philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Latest “Transformers” Film Shot with New IMAX 4K 3D Camera

IMAX announced that it has developed the first fully integrated dual 65mm 4K digital large-format 3D camera. Michael Bay’s latest Paramount Pictures project, “Transformers: Age of Extinction” is the first feature film to use the true 4K stereo camera, which captures both left and right eye images at full 4K resolution. According to the company, the new IMAX 3D Digital Camera system is “smaller, lighter and easier to use than other 3D digital camera systems on the market.”

See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/latest-transformers-film-shot-with-new-imax-4k-3d-camera/

Amid the Crazy Valuations, Google Finds a Steal

[Philip Lelyveld comment: Google will soon be able to know, or at least infer, a lot more about you with this new satellite network.]

And yet, as I discovered when I visited Skybox recently at its modest, low-slung headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., satellite imagery isn't even the business in which the company's founders see themselves. As at Google, the business of Skybox isn't data, but knowledge.

"We think we are going to fundamentally change humanity's understanding of the economic landscape on a daily basis," says co-founder Dan Berkenstock.

Here's an example of what he's talking about. In 2010, an analyst at UBS discovered that if he bought satellite images of parking lots of Wal-Mart stores, he could predict the company's sales figures before they were revealed in its quarterly report, because cars in lots equal shoppers in stores.

"We're looking at Foxconn every week," Mr. Berkenstock says, because measuring the density of trucks outside the Taiwanese company's manufacturing facilities tells Skybox when the next iPhone will be released.

See the full story here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702303642704579624483306835774?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB20001424052702303642704579624483306835774.html&fpid=2,7,121,122,201,401,641,1009

Your guide to E3 2014, the biggest week in video games

Virtual reality

OCULUS AFTER FACEBOOK

The last big news in virtual reality came during the Game Developers Conference in March. Oculus began taking preorders for the second (and final) version of its development kit, and Sony revealed Project Morpheus, its competing prototype headset for the PlayStation 4. Both companies will be showing off their hardware again at E3, but what exactly we’ll see is a mystery.

This is Oculus’ first big event since being acquired by Facebook, and it’s possible — though hardly certain — that we’ll hear details about a final consumer version of the Oculus Rift, which is currently expected in 2015. Oculus has also branched out from hardware to publishing, and it’s supposedly working with a number of major developers on dedicated VR games, so seeing some new games isn’t out of the question either. With much of the headset tech locked down, the next big hurdle is finding things to do with it.

VR GAMES GO COMMERCIAL

On that front, we’re looking forward to checking out Adr1ft, a virtual reality game developed by former Microsoft creative director Adam Orth — who started work on it after being notoriously fired for inopportune comments about the Xbox One’s always-on connection — and Call of Duty veteran Omar Aziz. A survival game about an astronaut attempting to repair a destroyed space station, it could end up being one of the first major VR titles.

PROJECT MORPHEUS

Sony hasn’t been talking about its headset for nearly as long, and its plans are more nebulous. Any details about pricing, release date, or final design would be welcome revelations. It’s also shown off little more than a few tech demos, so we’ll be watching carefully for any new content. But rumors have been scarce. Last month, inside sources supposedly said that Media Molecule was going to announce a "landmark" world-building game for Morpheus, but the company’s recent announcement shot that down.

Steam Machines

Valve was a big presence at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, but several months later, it’s nowhere to be seen. The company’s ambitious plans to release gaming-focused Linux "Steam Machines" with custom controllers have been pushed back to 2015, though we’re not sure yet how that affects partners like Asus and Alienware. Its prototype VR headset, allegedly superior to that of Sony or Oculus, seems to have appeared at a VR meetup in Boston, but it’s never been clear whether it will ever come to market. Obviously, it wouldn’t be E3 without rumors of a Half-Life 3 appearance, but Valve has called one such report "bogus." The company isn’t even on the exhibitors’ list, let alone ready to show a game that’s more apocrypha at this point than reality.

See the full post here: http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/5/5779712/e3-2014-preview

Digital Summit: Indoor Location Technologies Face Privacy Push-Back

GPS doesn’t work well indoors. But Don Dodge, a developer advocate at Google, enthusiastically explained how new indoor location technologies could enable stores to track their shoppers, or firefighters to find their way out of smoky buildings. Several methods of tracking indoor location are being developed by a bevy of startups, as well as giants Google and Apple.

Those technologies include Wi-Fi triangulation, which measures signal strength from nearby Wi-Fi hotspots; Wi-Fi fingerprinting, which logs your phone’s ID number as it seeks out Wi-Fi connectivity; radio beacons that triangulate your position; and LED light fixtures that imperceptibly flicker to encode your location in a way your device’s camera can detect (see “LEDs Could Lead You Right to a Discount”).

Dodge’s talk was the best attended of the day’s sessions. But not everyone in the audience was cheering the trends he described. They took exception to the fact the technologies involved don’t provide easy ways to opt out from having your location tracked.

“Device location by beacon does not always offer opt-in or out. And [other] technologies are able to uniquely identify a user just by their having WiFi turned on,” says Javier Aguera, a co-founder of Blackphone, which is developing a phone that attempts to block such tracking (see “Ultraprivate Smartphones”). He told me that there should be more debate about the rights of the people being tracked by indoor location technology. “We believe users should always be aware of and have control of such activities.”

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528206/digital-summit-indoor-location-tech-faces-privacy-push-back/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140610

Digital Summit: Wearable Computers Mean the End of Apps and Ads

The smartphone era has also been the age of apps. But those specialized, standalone pieces of software will soon be an anachronism, says the CEO of the popular information-management service Evernote. He predicts that as wearable computers supplant smartphones, they will displace apps, too.

But that kind of service won’t succeed if a person must remember to fire up a given app in situations in which it might be helpful, Libin said. He argued that people will instead prefer “ambient” services that constantly run in the background and then step forward as needed.

“Apps are becoming irrelevant or becoming much less important,” Libin said. “I think the killer app for this thing [wearable computing] is hyper awareness. I basically want to have a Spidey sense.”

Libin’s vision is undoubtedly shaped by the fact that Evernote sells services that could fit into the scenario he describes—they store notes and other personal information for you to call up later.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/528196/digital-summit-wearable-computers-mean-the-end-of-apps-and-ads/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140610

Microsoft Shifts Emphasis on Xbox One to Games

Microsoft wants to clear up any confusion that may exist about the Xbox One: It is all about the games.

A year ago, the company was promoting the Xbox One as an all-in-one entertainment system for the living room, one that could play games and then seamlessly shift to let users watch television and change channels with voice commands. On Monday, though, Microsoft sought to decisively shift the conversation about the Xbox One back to games, announcing a lineup of almost two dozen games, many of them hard-core shooting games, that are planned for release on the Xbox this year.

Part of the Microsoft’s disadvantage is that the company was more ambitious about the technology in the Xbox One. Microsoft included Kinect, a camera and microphone device that lets users play games and operate other functions with body movements and voice commands. The extra technology translated into a $499 price tag for the Xbox One, $100 more than the price of the PlayStation 4.

Sony deftly exploited that and other earlier missteps by Microsoft to portray itself as the more gamer-friendly console maker. In response, Microsoft recently announced it planned to introduce a $399 console without Kinect, which went on sale Monday.

See the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/technology/microsoft-shifts-emphasis-on-xbox-one-to-games.html

Free Music, at Least While It Lasts

The outbreak of free is being felt all over the economy, but music is an industry that has produced the soundtrack of contemporary American life. Artists are singing the blues about the crippling effects of streaming, and no one wants to be part of the day the music died.

Spotify has doubled its number of subscribers, paid and unpaid, in the last 18 months and reached a milestone of 10 million paid subscribers worldwide last month. In May, Pandora served up 1.73 billion hours of music, up 28 percent over the previous year. The two services have important differences, but they both have premium pay options as well as ad-supported free models. And Amazon, Apple and YouTube are all moving swiftly into the streaming space.

Books have retained some value in an evolving personal media ecosystem, partly because the physical artifact is more attractive than the plastic CD case (which can be opened only with a crowbar). CD collections no longer signify cultural identity. (LPs, which are making a niche comeback, are a different matter.)

I wrote a profile of Neil Young a while ago in which he railed about the loss of sound quality, but as Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has said, “good enough is good enough.” The convenience of pushing a button on a handheld device that streams wirelessly to a speaker is always going to trump hunting down a CD with marginally better sound and plopping it into a player.

Writing in The Daily Beast last week, the musician Van Dyke Parks said that in the good old days, a song he recently wrote with Ringo Starr would have provided him “with a house and a pool.” But at current royalty rates, he estimated that he and the former Beatle would make less than $80, which means he will have to choose between a dollhouse and a kiddie pool and then share it with Mr. Starr.

Read the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/business/media/free-music-at-least-while-it-lasts.html?curator=MediaREDEF&_r=0

Expiring patents were supposed to boost the 3D printing market. They haven’t.

At the end of January, a series of patents filed by Carl Deckard in the 1990s for selective laser sintering (SLS) — a high-quality 3D-printing technology — expired. With this technology back in play, people started to see big things for 3D printing coming up fast on the horizon.

And so in the latter part of 2013, a chorus of onlookers began predicting a coming explosion in 3D printing technologies. There was a near consensus about how great this was going to be. The Economist mused about the boom. Quartz intimated in July that it was good as a done deal. Techcrunch called the day the SLS patents expired “a great day for makers.”

The more accurate truth is, that while it is nice to have another piece of 3D-printing intellectual property available again to manufacturers, this is just one piece of the patent bank that the 3D-printing giants like Stratasys and 3D Systems have locked down, many of which were only filed recently. There’re so many 3D-printing patents keeping technology siloed inside the bigger companies that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has started its own effort to free the market.

Rutter uses the example of Stratasys’ Objet printers, which have several different heads and can print in up to 18 different materials. They can be used for industrial quality rapid prototyping. The individual printheads are mass produced and available, but the machine’s design is patented and strictly enforced.

But sadly for open source 3D printing enthusiasts — or happily for the big companies that control the technology — 2009 was the exception, not the rule. Not every expiring patent is going to explode the market open.

Read the full story here: http://pando.com/2014/06/06/expiring-patents-were-supposed-to-boost-the-3d-printing-market-they-havent/?curator=MediaREDEF

Why Uber And Airbnb Might Be In Big Trouble

Peer-to-peer services have been able to disrupt industries like hospitality and transportation because companies in those industries, like hotel chains and limousine services, have high fixed costs they can’t escape. But in raising so much money at high valuations, Burnham said, Uber and its cohort of sharing-economy services have put themselves in a similar bind, promising that a huge amount of the value they create will go to their venture backers.

Every dollar they have to return to investors is a dollar that doesn’t go to users of the platform — users who, by the nature of the sharing economy, often feel they’re the ones who created the value in the first place and deserve to partake in it. ‘Those companies won’t be able to get out from under that structure,” Burnham said. “That is an opportunity for the next generation of sharing economy companies. The key is to raise less and raise it at a valuation that allows a return for your investors without having to have a thick platform that extracts a lot of rents for your investors.”

See the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/05/13/why-uber-and-airbnb-might-be-in-big-trouble/?curator=MediaREDEF

New Panopticam Camera to Make VR Movies for Oculus Rift

“David Attenborough is currently shooting a documentary, ‘Conquest of the Skies,’ using a rig of eight cameras that will film in 360-degrees. That show will be released for the Oculus Rift.”

See the full post here: http://www.etcentric.org/new-panopticam-camera-to-make-vr-movies-for-oculus-rift/