Dreamscape Raises $30 Million For Location-based VR
Los Angeles-based Dreamscape Immersive says it closed a $30 million Series B financing round.
The location-based VR company was previously backed by 21st Century Fox and Warner Bros., among others. Those investors also participated in this round, which was led by AMC Entertainment. New investors include Nickelodeon, Majid Al Futtaim, VRSense Solutions Limited, and Image Nation Abu Dhabi.
The money is intended to help the company build more locations alongside securing quality content for its VR centers. Nickelodeon, for example, will produce an experience with Dreamscape. The company’s flagship location is expected to open next year at the Westfield Century City Mall in Los Angeles and AMC plans to work with Dreamscape to open up six more centers.
Dreamscape says it uses body-mapping tech developed by a Swiss research foundation. That’s an interesting piece of the efforts by Dreamscape because the absence of totally accurate full-body tracking is one of the things lacking from our last trip through The VOID.
See the full story here: https://uploadvr.com/dreamscape-raises-30-million-location-based-vr/
Dreamscape Immersive & Nickelodeon Partner on Location-Based VR
It has already been confirmed that Nickelodeon and Dreamscape are partnering for a new IP aimed specifically for children and families. Meanwhile VRSense Solutions, a developer of VR backpacks will be responsible for advancing Dreamscape hardware development, Middle Eastern lifestyle conglomerate Majid Al Futtaim will focus its efforts on expanding the start-up globally and media company Image Nation Abu Dhabi will assist in developing a large catalogue of immersive experiences to enjoy.
Other advisors on the project include filmmaker Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring), composer Hans Zimmer (Inception, Interstellar), production designer Rick Carter, former Warner Bros. executive Dan Fellman and former Disney COO Tom Staggs.
Survios Announce VR Music Creation App Electronauts
Survios, the development studio behind Raw Data and Sprint Vector, announced Electronauts today, which marks their third VR project. Electronauts is an immersive, VR music creation tool with a heavy focus on interactivity. Users will be able to experience music in new, surreal ways by remixing, composing, and performing all while using electronic instruments inside VR.
Additionally, Survios is partnering with Grammy-winning “superproducer” duo Stargate (as well as other unannounced artists) to incorporate well-known, top-tier talent into the experience. The official fact sheet also mentions you can “jam with your friends” hinting at a potential multiplayer feature.
We still don’t know a whole lot about this new project, so the assertion that users have “never before” been able to “create and interact with sound in a truly immersive way” feels like it might be a bit hyperbolic in the face of existing VR music apps such as SoundStage and EXA. According to press materials, it reportedly utilizes a new “Music Reality Engine” that’s been trademarked presumably by Survios for this app specifically.
See the full story here: https://uploadvr.com/survios-announce-vr-music-creation-app-electronauts/
VR and AR Expected to Further Redefine Experiences at CES
By Phil Lelyveld with Erick Moen
December 14, 2017
Virtual reality, augmented reality and immersive experiences crossed over the apex of the hype curve and are now tracking the slope of enlightenment as they develop into niche market applications or pivot into location-based entertainment. Resolution, frame rate, horizontal and vertical field of view in the HMDs (head mounted displays), and head and body tracking technology, have all improved over the last year with further advances expected next month at CES 2018 in Las Vegas. This applies equally to next generation HMDs, projection, and heads-up approaches to immersive experiences.
Audio, especially head-tracked spatial audio, got more respect in 2017, although monophonic or non-tracking 360 experiences are still common. Other control and sensory input technologies, such as eye- and hand-tracking control systems and haptic feedback solutions also continue to improve, both adding creative options for experience design and muddying the waters of what will constitute a clearly messaged consumer immersive media experience product.
Embedded sensors communicating with either internal processors or cloud-based resources such as geolocation, object/facial recognition, obstacle avoidance, and AI/personal assistants are expanding the tools available to experienced developers and blurring the distinction between the real and virtual worlds of work and play.
Location-based immersive experiences, from theme parks to small installations within arcades and purpose-built attractions in storefronts, received a significant amount of funding and support in 2017, especially in Asia. Press coverage of IAAPA Attractions Expo 2017, the annual out-of-home amusement conference, highlighted both VR and AR overlays on traditional rides and mixed reality experiences incorporating escape rooms, puzzle solving, and immersive experiences.
Hologate, the creator of turnkey multiplayer VR experiences, sold more than 60 units of its easily-maintained 4-player experience at IAAPA.
The number of funded startups and established companies in both the VR and AR ecosystem continues to grow, implying sustained confidence in the future of the industry. The press was filled with announcements of advances in cameras, photogrammetry tools, volumetric and lightfield image capture and processing, audio and video editing and game engine tools.
Price cuts and product bundles drove an increase in integrated HMD sales in the second half of 2017. One million HMDs were shipped in Q3. Sony accounted for 49 percent of those, followed by Oculus (21 percent) and HTC Vive (16 percent). Those numbers are separate from mobile HMD sales. For example, Samsung Gear VR has sold well over 5 million units in the past year.
A large number of key players, with the notable exception of Apple, are involved in the OpenXR effort run by the Khronos Group to standardize the way AR and VR apps communicate with HMDs. Microsoft joined OpenXR in November.
AREA, the Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance, released functional requirements for AR devices that could be a good template for entertainment guidelines. Many other standardization efforts, including the IEEE’s, are still in the early stages of developing big picture statements of what they want to drill down to before they work on specific recommendations.
The market, technology and art of immersive experiences is still immature, so it is not clear what should be standardized as opposed to what provides competitive advantage.
Immersion and engagement are the keys to driving adoption of VR and AR, but they must be built on a good story-world. Alejandro Iñárritu was awarded a special Oscar for illustrating how this could be done in a site-specific way with his “Carne y Arena” (Virtual Present, Physically Invisible) installation piece at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
A potentially mass-market example is “Wolves in the Walls” from the former Oculus Story Studio team. The work is getting strong buzz for the way it uses game engine technology to support compelling interactive moments that don’t distract from the overall narrative.
This year saw growth in the number of VR, AR and immersive experience competitions at existing festivals, as well as festivals dedicated to immersive experiences. The 2018 edition of New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival is a collection of mixed media performance pieces, AI-enabled experiences, multisensory interactive experiences, and mobile VR/360 documentaries.
The heat that was on VR and AR last year has moved on to Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies this year, and there are efforts to use blockchain to enable new entertainment opportunities and business models.
StreamSpace, an Austin, Texas startup, is building a platform for secure video distribution using blockchain. StreamSpace is funding its business build-out with an ICO (Initial Coin Offering).
Similarly, OTOY has announced the Render Token, a blockchain-based currency that underpins a distributed GPU rendering network for rendering lightfield image files. People who buy the Render Token will be able to redeem it for computer rendering time in the future, with the hope that the coin will increase in value so the amount of computer resources it will buy will also increase over time.
ICOs are a new way to fund the build-out of elements of the immersive media ecosystem ahead of and in support of the development of the market for immersive experiences.
For more information on CES 2018 (#CES2018), visit the event’s official website or its Facebook page. If you plan on attending, you can save $200 when registering by December 18. The ETCentric community should also be interested in C Space at CES, which examines “disruptive trends and how they are going to change the future of brand marketing and entertainment.”
See the original post here: http://www.etcentric.org/vr-and-ar-expected-to-further-redefine-experiences-at-ces/
A Team of MIT Scientists Taught an AI to Get Emotional Over Movies
INSIDE OUT – Pictured: Joy. ©2015 Disney•Pixar. All Rights Reserved.
“We developed machine-learning models that rely on deep neural networks to ‘watch’ small slices of video—movies, TV, and short online features—and estimate their positive or negative emotional content by the second,” the team wrote in a blog post Monday morning.
The approach didn’t just pay attention to the general plot line of a movie, but also to more subtle aspects, including the score, and close-ups of a person’s face. Using these clues, the project’s machine learning algorithms were able to identify positive and negative emotions, and map out the extend to which each scene would provoke emotional responses — something the researchers called “visual valence.”
...the fact that artificial intelligence can be used to analyze the emotional arc of a movie, and with that predict an audience response, could be profound for Hollywood, the researchers argued.
See the full story here: http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/ai-emotional-arcs-mit-mckinsey-1202635570/
AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked
The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together.
It's especially striking considering that it's allegedly the work of one person—a Redditor who goes by the name 'deepfakes'—not a big special effects studio that can digitally recreate a young Princess Leia in Rogue One using CGI. Instead, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning.
Like the Adobe tool that can make people say anything, and the Face2Face algorithm that can swap a recorded video with real-time face tracking, this new type of fake porn shows that we're on the verge of living in a world where it's trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.
Artificial intelligence researcher Alex Champandard told me in an email that a decent, consumer-grade graphics card could process this effect in hours, but a CPU would work just as well, only more slowly, over days.
Ethically, the implications are “huge,” Champandard said. Malicious use of technology often can’t be avoided, but it can be countered.
“We need to have a very loud and public debate,” he said. ”Everyone needs to know just how easy it is to fake images and videos, to the point where we won't able to distinguish forgeries in a few months from now.
Champandard said researchers can then begin developing technology to detect fake videos and help moderate what’s fake and what isn’t, and internet policy can improve to regulate what happens when these types of forgeries and harassment come up.
“In a strange way,” this is a good thing, Champandard said. “We need to put our focus on transforming society to be able to deal with this.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEEKS AN ETHICAL CONSCIENCE
Crawford’s good-humored talk featured nary an equation and took the form of an ethical wake-up call. She urged attendees to start considering, and finding ways to mitigate, accidental or intentional harms caused by their creations. “Amongst the very real excitement about what we can do there are also some really concerning problems arising,” Crawford said.
One such problem occurred in 2015, when Google’s photo service labeled some black people as gorillas. More recently, researchers found that image-processing algorithms both learned and amplified gender stereotypes. Crawford told the audience that more troubling errors are surely brewing behind closed doors, as companies and governments adopt machine learning in areas such as criminal justice, and finance. “The common examples I’m sharing today are just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. In addition to her Microsoft role, Crawford is also a cofounder of the AI Now Institute at NYU, which studies social implications of artificial intelligence.
On Thursday, Victoria Krakovna, a researcher from Alphabet’s DeepMind research group, is scheduled to give a talk on “AI safety,” a relatively new strand of work concerned with preventing software developing undesirable or surprising behaviors, such as trying to avoid being switched off.
Krakovna’s talk is part of a one-day workshop dedicated to techniques for peering inside machine-learning systems to understand how they work—making them “interpretable,” in the jargon of the field.
“A lot of decisions about the future of this field cannot be made in the disciplines in which it began,” says Terah Lyons, executive director of Partnership on AI, a nonprofit launched last year by tech companies to mull the societal impacts of AI. (The organization held a board meeting on the sidelines of NIPS this week.) She says companies, civic-society groups, citizens, and governments all need to engage with the issue.
See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-seeks-an-ethical-conscience/
China’s iQiyi bets on digital girlfriend to boost virtual reality headset sales
For iQiyi, Vivi assists users in accessing the company’s content based on the history of which videos they prefer to watch. The avatar can also answer simple queries raised by users, such as the time, weather or scheduled television shows, and even help complete missing portions of a poem.
And for those so inclined, Vivi can flirt, compliment a user’s looks and act coy when asked about her age. Because it is VR, a user can “touch” Vivi, who would giggle, act playful or pretend to be angry as part of the interaction.
“I’m already a middle-aged man, and if I like it, I’m sure younger people would like it too,” Ma said. “If a nerd wants to see her dance, he can order her to, and she would go into dancer mode.”
The company declined to release sales figures for the headset, which bears the Qiyu brand. It sells for 3,499 yuan (US$529) in China, compared with 3,999 yuan for Taiwan-based HTC’s Vive Focus.
The Qiyu headset did not rank among the top five VR headset brands in China in the second quarter, which is led by Shanghai-based Deepoon VR, HTC and Japan’s Sony, according to industry research group Canalys.
See the full story here: http://www.scmp.com/tech/social-gadgets/article/2123599/chinas-iqiyi-bets-digital-girlfriend-boost-virtual-reality