Apple Goes to Hollywood. Will Its Story Have a Happy Ending?
“We don’t know anything about making television,” said Mr. Cue, a senior vice president who oversees the team in charge of the company’s original programming initiative. “So what skills does Apple bring to that? And the viewpoint is: very little. There’s other things we bring. We know how to create apps, we know how to do distribution, we know how to market. But we don’t really know how to create shows.”
Or, to be more precise: Culver City, Calif., the former home city of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where Apple is building a new 128,000-square-foot headquarters for its entertainment division.
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the company has announced that it will reboot Mr. Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories” and has signed Ronald D. Moore, the producer of “Battlestar Galactica” and “Outlander,” for a new space drama. Apple also has deals in place for an animated series from the creator of Fox’s “Bob’s Burgers”; a comedy starring Ms. Wiig; a drama starring Ms. Spencer; and a documentary series about lavish homes from Matt Tyrnauer, who made the fashion documentary “Valentino: The Last Emperor.”
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/business/media/apple-hollywood-streaming.html
Startup Using AI to Help Create Effects for Movies, TV, Games
Palo Alto-based startup Arraiy is developing methods for automating part of the often-tedious process of producing visual effects for movies, TV shows and video games. “Filmmakers can do this stuff, but they have to do it by hand,” said CTO Gary Bradski, who has worked with tech companies such as Intel and Magic Leap. The Arraiy team, led by Bradski and CEO Ethan Rublee, “are building computer algorithms that can learn design tasks by analyzing years of work by movie effects houses,” reports The New York Times. “That includes systems that learn to ‘rotoscope’ raw camera footage, carefully separating people and objects from their backgrounds so that they can be dropped onto new backgrounds.”
Arraiy has collected 10 years worth “of rotoscoping and other visual effects work from various design houses,” explains NYT.
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/startup-using-ai-to-help-create-effects-for-movies-tv-games/
HTC Releases 3 ‘Ready Player One’ VR Experiences in ‘OASIS Beta’, Now Free on Viveport
Here’s the full list of mini-games available in Oasis Beta:
- Planet Gauntlet – Navigate through a seemingly endless dungeon while the undead seek to destroy you. Collecting gold will improve your score and eating food will restore your health, but only your bow skills will ensure that you make it our alive. Developer: Directive Games
- Planet Doom – Battle for the OASIS – Help to save the OASIS by defeating waves of IOI Sixers. Advance through the trenches of Planet Doom towards the snowy planes that surround Anorak’s Castle. With an arsenal of potent firepower, you must stop the Sixers from controlling the fate of the OASIS. Developer: Steel Wool Studios
- Planet Doom – Rise of the Gunters – Fight against a nearly invincible army of highly trained IOI Sixers alone OR with up to two of your friends! Proceed with caution as you defeat Sixers, collect their coins, find power ups and survive a merciless onslaught of hyper-explosive kinetic action for as long as you can survive. The OASIS is yours. Take it back from IOI by yourself or with up to two fellow Gunters! Developer: Drifter Entertainment, Inc.
The download is available for free from Viveport, although at least one of the games is launching on Steam soon—Drifter Entertainment’s Rise of the Gunters—which includes support for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
If that’s not enough to satiate your need for Ready Player One goodness before the film officially launches on March 29th, social VR platforms Sansar is still hosting an Aech’s Garage experience, and TheWaveVR has reimagined the film/novel’s ‘Distracted Globe’ nightclub, replete with ’80s hits and plenty of nostalgia to keep you spinning like a record, baby.
Blockchain based Augmented Reality Surface Provider Lampix cryptocurrency UP 76%
Lampix (PIX), the first hardware and software solution that turns any surface into a smart, augmented reality surface, is offering the developer kit on Kickstarter. The kit is offered only to 100 early backers and already 37 are booked. Following the good response to the offering, the price of PIX, the native cryptocurrency of Lampix has gained 76% in the past 24 hours.
WHY PIX BLOCKCHAIN TOKEN SYSTEM?
To create powerful augmented reality, Lampix as well as any other AR system first needs to understand reality. This requires powerful computer vision and lots of training data. That’s why the developers created the PIX blockchain token system. PIX allows businesses and individuals to request and submit object reference images and category descriptions for the benefit of Lampix users and beyond. By building robust object recognition platform this way, the system is decentralized and open to all users and developers. This will help generate a vast, always growing database of images to power unique applications across industries.
Lampix
REFERENCE IMAGES AND REVENUE GENERATION BY DAPP CREATORS.
Lampix Developer Edition is made as open and simple as possible for developers to leverage the powerful object detection system with own HTML5 based apps. If a developer need reference images for app to recognize specific objects, then all that needs to be done is set a bounty and the community will offer the needed details. When the app is ready to hit the market, a developer can sell the apps for PIX tokens to generate revenue.
See the full story here: https://www.legalgamblingandthelaw.com/news/blockchain-based-augmented-reality-surface-provider-lampix-up-76/
NEWS Google Wants Everyone to Try Scribble Art in Augmented Reality
See the full story here: https://mobile-ar.reality.news/news/google-wants-everyone-try-scribble-art-augmented-reality-0183672/
Virtual reality: Marina Abramović and Anish Kapoor at Art Basel Hong Kong
Next week sees the first public showing of two new short VR works at Art Basel Hong Kong, by equally distinguished figures from the art world, Anish Kapoor and Marina Abramović. They are being presented by the fair’s “virtual reality partner”, the Taiwanese electronics company HTC, as part of its Vive Arts programme highlighting the links between breaking developments in technology and the art world. The works by the two artists are, not surprisingly, very different. Kapoor’s “Into Yourself, Fall” is a journey through the human body, promising a “disorientating sensation of radical introspection” as the viewer negotiates vertiginous twists in a world that is both abstract and uncomfortably familiar. Abramović’s “Rising” is a polemical piece, asking us to consider the effects of climate change as we interact with an avatar of the artist who is slowly drowning inside a glass tank. The interaction continues after the viewing, via the downloading of an app which will periodically remind us of the artist’s struggles inside the tank and ask us to “save” her and, by extension, our planet.
See the full story here: https://www.ft.com/content/7f9d89d2-2c66-11e8-97ec-4bd3494d5f14
