video and audio will soon be indistinguishable from the real thing—even for another AI.
The news: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is holding a contest this summer to generate the most convincing AI-created videos and the most effective tools to spot the counterfeits.
Some background: Some of the most realistic fake footage is created by generative adversarial networks, or GANs. GANs pit AI systems against each other to refine their creations and make a product real enough to fool the other AI. In other words, the final videos are literally made to dupe detection tools.
Why it matters: The software to create these videos is becoming increasingly advanced and accessible, which could cause real harm. “You already have modified video being used to cause real violence across the developing world,” Aviv Ovadyasaid at an event organized by Bloomberg. “That’s a real and present danger.”

I saw the Red Hydrogen One phone with my own eyes

My reaction? I was impressed and couldn't believe how well the effect worked. It's part hologram and part 3D. It's not that the image hovers over the screen like R2-D2 projecting Princess Leia in the original Star Wars film. It's more that there were layers of depth to the image. It's as if the screen was a proscenium theater and some parts of the image were upfront and close and other parts of the image were farther away.

The overall effect was immersive. No matter how much I moved the phone, the 3D effect was there. It worked in both portrait and landscape.

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/i-saw-the-red-hydrogen-one-phone-with-my-own-eyes/

In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?

When Michiteru Kitazaki, a professor of engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan, recently posed this question in an email, he evoked an idea from Japanese culture known as tamashii, or the soul without a body.

In a paper published Tuesday in Scientific Reports, they showed that animating virtual hands and feet alone is enough to make people feel their sense of body drift toward an invisible avatar.

Their work fits into a corpus of research on illusory body ownership, which has challenged understandings of perception and contributed to therapies like treating pain for amputees who experience phantom limb.

....

Rather than an example of illusory body ownership, she said, the drifting effect may be more related to out-of-body experiences, in which people simply feel their bodies “displaced in space.” She added that the researchers might have found effects from the threats had they measured physiological responses, like changes in skin conductance or brain activity.

Dr. Kitazaki replied that the exact difference between out-of-body experiences and illusory body ownership is an open question, but agreed that future research should include such measurements.

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/science/virtual-reality-body.html

E3 2018 VR Guide: Every Press Conference And If VR Will Be There

Ubisoft – Monday, June 11th, 1 pm PT/4 pm ET/9 pm BST
VR Chances: Very Likely

See the full story and list of companies here: https://uploadvr.com/e3-2018-heres-every-press-conference-chances-seeing-vr/ 

RED Debuts Android Smartphone That Creates 4D Holograms

Similar to RED’s other industrial-looking products, the Hydrogen RED comes in aluminum (at $1,195) or titanium (at $1,595).

The phone’s other innovation is what RED calls “4-view,” essentially the ability to “switch the 2,560 x 1,440 screen from a standard 2D to 3D,” which RED calls its “holographic” view. The Verge reviewer called it “a big step over 3D on other phones,” with better 3D depth than he saw on previous phones. The technology behind it is “more than just combining two images to make standard 3D.”

As a phone, he concluded, “most people will be better served by getting something cheaper,” although “as a hologram making and viewing machine, it’s a solid technical improvement over what I’ve seen before.” What remains to be seen is “whether anybody really needs or wants that on a phone.”

They can manually adjust the level of 3D, “but the plug-in will also automatically create a depth of field that Leia has deemed to be the most comfortable for the largest number of players.” Developers can also provide a slider so that players can adjust the 3D settings themselves.

See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/red-debuts-android-smartphone-that-creates-4d-holograms/

Google, Publishers to Meet as Europe’s Data Law Takes Effect

Sources say that Google has agreed to discuss the concerns of publishers at four of its global offices on the eve of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect May 25. Google has told publishers using its advertising tools that they will be responsible for obtaining user consent to gather personal information from European users. Google has not adopted an industry-wide framework that many publishers plan to use to gain user permission on behalf of their advertising technology partners.

Of greatest concern is Google’s push to make publishers so-called co-controllers, which means the onus will be on them to determine “the purposes and means for processing of personal data,” and “ensure its processors’ contracts are in compliance.” The processor is “a third party vendor that digests data on behalf of the behalf of the controller and keeps records of personal data and processing activities.”

Thus, say publishers, although Google would require publishers to obtain consent for “processing of personal data on its behalf,” Google “would decide how and when that data would be made available to others.” Publishers say that paradigm “effectively prevents publishers from being able to choose which partners to work with.”

See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/google-publishers-to-meet-as-europes-data-law-takes-effect/

Watch Villette’s Virtual Reality video for ‘Money’

See the original post here: https://www.thefourohfive.com/music/article/watch-villette-s-virtual-reality-video-for-money-152