Tag: immersive media

Revisiting The Potential Future Of Hollywood & AI-Generated ‘Immersive Media’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Someone from the Los Angeles area looked at one of my blog posts about AI and “immersive media” from a while ago, so that got me thinking about where things stand now. I still think that live theatre is the future. I still think that, by say, 2030, Broadway will, in some way, replace Hollywood as the destination of young men and women who want to act for a living.

It could be a few years beyond that, but it’s coming. I say this because there is a capitalistic imperative to essentially replace all — all — of Hollywood with AI generated art. This is all going to happen in the context of what I call the “Petite Singularity” that I predict is going to happen by the end of the decade.

We may not be uploading our minds into the cloud, but there is going to be a lot of future shock. I mean, I got into an argument with an AI recently where I found myself saying “I’m sorry” like I was arguing with a passive-aggressive woman. Ugh.

So, the technology is zooming towards us. I hold to my prediction that at some point in the near future, your TV will scan your face and generate very personalized content based on existing IP. It will, on the fly, generate, say, a new Star Wars movie that is a bit darker than the usual fair, just because that is your mood at that specific moment.

There will be no shared reality. We’ll all have our own little media cocoons that we live in. We won’t be able to have any water cooler talk — at all — because we’ll all be watching slightly different versions of the same show.

Anyway, it’s a future we’re going to have to prepare for. I still believe that there might be a really big shift away from movie theatres towards live theatre. If you’re a 15-year-old, you’ll go to live theatre with your date instead of a movie because, well, movies in that context won’t exist anymore.

And all of this will happen really, really fast. Too fast for anyone to process it.

The thing I have my doubts about now is the idea that anyone will use the Apple Vision Pro. I may have gotten that part of my prediction just plain wrong. While I do think that Augmented Reality has a bright future, Virtuality Reality…not so much.

I just don’t see the usecase for it. At least not in the near term. I suppose it might be good for immersive media, but that’s a lot closer to 20 years from now, not five or six. The technology just isn’t there yet. And the goggles will have to be a lot less bulky.

I’m still waiting for my “MindCap,” something similar to the technology in 3001: Final Odyssey or maybe Strange Days. Anyway, regardless, if we can somehow avoid a civil war, revolution and or WW3 in the next few months, something interesting might happen.

Creative Destruction: Hollywood Must Buy Up Empty Malls For The Coming Immersive Media Era

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

You’re supposed to put your stick where the puck is going to be, not where it is, then I have a suggestion for Hollywood — buy up empty shopping malls now.

I say this because despite what is proposed in Ready Player: One, young human people still need the entertainment industry to facilitate dating rituals. So, even if we all have an economic VR – treadmill setup in our homes, 13 year old boys will still need to go through the rite of passage of asking his cute crush in homeroom out on a date.

Right now, “Netflix and chill” is not very practical for that kid. But going to a movie is definitely doable. As such, even in the age of “immersive media” little boys are still going to need an excuse to leave the house and hang out with their crush (reasonably) unsupervised for a few hours. So, it would make a lot of sense for them to not use a home VR – treadmill setup, but instead go to a revamped mall where there’s a massive immersive movie being played.

No one listens to me, but lulz. I had to get that off my chest.

America 2029: Immersive Media & The Death Of The Film Industry

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I’m not going to get into the economic, political or environmental dystopia I believe the United States will be in by 2029 unless some very drastic, very radical things change, like, now. So let’s take a walk down what the online media world might look come January 2029.

First, let’s start with a little speculative anecdote.

You’re in your self-driving car, watching the local news as you head home from your 1 day of physically being in the office. (Immersive media has rendered physically going into work nothing more than a cultural chore of habit.) You notice that Gone With The Wind has been released and using a combination of eye movement and non-audible voice commands, you “subscribe” to the “experience” so you and your wife can “play” the immersive movie when you get home.

Your car parks itself and out of middle-aged habit, you check your snail mail. Your neighbor walks by with his dog. The two of you are Facebook friends and as such you barely have a traditional conversation. You eye what’s floating around each other and interact with the immersive Facebook quickly and silently. You might interject a word or two simply because something you interact with is interesting, but in general the event is simply a pause that ends as quickly as it begins.

Walking into your home, you sync up with the home’s IOT environment and as such learn what may or may not have happened in the house while you were busy at work. You always have the option to do this via MX at work, but it’s frowned upon. Your wife comes up and and you hug and see that your young child continues to grow quickly and in a cute fashion. The baby is asleep in her crib, but you see via MX some of the cuter moments of the day. Your wife is on leave because of the baby and will soon return to work. The two of you go to the Ready Player One-type tread mills and proceed to “play” within the Gone With The Wind environment. Thousands of other people have approximately hours to roam around the environment and get to not only see, but interact with, AI actors playing the different parts of the original movie, only now you have photo realistic Vr instead of the passive nature of film. All of this will be produced not by a film studio, but by a gaming studio.

It seems to me that the movie industry in 10 years will be where the newspaper industry is now — contracting in what seems like a moment-by-moment basis, leaving a lot of people looking at each other and wondering, “Why does it still exist?” Leaving out the possibility of a vinyl record-type revival at some point, it’s likely that the video game industry will battle and defeat the movie industry with the rise of immersive media.

I say this because the movie industry — like the newspaper industry — is slow to change and based on a business model that makes some assumptions that will soon enough no longer be true. With the newspaper industry it’s that people are willing to wait as long as 24 hours to read the news, while with the movie industry it will be that people will want to passively watch a story being told in the dark with a group of loud, often rude people. Don’t get me wrong, I love, love, love movies. I love everything about them. I love how they’re made. I love the rise and fall of stars and I love the sparkly nature of showbiz itself.

But, alas, I love newspapers, too, and in 10 years time, I doubt very many of them will exist.

So, what will replace the movie industry? I suspect it will be the video game industry hyped up on the technological advancements of immersive media. By “immersive media,” I mean what some people refer to as MX (AR/VR). Any media where you are assumed to interact with the media in some way. So once social media becomes integrated with AR, then some basic assumptions we have about the fate of Facebook and Twitter may fall by the waist-side. Meanwhile, the entire movie industry, I fear, simply won’t exist as we know it in 2029. Or, if it does, it will be a fraction of its size or own entirely by different gaming companies.

While in some ways, this is kind of old news, I think from a practical economic and social stand point, we’ve barely scratched the surface of trying to understand how immersive media will change every day life.

Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer living in Richmond, Va. He is working on his first novel. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com.