The next time you go to an IMAX Experience Centre, you may come into virtual contact with a few superheroes. IMAX and Warner Bros Pictures announced Tuesday that the two companies are partnering on a three-year plan to release one virtual reality experience each year based on Warner Bros films, starting with this year’s Justice League.
The Justice League VR experience will be released later this year, presumably around the time of its November release. A VR experience is also planned for Aquaman, which is scheduled to be released in late 2018. There will also be a third virtual reality experience for an unknown project. Rumors have been circulating about Warner Bros releasing the stand-alone Batman film we keep hearing about in 2019, the final year of the IMAX-WB partnership.
The Justice League VR experience will initially be exclusive to the new IMAX VR Experience Centre locations. IMAX debuted the first location in Los Angeles in January, and has plans to open at least five additional locations in New York City, California, the United Kingdom, and Shanghai in the next few months. When Digital Trends visited, the L.A. location was equipped with 14 VR pods, and HTC Vive and StarVR headsets, as well as accessories for you to move freely around in the real world while interacting with the virtual one. Subwoofer vests and a motion chair are a few of the amenities.
This is the first deal IMAX has made with a major movie studio to bring VR content to its multiplexes. The VR experiences will be available on mobile and at-home VR headsets following a short period of exclusivity at IMAX VR Experience Centre locations.
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?