New York’s 15th annual Tribeca Film Festival is pushing for more virtual reality, revealing a lineup of documentaries, fiction, and interactive films utilizing experiential programming.
From April 13 – 24, the Tribeca Festival Hub will feature a total of 23 virtual reality interactive installations and exhibitions, with 16 of the films making their world premiere. Projects scheduled to debut at this year’s festival include interactive gaming exhibits, content with fictional and documentary storytelling, as well as interactions with artists and filmmakers.
For this year’s festival, the organization will also have a Virtual Arcade open from April 18-20, which will allow about 50 people at a time use various headsets like the Samsung Gear VR. In effort to embrace virtual reality, the festival will also extend onto its fourth annual Storyscapes program, a showcase of 10 VR installations which will be focusing on social issues such as racism, violence, and the environment. Genna Terranova, the festival’s director, told Mashable, “VR is evolving and moving so quickly. We really feel like [VR is] a big part of our exhibition from a storytelling point.”
Outside of the Virtual Arcade and Storyscapes, the festival will host a variety of virtual reality experiences including Killer Deal, a story about a “struggling machete salesman” who finds himself in trouble when his discount motel comes with an uninvited guest.
Deep, a meditative and psychoactive VR game that is controlled by the user’s breathing, is one of the high-profiled installations to check out this year. Other projects set to debut are The Crystal Reef by Cody Karutz, Lauren Knapp and Stanford University, a story about the future’s climate change being told from a rocky reef off the coast of Italy, as well as Hard World For Small Things by Janicza Bravo and Wevr.
If you’re interested, check out this full list of VR experiences at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.
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?