Warner Bros. released a new trailer today for Ready Player One, the Steven Spielberg-directed virtual reality epic based on the novel of the same name. The new trailer is more story-oriented than the action-filled teaser we saw at Comic-Con, but it’s still, like, totally packed with 1980s nostalgia and pop culture references in nearly every frame.
At an event in Austin, author Ernest Cline took to Facebook Live to answer questions about his dystopian vision. According to the sci-fi site io9, he related that escapism was one of the central themes of the novel. “Striking a balance between tending to the real world and the needs of the real world but also art and escapism as an essential part of life,” Cline said.
As to the trailer itself, it reveals some more details about protagonist (and walking ’80s encyclopedia) Wade Watts and his quest to find three mysterious Easter eggs hidden in a vast virtual reality massive multiplayer game called OASIS. The game’s creator, James Halliday, has died and whoever finds the buried treasure will inherit a huge fortune, as well as the entire virtual world.
The trailer is one that will be dissected frame-by-frame by ardent fans to find every last pop culture and video game nod. Just on a first viewing, you can catch references to Street Fighter, Overwatch, Battletoads, a DeLorean, a light cycle, King Kong, and dozens more, with Van Halen’s Jump punctuating the whole thing. There’s even a brief Say Anything boombox cameo.
Spielberg directed the movie and stayed true to the obsessive ’80s nostalgia from the novel, although he did drop a few things from the book. In an interview with Collider from 2016, he said he tried to avoid referencing any of his own films. “I’ve cut most of my movies out of [Ernest Cline’s] book,” he said.”Except for the DeLorean and a couple of other things that I had something to do with.”
The movie stars Ty Sheridan as Watts, along with Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T. J. Miller, Simon Pegg, and Mark Rylance. It will be released on March 18, 2018, with several unique VR experiences planned around the film’s premiere.
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?