Metaquette Q41 > On Planet X > #UnrealEngine #LED #Greenscreen #MoCap #NYWIFT #PlanetXstudio

Pooky on Planet X

Tips & Tricks for the Metaverse.......with Pooky Amsterdam

Brooklyn is the island of my birth, and though it has seen many changes since then, it is still the place to find origins. Last week I was able to go to Planet X an amazing LED / Unreal Engine / Greenscreen / Mocap studio space through the auspices of NYWIFT and check out behind the scene, or behind the screen, production facilities. In a refurbished car wash, this new filmset has appeared. Darin Friedman is running a great operation. everything is tightly organized but the results are panoramic. Like The Mandalorian uses the same kind of 20 feet tall LED screen to create places that would be far too expensive to film on, such as Mars or Alpha Centauri. Or even find in this Solar System.

Q: What's next for Metaverse Entertainment?

The incorporation of Unreal Engine into gaming platforms can only help this more and more viable and exciting way of providing backdrops, atmosphere and more. John MacInnes had a "mise en scene" challenge for his followers. All the tools for creating them exist in Unreal Engine. Lighting, character, sets and props.

Today the incredible Jo Redfern just posted an article from Variety on the kind of collaboration that is perfectly aligned for where we are in technology and expression right now. "Hypergalactic" will get a boost from Spaceport, Roblox and Fortnite. It is the edge of tomorrow, today. This allows the millions of players to see a film, to support it and to fan fiction it within the games they both play in and identify with.

User Generated Content is part and parcel of the Metaverse experience. We live our stories as animated characters and can generate stories, creating our own origins and formulating experiences which live vividly in both our imaginations and reality. We identify with what we make, and while our avatars are an ultimate kind of creation, they are separate from our biological self, yet imbued with all the thought, energy and emotions of who we are. 

Being able to create content from a Metaverse platform can create great brand building, playing with an object in a positive way can represent a product moving from virtual good into one's actual closet or refridgerator.

Using the Metaverse as an entertainment platform to create films, video series and real-time game shows is in my core DNA.With over 200 avatar based real-time game shows and a large portfolio of films mainly using the Second Life platform, I might have been an early adopter, but using these kind of vehicles has always made sense to me because they reach people where they are. With VR it's all getting closer.

Brooklyn will also be the home in Fall / Winter 2024 to the first Volumetric Video production facility in New York.  ZeroSpace is coming! Bingeable VRTV is a next step, where we will be able to enter the program, movies and shows alongside the virtual performers. 

I have my 10-part musical series ready to go.

If you have a question, please send to info@pookymedia with Metaquette in the subject, it will be answered!

 

Metaquette Q40 #Metaverse #MetaverseEntertainment #Entertainmentplatform #DigitalHollywood #ContentDrivesAdoption #AppleVisionPro

Tips & Tricks for negotiating the Metaverse.........with Pooky Amsterdam.

For people unsure that they will be able to hear in VR, I would think the reveal of captions available for VisionPro, would bring more people to this device.  Under the category of Content Driving Adoption. this is real breakthrough. 

 Q: Will Content Drive Adoption for VR in The Metaverse? 

I personally became involved with 2.5D avatar based chat rooms over 20 years ago, because I could read what everyone was saying better than I could hear in real life. It became obvious to me in 2003 that those platforms could be used to create theatrical-like productions. 

"Theatrical-like productions" seems so quaint a term in a world where Generative AI Cinema is heavy on the menu for this years Digital Hollywood Festival. While the panels and discussions are attuned to the rise of AI and its existential threat to creative professionals, the jury is still out on how humans will respond to a steady AI diet. Saving money and time are paramount for any profession, how to maximize the best work is often based on a variety of influences and synchronicities.  Better prompting we are finding, creates better, and even more original content, but even us humans "generate a script for a rom-com" in startling similar ways. Boy loves Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy gets better Robot companion will be done to death.

Movies and TV is the catchall for our entertainment complexes, often with a passive outlook, we sit back and relax while games certainly make up lean forward and engage. What if the Metaverse could serve as a platform for people to be able to make and create their own TV-like and Theatrical-like productions? Allowing that great democratization of content utilizing tools will create vast content, much like YouTube or any of the big platforms (insta, X, TikTok, etc) allows for the public to upload. A massive amount of creativity has been unleashed, and appreciated. We are DIY to the core.

In the coming years, developers can give those kind of tools to those who wish to create entertainment like programs for it's users. YouTube has helped create new forms of shows, commercials are taking their cues from shorts and tiktok creators. Through these social media platforms, recognizable styles are adapted into more mainstream media too. 

Will AppleVisionPro and META take up the challenge for interactive TV? The games which are now played involving zombies or shooting targets are really only one kind of entertainment. In a world which is scary enough, (read the news if you don't believe me) I want games on my own time to serve me. Okay distract me and entertain me, but also make me feel good that I have elected to play them. 

Virtual Worlds, the Metaverse and such, are entertainment platforms as people elect to engage and be entertained there, playing, even creating games within them, meeting friends, shopping, looking at cool stuff etc. But The Metaverse is also an entertainment platform in itself by being a stage set, albeit a virtual one where more classically defined entertainment can take place. Like the Game Shows I've created, with a viewer log-in audience that takes place on a weekly basis for example. 

Other ways that the Metaverse is an entertainment platform is as an animation type of studio, where the 360 degree world of virtual goods and backgrounds can be accessed for real-time film making. 

Which brings me to using the Metaverse as both a subject and location for a film itself, as in Mambo Motel ~ The Metaverse Musical. As an avatar invested in my virtual life, meeting others who have similar interests from across the globe has made the physical world more interesting, colorful and lively. I have penned this exploration of a new world as an exciting, yet cautionary tale of how we find ourselves by losing ourselves within the Metaverse. 

It will only be a short matter of time I believe before volumetric video studios will be able to produce Virtual Reality bingeable TV, with all players and producers under one roof. They will be able to exchange ideas and skills creating programs of various interests for all who put on VR goggles. 

The legendary Trip Hawkins recent post on Medium  made me realize that the studio of the future for VRTV could resemble an older model of a NBC studio kind of set-up, with everyone in the building for top > down and up pipeline positioning.  We all will be there, hopefully with the best working hierarchy we have learned from the past.