philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Virtual Reality Poised for Mass Entertainment, but Can Hollywood Make It Happen?

Newborns are about unrealized potential; so are new technologies. Franklin understood that aviation would change the world, though it took the arrival of airplanes to realize some of his predictions. Today it seems to be virtual reality’s turn to take flight, perhaps to become as impactful as cinema and television. But the pioneers trying to tell stories in VR are grappling with the same question that confronted Ben Franklin that distant Wednesday in Paris: “What good is it?” Or, more precisely: “How do we use it?”

“I think from a cinematic storytelling perspective, we may be right around — or even before — (the time) metaphorically, when the Lumiere brothers created ‘Train Pulling Into La Ciotat Station’ ” (in 1895), says Eugene Chung, director of film & media for Oculus.

Because VR was nurtured in gaming devices and simulators, videogames have seemed like the most natural fit for the medium. But many developers are already using it for live-action experiences and trying to find the best way to fit it to narrative storytelling. “The original motto of Oculus was, ‘Step Into the Game,’ ” Chung says. “We’ve since modified it to letting people ‘Experience the impossible.’ ”

“Locomotion is a big topic in VR,” [Sony's Rick] Marks says, “How do you move around a 3D world?” “Walking” with a joystick feels fine in a console game; in VR, it can induce simulator sickness. Marks’ team is experimenting with letting players use “teleportation” — which amounts to jumping from point to point.

Another challenge arises from a sense few people are even aware of: “Proprioception,” the body’s positional sense. Going into a VR world and being unable to see your own body and arms can quickly become disorienting.

Many VR pioneers are learning from stage directors, who have always had to guide the audience’s attention using lighting, sound and staging, without being able to control point of view as a film director can.

Some VR creators are also studying theme park design. Hilary Lewis, an architectural historian who has done a deep study of the look and layout of Disneyland, observes: “What (Disney) did at the theme parks was take all the talents they had in developing film and apply that to creating a three-dimensional space you could walk around in. If that’s not the beginning of virtual reality, I don’t know what is.”

VR faces yet another obstacle: Putting on goggles and headphones is isolating. Yet, that’s the point: You shut out the real world for an artificial one. But entertainment is social, too. Today’s VR can quickly become a strangely ghostly, lonely experience, like Scrooge revisiting the shadows of Christmas Past or the dead Emily Webb reliving her birthday in the final act of “Our Town.” Developers are hard at work making the VR experience social, adding avatars for multiple users, and the like. That may turn out to be crucial if VR is ever to rival TV and movies.

Read the full story here: http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/virtual-reality-poised-for-mass-entertainment-but-can-hollywood-make-it-happen-1201193873/?curator=MediaREDEF

The Internet as we know it is dying

How Facebook and Google are killing the classic Internet and reinventing it in their image

If you’re not an avid gamer, the kind of person who enjoys watching other gamers narrate their own adventures through the latest first-person shooter, you’ve probably never heard of Twitch TV. But the three-year-old site is an extraordinary success story. At peak viewing times, it boasts a bigger audience than MTV, TNT or AMC. 32 million peoplewatched the finals of last year’s “League of Legends” tournament. So there’s little question why Google might be interested in laying down $1 billion for the site. The young male advertising demographic is notoriously hard to corral. Twitch TV’s got it.

But for the gamers who produce much of the content, the idea that Google’s copyright cop, ContentID, might suddenly be patrolling their world is a nightmare. It is not uncommon for Twitch TV gamers to stream themselves playing a game while simultaneously listening to recorded music. If, after integrating with YouTube, rights holders start using ContentID to claim ownership over the intellectual property in over those videos, the advertising revenue generated by those videos would no longer end up in the hands of the creators of that revenue. Even scarier, to some, is that the possibility that years of previously produced streams might suddenly come under interdiction. And ContentID is by no means infallible: They make plenty of (costly) mistakes.

From a copyright holder’s point of view, bringing a new sheriff into town probably seems entirely just and proper. To be sure, there is an element of the Twitch TV squealing that comes off as decidedly juvenile. Grow up kids! Join the real world! But there’s a deeper story here, a tale of dangerous consolidation. Through YouTube, Google already wields an enormous amount of power over the ability of people to make their livings from independently producing online video. Bringing another huge audience under Google’s roof further solidifies Google’s ability to dictate terms: Play by our rules or you don’t play at all. By all accounts, Twitch TV has built its success by virtue of its ability to foster a sense of shared community. Does that community survive once it is sucked into the Google maw?

But the indisputable fact remains. Between the two of them, Facebook and Google control the universe of online advertising and determine how the currents of web traffic flow. (And let’s not forget Amazon’s disproportionate power in the world of retail.) Both companies are engaged in a winner-takes-all strategy of constant expansion, gobbling up any newly emerging companies that have succeeded in accumulating a critical mass of users. Both companies, accountable only to their shareholders, enjoy enormous power in influencing our civic conversations.

It’s no wonder that there is so much sound and fury on the Web. Because they just keep getting bigger, while we feel increasingly powerless.

See the full story here: http://www.salon.com/2014/05/26/the_internet_as_we_know_it_is_dying/

Hachette and Amazon Dig In for a Long Fight Over Contract Terms

“Amazon wants to do away with gatekeepers,” explains NYT in a related article. “It promises a world where books are cheap, where anyone can publish anything, where there are no editors or distributors saying this is not what is selling now, go away.”

“Hachette is holding fast to the traditional publishing system that underpins modern culture. It was a world where publishers bankrolled writers in return for a large cut of the proceeds, where editors improved prose and sharpened arguments, and where books were selected and presented rather than simply released. They cost more, too.”

“The dispute is about money, but the outcome — whether Hachette gives up on pricing and pays a little more for marketing, or not — is about so much more.”

See the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/amazon-hachette-book-publisher-dispute.html?_r=0

Silicon Valley to Get a Cellular Network, Just for Things

The French company SigFox says it picked the Bay Area to demonstrate a wireless network intended to make it cheap and practical to link anything to the Internet, from smoke detectors to dog collars, bicycle locks, and water pipes.

Regular mobile networks are jammed with traffic from phone calls and people downloading videos. But for the Internet of things to become a reality, similar capabilities will need to be extended to billions of objects, many of them embedded in the environment and powered by small batteries. “If you want to get to billions of connections like that, you require a completely new type of network,” says Luke D’Arcy, director of SigFox’s operations in the U.S.

The Silicon Valley network will use the unlicensed 915-megahertz spectrum band commonly used by cordless phones. Objects connected to SigFox’s network can operate at very low power but will be able to transmit at only 100 bits per second—slower by a factor of 1,000 than the networks that serve smartphones. But that could be enough for many applications.

By reaching into the Bay Area first (with expansion to tech hubs such as Austin, Cambridge, and Boulder in its sights), SigFox hopes to catch the interest of a region where venture capitalists poured nearly $1 billion into startup companies focusing on the Internet of things last year, according to the research firm CB Insights. One of those startups, Whistle, makes a fitness-tracking collar for dogs. It has raised $6 million and is located in a corner of San Francisco that’s been called “IoT Town” thanks to its profusion of similar ventures.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527376/silicon-valley-to-get-a-cellular-network-just-for-things/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140528

How Statisticians Found Air France Flight 447 Two Years After It Crashed Into Atlantic

Their approach was to use a technique known as Bayesian inference which takes into account all the prior information known about the crash location as well as the evidence from the unsuccessful search efforts. The result is a probability distribution for the location of the wreckage.

Bayesian inference is a statistical technique that mathematicians use to determine some underlying probability distribution based on an observed distribution. In particular, statisticians use this technique to update the probability of a particular hypothesis as they gather additional evidence.

In the case of Air France Flight 447, the underlying distribution was the probability of finding the wreckage at a given location. That depended on a number of factors such as the last GPS location transmitted by the plane, how far the aircraft might have traveled after that and also the location of dead bodies found on the surface once their rate of drift in the water had been taken into account.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/527506/how-statisticians-found-air-france-flight-447-two-years-after-it-crashed-into-atlantic/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140528

MIT’s CityHome makes 200 square feet feel like a mansion

Contrary to what the name might suggest, CityHome isn’t actually a living space itself. It’s more like a large, consolidated chunk of home essentials that allows you to maximize usable space in a small studio. Think of it like a murphy bed on steroids — it’s basically a closet-sized mechanical box that fits into an apartment and functions as a bed, work space, dining room table (with seating for six), a cooking range, closet, and multipurpose storage space.
Read the full story here: http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/mits-cityhome-packs-everything-need-200-square-feet/#!RwmFa

Metaio’s ‘Thermal Touch’ technology turns everything into a touchscreen

The German tech company Metaio recently demonstrated its new “Thermal Touch” interface, which turns just about anything into a touchscreen.  It’s the latest jump forward in the field of augmented reality, which aims to incorporate computer-generated images into the natural world.

All you need for Thermal Touch is a thermal camera and a working finger.  Simply hook up the camera to any device you’re wearing, such as Google Glass or other type of smart eyewear, and then get to touching.  The infrared camera can track the lingering heat signature your finger leaves behind, using it to activate digital content in your glasses’ heads up display.

So if you’re reading a magazine while wearing Thermal Touch, you can touch one of the items you like and all of its pricing information will appear on your screen.  Or you can even go to the website where you can buy it.

See the full story here: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/metaios-thermal-touch-technology-turns-everything-touchscreen/

3D printer used to create synthetic fruit

[Phil Lelyveld comment: OK, "3D Printing" has finally jumped the shark.  This prints fruit the way a coffee machine with a cream and sugar button "prints" coffee.]

3D Fruit Printer, a machine that "prints" three-dimensional "fruit". It is not, however, actual fruit: instead, it's a sort of reconstituted version that can be any flavour.

The printer uses a molecular gastronomy technique calledspherification for converting liquid to a series of gelatinous globules resembling caviar or tapioca pearls. For fruit juice, this means mixing the juice with alginic acid. This mixture is then dripped into a cold bath of calcium chloride; the resultant reaction produces a skin around the ball of liquid, which pops when you bite into it (although you should really rinse it off first).

See the full story here: http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/37024-3d-printer-used-to-create/

Is UltraViolet Finally Catching On with Consumers?

Results from the research group’s report based on a survey conducted in February found that 82% of individuals with an UltraViolet account — there are now over 16 million — plan to continue to use the service in the future. UltraViolet launched in 2011, and is a product backed by most studios, with the exception of Disney, retailers and tech companies.

And those that do tend to buy more digital movies and TV shows than traditional consumers of home entertainment.

In fact, NPD found that a UV user is 11 times more likely to have made an electronic sell-through film purchase in the last year than those without an account.

According to the Digital Entertainment Group, consumers spent nearly $1.2 billion buying movies and TV shows digitally in 2013, up from $808 million in 2012. The key driver behind the jump: the growing tendency of studios to release big titles digitally two or three weeks ahead of their release on disc, a practice pioneered by Sony Pictures in 2011 and now embraced by all the majors.

See the full story here: http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/is-ultraviolet-finally-catching-on-with-consumers-1201189265/

ESPN STUDIO INTEGRATES VIDEO DISPLAYS AND ONLINE FEATURES

The sports network is also working on some sort of holographic imaging technology for the hosts, but the details of “Project Jarvis” — as the venture is called — are still unknown.

ESPN is also hoping to expand its digital presence. “The network has found that viewers that access ESPN on multiple devices spend three times as many hours with its content than those who watch TV alone,” reports Bloomberg.

“SportsCenter” now has 10 people working on social media. Last year, there was only one social media employee.

A Dunkin’ Donuts’ season-long sponsorship with ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” in which plays are re-enacted with cartoon coffee cups in place of the athletes, has been viewed more than 70 million times since September on Vine, the video-sharing website, according to Costello.

The network is particularly concerned about its eroding young viewer base. ESPN primetime viewers fell 2 percent this past year in the 18-to-49-year-old age group.

See the full story here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-22/espn-lights-up-new-tv-studio-for-screen-obsessed-viewers.html