Entertainment Technology Center: immersive media challenge 2019
The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) is a neutral meeting ground that brings together senior executives from the entertainment, consumer electronics, technology and services industries and academic faculty and researchers to address topics related to the creation,distribution and consumption of entertainment content. ETC's work has covered a wide scope, ranging from an instrumental role of testing, evaluating & facilitating the global standard for the roll-out of Digital innovative.
Immersive Media Challenge
What is the ‘next’ next thing in immersive media? We were tasked with thinking 3-5 years in the future and anticipate the state of immersive media as applied to health and wellbeing. More than a hackathon or ideation sprint, this IMC is a futurist challenge requiring examination of contemporary pain points and limitations and looking to the future of technology, media infrastructure and storytelling.
Building upon our work with older adults and reminiscence therapy, we built features using Machine Learning that could add great value to the future of VR.
Deepfake
Human Image Synthesis is technology applied to make believable and even photorealistic renditions of human-likenesses.
The obvious ethical considerations have put neural networks like Deepfake front and center in the debate of the future of news and even our communal understanding of the truth. For example, it is believed that the government of Gabon used Deepfake technology to uphold the rule of an ailing dictator.
We wanted to explore of the use of Deepfake technology to create more meaningful emotion connections with a HMD covering one’s face.
Applying the technology to my own face, we made the HMD “disappear” allowing a more human connection to take place between users in VR.
PoseNet
Real time human pose estimation is a machine learning model using computer vision to detect human figures in images and videos.
Inspired by my build at the 2019 MIT Reality Virtually Hackathon, we wanted to use posenet in order to provide a visual aid for physical therapy. Current HMDs like the Oculus Quest use computer vision for registration. Adding a feature like gamified physical therapy can add much benefit to people who need a little more motivation with their PT or everyday exercise (me included).
Huge thank you to LightCraft for supplying their Stage and Real Time Rendering Technology. http://www.lightcrafttech.com/