philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Startup to Introduce Holographic TV Technology at NAB 2017

Startup Light Field Labs, founded by three former Lytro engineers, is working on creating holographic displays via light field technology. The goal is to create a TV set that can project a 3D hologram into the living room, with the further-off goal of enabling the user to touch it. Although that might sound like science fiction, the company founders stand behind their idea, and state the company will be able to ship a few displays to developers in 2018. Commercial production will be in operation by 2019 or 2020.

...the three founders — chief executive Jon Karafin, chief technologist Brendan Bevensee and vice president of engineering Ed Ibe — say commercial production will commence “either by licensing the company’s technology to partners or by building out its own production facilities.”

See the full post here: http://www.etcentric.org/startup-to-introduce-holographic-tv-technology-at-nab-2017/

TheWaveVR is a mesmerizing, trippy take on the future of music festivals

TheWaveVR will remind you of drugs even if you’ve never done drugs and will probably also make you want to do drugs.

The virtual reality music app is launching a beta version today on Steam early access that brings you into a world of outlandish visuals and heavy electronic music inside a social arena.

Today, the Austin-based startup is also announcing that it has closed a $4 million seed round led by Upfront Ventures. Other investors in the round include RRE Ventures, KPCB Edge, Greycroft VR Gaming Tracker Fund, Luma Launch, Boost VC and The VR Fund.

I’d question the sustainability of that model if I hadn’t already experienced a concert, but the reality is that this app is going to be something that every worthwhile DJ — in LA or elsewhere — will be playing around with soon and I’m sure it won’t be long before users have their pick up some top artists inside the app. The team is building tools for artists to import tracks that they can play around with onstage.

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/thewavevr-is-a-mesmerizing-trippy-take-on-the-future-of-music-festivals/

Stronger Privacy Laws Could Save Advertising From Itself

For more than ten years, an ad network called The Deck showed the world that digital advertising could be different. The service displayed only one small ad per page. Its parent company, Coudal Partners, vowed not to collect personal data. Instead, it carefully selected both the publishers and the advertisers it worked with, cultivating a collection of relevant ads for an engaged audience. The Deck was, in short, exactly what most people would want in place of today’s nightmarish advertising ecosystem.

But last month Coudal Partners announced that it’s shutting the network down. The company blamed the ad industry’s tectonic shift of funneling dollars to Facebook and Google and away from other platforms. Advertisers are drawn to the two tech behemoths precisely because they each collect an enormous amount of user data and can theoretically serve ads to targeted audiences. And now ad networks that value privacy are casualties in a battle where gobbling up personal data is routine.

last year, the European Union passed a sweeping set of data privacy rules called the General Data Protection Regulation. The new rules, scheduled to go into effect next May, will require all companies serving EU residents to get explicit permission from those users for ad-targeting purposes. The rules also require that companies allow EU residents to view the data about them that’s been collected; update or remove that data from those companies’ servers; and even transfer it to other companies. Companies that violate the rules could end up paying out as much as four percent of their worldwide revenue.

The great promise of digital advertising was that sponsors would finally be able to know, with great precision, how many people actually saw their ads...

What digital advertisers soon realized, however, was that even though huge numbers of people might see an ad, a small percentage of those people would actually click on those banners.

The led to the birth of a huge ecosystem of ad-tech companies dedicated to collecting, selling, and mining personal data to find users who would be more inclined to engage with an ad. The trade-off was advertisers lost control of where their ads appeared, and publishers gave up a big chunk of their ad revenue to middlemen.

“We’re all wasting way too much time and money on a media supply chain with poor standards-adoption, too many players grading their own homework, too many hidden touches, and too many holes to allow criminals to rip us off,” Procter and Gamble chief marketing officer Marc Pritchard said in a speech at an Interactive Advertising Bureau event earlier this year. Pritchard gave the digital advertising industry a year to clean up its act, after which he said Procter and Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, would begin pulling its business from ad brokers that aren’t sufficiently transparent in their dealings.

US. President Donald Trump signed a resolution just last month preventing the Federal Communications Commission from forcing internet service providers to seek permission from users before using their web browsing history for ad-targeting.

According to a survey by YouGov and the Huffington Post, 72 percent of Republicans believed the FCC rules should have been allowed to go into effect, as did 71 percent of the public overall.

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/stronger-privacy-laws-save-advertising/

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/stronger-privacy-laws-save-advertising/

ETC@USC Posts New vNAB Conference Videos on YouTube

More than 30 videos from the 3rd annual Entertainment Technology Center@USC vNAB Conference are going live for viewing on the ETCenterVideos YouTube channel. This year’s vNAB featured thought leaders and catalysts from the entertainment, consumer electronics, technology, and service industries presenting their insider’s perspective on emerging and disruptive technologies. The talks were recorded March 20-21 at Google’s offices in Venice, California. The vNAB Conference is a prelude to the Next Generation Media Technologies sessions scheduled for the upcoming NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 25-26.

The Day One release also includes speakers from Google, Western Digital, Oracle, Aspera, Equinix, Pac-12 Enterprises, Dalet and Avalanche.

The second series of talks, to be posted on Wednesday, April 19, explore artificial intelligence, machine learning, the future of narrative, and immersive experiences in VR, AR and mixed realities. The lineup includes presenters from Google, Technicolor, Adobe, Fox Sports, Disney and GrayMeta.

See the full story with all the links here: http://www.etcentric.org/etcusc-posts-new-vnab-conference-videos-on-youtube/

The Bizarre Digital Book You Must Destroy Before Sharing

A Universe Explodes. The book, written by Google employee Tea Uglow, developed by design studio Impossible Labs, and published by Editions At Play, is actually more of a web app.

Before an owner can give her version away, she must remove two words and add one to every page, creating a personalized limited edition of the book.

These changes are saved to a public database using blockchain...

With every iteration of the book, more words disappear until there’s only one word left on each page. “Frankly, after 20 owners it will be unreadable,” Uglow says.

With something like bitcoin, the transactions are financial in nature—you can see who bought the cryptocurrency, when they bought it, and for how much, without the need of a bank. In the case of A Universe Explodes, it’s more about tracking creativity than the transaction itself. Uglow compares the book’s ledger to a library card—you can see who’s read the book and how they’ve changed it, even if you can’t change the book yourself. From the website, readers can trace the devolution of all 100 original volumes, as each is edited and passed down by its respective owner.

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/bizarre-digital-book-must-destroy-sharing/

Watch: Video Calling, 3D Drawing, and Shared Experiences Inside Facebook’s Social VR App

See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/inside-facebook-spaces-social-vr-app-video/

Facebook Unveils Two New Volumetric Video ‘Surround360’ Cameras, Coming Later this Year

Facebook today announced two new additions to the Surround360 hardware initiative that are poised to make 360 video more immersive. Unveiled at the company’s yearly developer conference, F8, the so-called x24 and x6 cameras are said to capture 360 video with depth information, giving captured video six degrees of freedom (6DoF). This means you can not only move your vantage point up/down, left/right like before, but now forwards/backwards, pitch, yaw and roll are possible while in a 360 video.

Facebook says depth information is captured for every frame in the video, and because it outputs in 3D, video can be feed into existing visual effects (VFX) software tools to create a mashup of live-action capture and computer-generated imagery (CGI). Take a look at the gif below for an idea of what’s possible.

See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/facebook-unveils-two-new-volumetric-video-surround360-cameras-coming-later-year/

For now the AR-focused Camera Effects platform is necessarily a smartphone-only affair, but promises to provide the basis for some of the interactions that will take place in the perfect ‘glasses form-factor’ AR headset of the future.

“I used to think glasses were going to be the first mainstream augmented reality platform, and that maybe 5-10 years from now we’d get the form factor that we all want,” Zuckerberg admits. “But over the last couple of years, we’ve started to see primitive versions of each of these use-cases on our phones and camera.”

Facebook Launches New Camera Tools as a Foundation for Advanced Augmented Reality

The Man Who Makes Facebook’s Machines Think

Boureau wants to create a world where we see as many opinions as we can handle — up until the point at which we start tuning them out. AI can help with this by mapping out patterns in text, understanding where something goes off the rails and potentially figure out a way to alter the conversation flow to stem the bad turn. “If we knew more about that learning process and how these beliefs get in people’s heads from the data then it might be easier to understand how to get more constructive conversations in general,” Boureau said.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, LeCun publicly suggested Facebook had the technical capabilities to use AI to filter out fake news. Some saw his statement as a solution to a problem many blamed for the widespread polarization in the US, but LeCun said that the task was best left to third parties, instead of machines capable of introducing bias. “There’s a role AI can play there, but it’s a very difficult product design issue rather than a technological issue,” he said. “You don’t want to lead people into particular opinions. You kind of want to be neutral in that respect.”

Indeed, as LeCun cautions, AI is still far from reaching human level intelligence, or General AI as it's known.

See the full story here: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/meet-the-man-who-makes-facebooks-machines-think?utm_term=.tl1dynz3k#.rk4mwNGBQ

A Major Warner Bros. Patent Reveals a Coming AR/VR Movie Delivery System for Theaters, Home systems & Headsets

Years ago the big film studios began introducing 3D experiences for movies goers and handed out 3D glasses as you entered the theater. This week Patently Apple discovered a patent filing from Warner Bros. Entertainment describing new systems that are in development that will bring movie goers Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and mixed reality films. And yes, users will be handed 3D/AR/VR headsets to watch these next-generation movies. The difference with these films will be that they're being designed to work in the theater and at home with iTunes or Netflix. So next-gen headsets are going to be needed to be able to watch this kind of content. Warner Bros. patent notes that these movies will work on headset powered either by Intel or ARM processors.

However, the technology for experiencing anything similar to cinematic content delivered using VR or AR equipment or methods is in a very early stage of development. Actual implementations of technology are quite limited, and users have thus far been largely or completely untouched by VR or AR in their experience of narrative content. 

It would be desirable, therefore, to develop new methods and other new technologies for mastering cinematic content for VR and AR use, that overcome these and other limitations of the prior art and enhance the appeal and enjoyment of narrative content for new immersive technologies such as VR and AR.

See the full story here: http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2017/04/a-major-warner-bros-patent-reveals-a-coming-arvr-movie-delivery-system-for-theaters-home-systems-headsets.html

VRLA – Microsoft HoloLens delivers first ever augmented reality Easter Egg hunt

Philippe Lewicki, CEO of AfterNow.IO, developed this application for Microsoft.  Brian Selzer is helping them with bus dev.

See the full story with multiple .gifs here: http://mashable.com/2017/04/15/hololens-easter-egg-hunt/#ddlSTo_ojPqt