philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Criterion Collection’s Classic Movie Streaming Service Sets April Launch Date

Movie buffs left out in the cold by FilmStruck’s demise will soon get a new streaming service stocked with over 1,000 classic and contemporary art-house films this spring: The Criterion Collection announced that the Criterion Channel will launch April 8 in the U.S. and Canada.

The Criterion Channel will be regularly priced at $10.99 per month or $99.99 for an annual subscription. Customers who sign up now as charter subscribers will receive a special discounted rate of $9.99 per month or $89.99 per year — pricing the company says will be locked in “for as long as you stay active” — as well as a 30-day free trial.

The Criterion Channel (criterionchannel.com) will be available on computers, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, iOS, and Android devices.

Criterion didn’t reveal specific titles that will be available on Criterion Channel but said the subscription VOD service will include access to Criterion’s entire streaming library of more than 1,000 classic and contemporary films from around the world.

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/criterion-channel-launch-date-1203124497/

Magic Leap Highlights Award-Winning Augmented Reality Apps Revealed at Reality Virtually Hackathon

With Magic Leap One approaching six months since launch, Magic Leap is fully focused on building a content ecosystem and developer community.

The company's latest endeavor in engaging developers was sponsorship of the Reality Virtually Hackathon, which took place Jan. 17 to 21 at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now, Magic Leap has released a highlight reel that gives the public a peek at the fruits of their endeavor.

Taking advantage of spatial audio, eye tracking, hand tracking, haptics, real-world response, and other features of Magic Leap One, 20 development teams constructed apps in the areas of entertainment, education, productivity, accessibility, and music, among others.

See the full story here: http://www.virtualrealitypulse.com/edition/daily-oculus-leap-motion-2019-01-31?open-article-id=9691517&article-title=magic-leap-highlights-award-winning-augmented-reality-apps-revealed-at-reality-virtually-hackathon&blog-domain=reality.news&blog-title=next-reality-ar

This Is Your Brain Off Facebook – study shows social media effects

The researchers — led by Hunt Allcott, an associate professor of economics at N.Y.U., and Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist — used Facebook ads to recruit participants over age 18 who spent at least 15 minutes on the platform each day; the daily average was an hour, with heavy users logging two to three hours, or more.

For abstainers, breaking up with Facebook freed up about an hour a day, on average, and more than twice that for the heaviest users. They also reported spending more time offline, including with friends and family, or watching TV.

The most striking result from the study may be that deactivating Facebook had a positive but small effect on people’s moods and life satisfaction. The finding tempers the widely held presumption that habitual social-media use causes real psychological distress.

But previous research could not discern whether mood problems followed heavy usage, or moody people tended to be the heaviest users. The new study supported the latter explanation.

“It is entirely possible, and likely, that the dynamics of social media and well-being are different for teens versus those ages 30 and over.”

See the full story here; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psychology-health.html?utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=69473914&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_cAW6fWqvybT7S0YFmVJuD3qTAhIvFFJraq9ucRNtpcCFVip-9yEyA09ohmMEPEiBB10u8WOHRanuD92qwwc8O7LKD1w&_hsmi=69473914

With concerts and coursework, Thomas Dolby explores the sound of virtual reality

In another look toward the future, Dolby is also training a new generation of composers working across sound and technology as a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The Peabody Institute’s four-year Music for New Media program enrolled its first class in the fall of 2018. Starting with skills with roots in the legacy of scoring films, the coursework then transitions into composing for non-linear environments where decisions change and environments shift in real-time.

See the full story here: https://technical.ly/baltimore/2019/01/30/thomas-dolby-sees-a-new-generation-of-virtual-reality/

THANKS TO AI, MIT’S NEW ROBOT COULD BEAT YOU AT JENGA

Teaching a robot how to play Jenga is a lot more difficult than it sounds.

Rather than relying on visual information alone, players have to poke, tap, and feel individual wooden blocks to choose which one to remove from the tower. But thanks to machine learning algorithms, MIT researchers were able to teach a robot how to successfully play Jenga by only giving it a basic set of instructions — an impressive victory for tactile robotics.

See the full story here: https://futurism.com/the-byte/mit-robot-jenga

Augmented reality to grow into trillion dollar industry, Sundance panel hears

Schilowitz said once users reached the point where the image resolution and AR device were so effective that users forgot what they were doing, ethics would come into play. “You’re building a digital reality in an office space, in a living room or in a new kind of space that creates this kind of simulation behavior,” he said, adding that the bigger the play, the more amazing the experience. “But it’s also terrifying if you don’t know what you’re getting into.”

Asking how the form could impact spatial storytelling, moderator and experiential journalist Kent Bye turned to Alice Wroe, a creative designer at Magic Leap who worked on Mica, the company’s human digital assistant that appears when users wear a special pair of glasses....

Artist and director Peter Flaherty of Flaherty Pictures emphasised that kinematics, or motion through space in an emotional narrative context, was highly critical to his work. Flaherty’s Sundance exhibition The Dial (pictured) is a drama that calls for a certain level of empathy for the characters as the user moves through space and chooses a narrative path in a story that is not simply binary.

Third person content becomes amplified in the AR space, superseding virtual reality (VR), said Ryan Horrigan, the co-founder and CEO of Artie, an AI/AR company that creates a platform for avatars. Horrigan said this type of content allowed more freedom for users. “First person is very hard. When you have to contextualise yourself as a character, you then have to have the roles of being in that scene and having the laws of that world.”

The panel also addressed rules and ethical standards, which may not be widespread yet, but need to evolve. Horrigan cautioned that while his fellow panellists probably do know what they were in for when they explored AR, casual users might not.

He explained that for those who have not yet tried an AR device, it would be hard to anticipate the resulting pressure or emotion – and therein lay the danger. Horrigan added he had yet to see any sort of preamble or rating system cautioning the user in cases where content was graphic or sexual in nature, which was also cause for concern.

See the full story here: https://www.screendaily.com/news/augmented-reality-to-grow-into-trillion-dollar-industry-sundance-panel-hears/5136311.article

Virtual reality gait training versus non-virtual reality gait training for improving participation in subacute stroke survivors: study protocol of the ViRTAS randomized controlled trial

Annie Awards Check Into Virtual Reality With Inaugural Prize

The Annie Awards, recognizing a need to celebrate all the animated content being made these days in virtual reality, has created a category this year to honor that work.

Until now, VR content had to create a 2D version and, in some cases, play in theaters, in order to become eligible for awards recognition, which can be a time-consuming and costly process. So ASIFA-Hollywood, the organization behind the Annies, set up a VR lab at the Burbank HQ so that judges could view the content as it was meant to be seen.

The inaugural Annie nominees for VR production are Google Spotlight Stories’ “Age of Sail,” directed by John Kahrs; Sundance 2018 selection “BattleScar,” directed by Nico Casavecchia and Martin Allais; Baobab Studios’ “Crow: The Legend,” directed by Eric Darnell, pictured above; Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg’s “MindPalace,” directed by Carl Krause and Dominik Stockhausen; and Polyarc’s “Moss,” which is a VR game.

The Annies will be presented Feb. 2 at UCLA’s Royce Hall at 7 p.m. For the entire nomination list, see annieawards.org.

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2019/film/spotlight/annie-awards-check-into-virtual-reality-with-inaugural-prize-1203114890/

Indoor virtual reality theme park seeks Philly-area site

With a modular format, the VR theme parks can offer experiences ranging from a Junior Zone that allows young children to discover, learn and explore through virtual and physical spaces, to a Sports Zone where all ages can learn, practice and hone skills in football, baseball, clay pigeon shooting and other sports, to an Arcade Zone featuring immersive and interactive arcade games, the company said.

Legend Heroes has hired retail leasing specialist R.J. Brunelli & Co. of northern New Jersey as its exclusive nationwide real estate broker for its entry into the U.S. market.

Brunelli is scouting vacant anchor and sub-anchor spaces at regional malls as the preferred locations, as well as freestanding or strip center big-boxes.

Other possible venues include warehouse/flex buildings in close proximity to major malls or entertainment complexes.

Building requirements call for 30,000- to 40,000-square-foot spaces with a minimum ceiling height of 16-feet overall, with 40 percent of the space at least 32-feet high for rides, noted Julie T. Fox, Brunelli's manager of new tenant representation. Preferred locations should have five million people within 30 miles, with a one-hour maximum driving distance, Fox said.

See the full story here: https://www.phillyvoice.com/indoor-virtual-reality-theme-park-seeks-philly-area-site/

AT SUNDANCE, VIRTUAL REALITY FILMMAKERS ARE EVOLVING BEYOND VR

Five years ago, Sundance's New Frontier program proved to be a launch pad for the VR filmmaking boom that was coming. In 2019, there are still a lot of virtual reality projects, many of them from longtime VR creators like Felix & Paul, but some, like Saatchi, are branching out and incorporating augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and connected devices into their interactive storytelling.

"We're finally going into an experimental phase where people have to hustle and think about how new technologies can merge together," Arora says. "What's happening has kind of, in a Darwinian sense, purged the kind of get-rich-quick folks."

"What's really reflected in the show this year is that the human body is integrated into the frame of the experience," Frilot says. "I was looking at the lineup and realized there was a physical body in every single one of these projects."

That's even true for the latest project from Oculus itself. The Under Presents, which debuted at Sundance, uses Oculus Quest to put users in an interactive theater experience where the characters in the VR space are actually being played by Quest-wearing actors from the New York-based theater collective Piehole. (The project will be made available later this year.)

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/sundance-vr-film-evolution/