Assassin’s Creed star Michael Fassbender isn’t the only one who gets to travel into the world of the Spanish Inquisition. Thanks to a new virtual reality experience from 20th Century Fox, New Regency, AMD, and Alienware, you can too.
The VR experience shows the perspective of an Assassin, a member of the secret society from both the film and the Ubisoft video game franchise. It might not be quite the same as actually entering the Animus and taking the place of one of your ancestors, but on the plus side, you can do it from the comfort of your own home or wherever else suits you. The VR content will be available through the Oculus Video app for Oculus Rift and Samsung VR, plus as a 360-degree video on Facebook starting Thursday night, when it debuts at the 2016 Game Awards, reports Variety.
There are other alternatives for getting to see the world as an Assassin as well, so don’t worry if you don’t own the necessary technology yourself. AMC theaters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Austin, Texas, will all offer moviegoers the chance to try the VR experience from December 2 to January 1. Each of the participating locations will have Oculus Rift demo kiosks that fans can check out.
As for the movie, it will follow Fassbender as Callum Lynch, a descendant of the Assassins who is sent back to 15-century Spain via the Animus. There, he has to learn how to fight the Templar organization so he can apply that knowledge and defeat them in the present day. The Justin Kurzel-directed film also stars Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson, and Michael K. Williams.
Assassin’s Creed opens in theaters on December 21.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?