https://p115.p3.n0.cdn.getcloudapp.com/items/qGuD85JZ/Image+2020-01-27+at+12.15.10+pm.png This morning saw a post on the bbc about a new game coming out called watch dogs: legion — focusing on London (and weirdly adding some Brexit reference in there) the thing that really attracted me to the post was the fact they did a virtual interview (in game) > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-51235819/watch-dogs-legion-click-goes-inside-the-post-brexit-game — ignore the Brexit parts just take a look at what they can do in game now. i think this is going to be the next step for current game streamers. We already saw that ninja finally got his ‘ninja’ skin in the game and I’m sure that brought him in a nice little commission alongside his trainers and other merch in stores around the country — nice little income to live on for the next few years — not bad for spending a decade getting good at a game huh, you just have to fit the media agenda.
But what I love about this new VR/AR frontier of realtime full body scans is that once you have a model of you scanned into the system and the dots painted on your face then virtualising you in game is fairly straight forward, sure it needs a team of people but those things are starting to change fast. Literally in the unreal engine now you can build massive virtual production sets in a fairly modest green screen environment — sure those things have a cost but they are greatly reduced from the costs that big media had to put in, it’s really evolved and these tools are bringing interesting crossovers. > https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/programs/virtual-production shows you the level you can go with this. Heck, you can even get tools like [Houdini 18](https://www.sidefx.com/community/houdini-18-released/) which brings about tools that allows for procedural creation — I follow a [guy on twitter](https://twitter.com/cinedatabase) (matt workman) that actually creates virtual shoots and sets using these tools, maybe textures and objects you might use in the real world of photography and video making — great for informing clients how the shoot might look before actually do it. (It’s called [cinetracer](https://twitter.com/CineTracer) btw, Cinematography Simulator) https://vimeo.com/370444569
I mean, literally anything you can imagine you can create with these wonderful tools and they are in the hands of the everyday power user > *Houdini Indie* - Houdini Indie is also available for $269 USD per year or $399 for two years. This version offers limited commercial usage for indie gamers and animators making up to $100K USD per year and cannot be used in the same pipeline as commercial versions of Houdini. Houdini Indie uses its own file format for saving scenes and assets and renders animations up to 4096x4096. I can certainly imagine someone like @drdisrespect with the right team behind him doing virtual sets with people remotely, even somewhere on the other side of the world jumping into set with him, doing interviews, creating content in real time, I mean their is where attention will go too — when you can be time sensitive relevant about some world news, get paid electronically in real time via crypto.. . Kinda reminds me of classics like this I used to watch as a kid.. .
How far we have come … we can’t predict what’s next but we can have a good idea of what it might look like — if you thought your kids looking at a screen of a mobile phone was bad, you wait until they are all sitting together with a VR headset all day. I guess black mirror was spot on after all eh? __humble x