In case you missed it, Westworld — the horrifying dystopian theme park bound to bring out the most deviant aspects of even its most morally pure patrons — is up and running on HBO. The show premiered Sunday and is already causing quite the stir.
While the show itself has generated most of the buzz, HBO’s marketing team has a couple of clever tricks up its sleeve to help sell the Westworld experience.
As reported by ScreenCrush, potential parkgoers can head over to discoverwestworld.com and check out a sort of virtual travel brochure for the fictional theme park. The site offers four distinct sections (About | Experience | Explore | Stay), and features a rundown of the parks’ perks, an interactive map, and even a functional calendar you can use to book your stay (looks like rooms are only available on Sundays). If you tire of all that, you can chat with a “personal concierge” named Aeden, whom HBO created to answer all of your questions about the series and the site.
HBO created the bot in conjunction with rehabstudio, Digital Kitchen, and The Zoo. Here’s how it works:
Upon visiting the site, you’ll be asked for your email and birth date. Once your provide the former, you’ll receive the message below in your inbox.
If you’re deemed worthy of a profile, you’ll be provided with a personality assessment that you can fill out using the access code “WHITEHATEBLACKHAT.” Once you’ve done that, the next time you return to the site, Aeden will be there to answer your questions, calling you by name and tailoring his answers to your personality archetype.
If all of this sounds a bit overwhelming to you and you just want to … you know … watch the show, the inaugural episode of HBO’s newest drama is available for free here.
Stay tuned for Westworld-related news and updates.
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?