Michael Jackson ‘Scream’ Compilation Features Eerie Augmented Reality Experience
Album Artwork (PRNewsfoto/Legacy Recordings)
Billboard reports that the "Scream" experience is both the estate and Shazam's first foray into the still-growing world of AR. These visuals will have their own Shazam scan codes to unlock an experience "inspired by the album's cover art".
Steve Aoki has remixed Michael Jackson's "Thriller" as part of the release of a new compilation of the pop icon's work, titled "Scream". The standalone single, "Thriller (Steve Aoki Midnight Hour Remix)" is available to stream here. Sony and the Estate collaborated with multi-platform creative studio Flight School for the intiative.
See the full story here: http://newburghgazette.com/2017/09/30/michael-jackson-scream-compilation-features-eerie-augmented/
New York Film Festival’s Convergence program sees the potential of virtual reality
As executive producer Jonny Ahdout explains, "Sharmeen had a very quick understanding of what it means to formulate creative thinking in virtual reality.
Ahdout acknowledges problems with current VR technology. Both moving the camera and editing are difficult. So is directing the viewer within the VR image. "You want to find the balance between giving people the freedom to look around where they want, but also attracting attention to what is taking place," he says. "With subtitles it's particularly difficult, because you have to piece them into certain parts of the screen. Newer technology will allow subtitles to follow wherever you're looking.00
"We use 3D sound a lot to place a sound in the environment where we want you to look," he goes on. "There's also staging, where if you have an action taking place that's moving from one side to the other, people generally follow that. Something we'll do in cutting is rotate scenes. If you have an action that's ending here in scene one, and the next action in scene two is starting over there, we'll rotate the entire scene so that they overlap on top of each other."
Editing in VR is a major hurdle compared to flat filmmaking. "Brains don't accept quick cuts the way that they do in filmmaking," Ahdout contends. "So we use long takes where you can feel really present in that moment. It's difficult, there's no rulebook. We just know we can't do it the way filmmaking does."
Another problem is the length of time viewers can tolerate VR. Somewhere between five and fifteen minutes seems to work best with documentary pieces and linear stories. Ahdout thinks viewers can stay inside interactive pieces for much longer stretches.
...The seams show through in Sanctuaries of Silence, a New York Times Op-Docs production directed by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. A profile of acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, the piece follows him as he records sound in the rainforests of Olympic National Park, along the Pacific Coast seashore, and on 46th Street in Manhattan. Like a fancy New York Times Magazine cover story, Sanctuaries of Silence starts with a debatable premise—Hempton's belief that our last refuges of silence are being overtaken—and "proves" it by cherry-picking facts and ignoring whatever doesn't fit his argument.
See the full story here: http://www.filmjournal.com/new-york-film-festivals-convergence-program-sees-potential-virtual-reality
Matchbox Twenty Launches Virtual Reality Concert Experience
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock (8996965bs)
Rob Thomas with Matchbox Twenty performs during the Matchbox Twenty & Counting Crows: A Brief History Of Everything Tour at Lakewood Amphitheatre, in Atlanta
Matchbox Twenty & Counting Crows: A Brief History Of Everything Tour - , Atlanta, USA - 13 Aug 2017
Matchbox Twenty and SwivelVR have teamed up for what is billed as the “first fan-controlled virtual reality experience.”
The collaboration will be for the band’s live concert on Oct. 4 from Denver.
SwivelVR allows users to watch and control the 4K VR 360 and/or 2D 360 Matchbox Twenty experience. Viewers use a hands-free menu to interact and alter what they watch. Fans will also be able to take snapshots of the show to save or share on social media.
Virtual reality glasses are not required to participate. The experience is also compatible with iPad, Apple Airplay with AppleTV, or a streaming dongle to watch on the TV.
Sony Inks Deal Pioneering Stem Licensing for DJs, Remixers
For years, to create remixes of popular songs, DJs and remixers have used stems — isolated instrument tracks and vocals — but not legally. Now, Nashville-based startup Remix Hits has signed a landmark deal with Sony Music that will allow DJs and other remixers to purchase and download licensed, and therefore legal, stems. Remix Hits, which is also in discussions with Warner Music and Universal Music, has created a hit song stem marketplace. The licensing model includes a revenue sharing plan for rights holders.
According to Digital Music News, Remix Hits relies on INSIGHT, a distribution platform with patent-pending audio identification tech capable of identifying if material “has been chopped, reversed, pitch shifted, time stretched, distorted, and compressed to extreme levels.”
“Unlike Gracenote, or Shazam, which focus on final master recordings, INSIGHT is specifically designed to detect copyrighted material at the stem level,” explains the press release.
See the full story here; http://www.etcentric.org/sony-inks-deal-pioneering-stem-licensing-for-djs-remixers/
TRIPP Raises $4 Million to Develop ‘Mood Altering’ VR Experiences
Los Angeles-based VR software development company TRIPP has announced a $4 million Series A round investment lead by venture capital firm Mayfield. TRIPP describe themselves as “mood architects”, aiming to create VR software that improves mindfulness.
Many types of VR experiences already function as powerful forms of escapism, but TRIPP believes their approach to creating ‘mindfulness’ VR software can deliver a more-focused brain stimulation that could improve a person’s well being and mental health. According to their website, the team will apply their decades of game development experience combined with “emerging mindfulness research” in VR experiences that affect the user “in deeply positive, and highly targeted ways that take you well beyond ‘fun’.”
Coming Soon to AMC Theaters: Virtual Reality Experiences
CULVER CITY, Calif. — It is easily Hollywood’s hottest start-up.
Steven Spielberg was an early investor. So were 21st Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros. The venture’s leadership team includes the former chief of Disney’s theme park design division; the producer of the “Men in Black” movie series; and a live event kingpin.
And now AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater chain, has invested $20 million in the fledgling company and agreed to finance the rapid rollout of its product in the United States and Britain.
The fuss is over Dreamscape Immersive, which has been working in a warehouse here for the last year and a half on what it calls a “virtual-reality multiplex.” Instead of a variety of movies, Dreamscape Immersive locations will offer a variety of virtual-reality experiences. Its technology, developed by a Swiss motion-capture firm, allows up to six people to explore a virtual-reality environment at once, seeing fully rendered avatars of one another.
“We were mesmerized by what we saw,” said Adam Aron, chief executive of AMC Entertainment. “Their vision is to change what V.R. has been — away from just a heightened level of video game and toward cinematic storytelling — and we think it’s what consumers have been waiting for.”
“In many cases, we have surplus space, and we think Dreamscape will add energy and excitement to our theaters, especially during the week,” Mr. Aron said. “But this isn’t a replacement for movies. It’s a complement.” Tickets are expected to cost from $15 to $20.
Dreamscape joins a cluster of companies that are trying to take advantage of the still-untapped consumer promise of virtual-reality technology, the desperate need by shopping malls to reinvent themselves in the online retail age and the pressure on movie studios (and theater companies) to find new avenues of growth.
The Void, a Utah start-up, recently announced a partnership with the Walt Disney Company to open “Star Wars”-themed virtual-reality experiences at Disney malls outside theme parks in California and Florida. Already operating are two Imax V.R. Centres in Los Angeles and New York; tickets start at $7, and the Los Angeles location has attracted 50,000 people over the last nine months. Imax said it planned to expand the concept to Canada, Britain and Shanghai this fall.
The Hollywood players behind Dreamscape give it immediate cachet. Joining Mr. Spielberg are people like Hans Zimmer, the movie music composer, and the director Gore Verbinski. But their involvement does not guarantee success. Mr. Spielberg, for one, has been down this road before, with mixed results. In the late 1990s, his DreamWorks SKG invested alongside Universal Pictures in a heavily promoted venture called GameWorks, which was supposed to use new technology to revolutionize the arcade business. GameWorks never lived up to its billing.
Around the same time, Disney encountered similar disappointment with DisneyQuest, which was envisioned as a worldwide chain offering virtual-reality experiences. Only two were built.
Two members of the Dreamscape management team, Walter Parkes, a co-chairman, and Bruce Vaughn, the chief executive, are very familiar with those efforts. Mr. Parkes, a movie producer whose credits include the “Men in Black” series, worked for Mr. Spielberg as a senior DreamWorks executive at the time. Mr. Vaughn spent 23 years at Disney, most recently serving as chief creative officer of its Imagineering research and design unit.
“Even big-name brands can have a hard time getting people to go here instead of there,” Mr. Vaughn acknowledged.
Mr. Vaughn was sitting in the Dreamscape warehouse last week with Mr. Parkes and Kevin Wall, an Emmy-winning producer of world-spanning music events like Live 8 and another Dreamscape co-chairman. The men, together with Aaron Grosky, the chief operating officer, said Dreamscape’s fate would be different, partly because virtual-reality technology has advanced so significantly.
“This is truly the birth of a new storytelling medium,” Mr. Parkes said.
As if to prove it, Mr. Parkes took a reporter through a prototype Dreamscape experience. The company uses more than a dozen cameras and sensors to transport people into various settings — home plate in a sold-out baseball stadium, the spider-filled ruins of an ancient temple or a futuristic, neon-lit city flooded with water. You put on V.R. goggles and a pair of gloves. An attendant clips a small device to your shoes. And off you go.
Inside Dreamscape experiences, which will last about nine minutes and cost about $1.5 million to $2 million to produce, participants can handle objects and — as avatars — even pass them between each other.
“A shared experience is what makes the lasting emotional impact,” said Mr. Vaughn, noting his track record in creating Disney theme park attractions.
Dreamscape is developing original content. Mr. Parkes said the company was also negotiating with various studios and filmmakers to create experiences that put people inside movie franchises.
“If you enjoy our experience, you’ll be more likely to see the movie, and vice versa,” he said.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/business/media/amc-theaters-virtual-reality.html
IF DATA IS THE NEW OIL, ARE TECH COMPANIES ROBBING US BLIND?
“The defense of this practice is that these companies provide ‘free’ services, and that they deserve some reward for their innovation and ingenuity,” Dr. John Danaher, a lecturer at the School of Law at NUI Galway, who writes about the intersection of the law and emerging technology, told Digital Trends. “That may well be true, but I would argue that the rewards they receive are disproportionate. The other defense is that many companies provide for some revenue-sharing agreements with more popular users, such as YouTube. That’s becoming more true, too, but it’s only a handful of users who can make decent money from this.”
In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier suggests that users should receive a micropayment every time their data is used to earn a company money.
...a formula could easily be established to determine both where data originated and how important the data was in shaping certain decisions. Not all data is created equal. While some of the systems human data helps train just requires us to click a link or upvote a comedy special, other types require high levels of expertise. One illustration of this is translating a document from one language to another. Although tools like Google Translate are increasingly effective, the reason these machines are able to work as they do is because they draw on data that was previously provided by human users.
Hanna Lützen, who translates the Harry Potter books into Danish gets paid for that particular job by a publishing house, but Google then pays her nothing if those combined 1 million+ words help make its language translation system smarter so it can translate your love letter to a girlfriend in Denmark.
Precedents like the E.U.’s “right to be forgotten” ruling against Google show how laws are still catching up with the realities of new digital technology. But according to John Danaher, enforcing this may be a tough legal case to argue.
“The case I would make against the practice is moral, not legal,” Danaher continued. “General rules of contract law are taken to apply to the agreements that users click when signing up for a service like Facebook. As long as Facebook draws the user’s attention to their terms and conditions, and as long as those terms and conditions do not breach public policy and unfair terms rules, they are held to be binding on the user. In my opinion, this just shows the inadequacy of current approaches to contract law, since it is well-known that people are willing to accept even the most outlandish terms and conditions.” (During a 2014 experiment, unwitting participants in London agreed to give up their eldest child by agreeing to public Wi-Fi terms.)
See the full story here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/data-ownership-question/
‘Raw Data’ Devs Share Player Metrics & Insights Ahead of October’s v1.0 Launch
Speaking at VRDC Fall 2017 this week, Survios CTO Alex Silkin and Design Director Mike McTyre stressed to VR developers in the crowd that collecting proper player analytics should be a major priority. The pair said that it was a mistake to wait as long as they did before they began collecting and analyzing player data from Raw Data, but once they did they found a number of major surprises that disrupted their understanding of how players were playing, and prompted them to make changes.
About 80% of players played only the single-player mode, and while cooperative play was billed as a major selling point to the game, only 17% of players have played that mode.
When it came to the launch of one of one of the game’s new heroes, the developers thought players would be excited to play as ‘Boss’, the shotgun wielding street merc. But the data showed a palty 7.5% of players were choosing him. The team discovered that some of his abilities were overly complex and players weren’t using them, making the hero feel weaker than the others. The devs ended up altering the way the hero played to make him easier to understand and a more attractive choice.
Survios credited video game analytics firm Exostatic for helping to implement and analyze Raw Data metrics.