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If you believe that the future of the internet is the Metaverse, then walk this way. ViacomCBS has officially announced it is exploring ways it can take its entire canon from divisions like Paramount, as well as future IP, into mixed reality (MR) to be consumed on next-gen immersive displays.
https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/mapping-the-metaverse/Heading the charge is Paramount Studios’ resident futurist
Ted Schilowitz who has been tasked with exploring ViacomCBS’ interface with the
emerging forms of visual computing.
In an exclusive interview for the Makers Pop-up virtual
conference Schilowitz reveals, “Unofficially for the last couple years
I’ve been covering all ViacomCBS in terms of the pursuits around the Metaverse.
We’re not looking at the next 10 year journey to 2030. Officially now my
purview is across all of ViacomCBS enterprises of which Paramount is one
division.
Paramount Studios’ resident futurist Ted Schilowitz has been
tasked with exploring ViacomCBS’ interface with the emerging forms of visual
computing.
“It’s exciting to have a belief from the company that we
really need to pay attention to where things are going.”
The Metaverse (variously trademarked as Omniverse or
Magicverse by Nvidia and Magic Leap) is a term gaining buzz in Hollywood and
Silicon Valley to describe the evolution of our relationship to the internet.
It is understood to be a digital mirror for real world
activities including work, social, health, fitness as well as entertainment.
“It’s about being inside an immersive interactive
environment that starts to feel real to you,” Schilowitz says. “That is the
next big step in entertainment and it is starting to take off. New VR/AR
devices will enable us to enter these entertainment worlds and take you to the
holodeck,” the VR environment famously from Star Trek, part of the
Paramount universe.
Star Trek aside, ViacomCBS owns huge brand assets from
Nickelodeon to MTV that attract a younger audience. It’s the same demographic
most likely to engage with experiences more familiar to gaming and who expect
to interact with multiple digital touchpoints in their daily lives.
“It’s important for Paramount and other studios to
constantly look at youth culture, how they absorb their information and how
they expect to interact with digital worlds,” he says.
“My [responsibility] is to take all the hit content created
over the 100 plus years at Paramount and the 45-50 years of the Viacom universe
and see how we propel that forward into what the customers of tomorrow are
starting to do today.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean producers should pivot pitches
into the MR space. Schilowitz’ advice is to “pitch what you are passionate
about, don’t try to lock into one platform or another. Speak to the creative
core of the business not the tech side. The tech core should support the
creative essence, not the other way around.”
The Digital Theme Park
The final picture may be indistinct, the puzzle has a
zillion pieces, but Schilowitz insists the outline of the edges are already
here.
“From a technology perspective we are extraordinarily
close,” he says. “We are already [experiencing the Metaverse] in various ways
albeit mostly using traditional screens. Overt examples would be games
like Fortnite where people gather in a virtual space and spend hours
of their day. It’s not just trying to achieve a game objective. It’s about
socializing in a more avatar-oriented three-dimensional space.”
Earlier examples are the multiplayer world building games
like Second Life, Star Citizen and The Sims. Minecraft and
AR game Pokémon Go are other pointers. Schilowitz takes his own
inspiration from Disney World in Florida, where he grew up. Until
recently, theme parks were the only place you could get a sim experience at
scale.
“The original metaverses were theme parks — amazing
environments that didn’t come from the natural world but from creative people’s
brains,” he says.
“As someone who feels younger than they are [Schilowitz is
in his late 50s] somehow my DNA and brain chem still works like a teenager when
I view entertainment. I view interactive entertainment as a theme park style
experience where it’s less about the hardcore adrenalin rush of playing a game
— though that’s a part of it — and more about living in a simulated
environment.”
What is changing rapidly is the form factor and audio visual
acuity of immersive displays. Google, Magic Leap, Facebook and the entire VR
entertainment industry may have gone back to the drawing board after early less
than successful iterations of head-mounted gear — but lighter, less cumbersome,
higher fidelity and more affordable wearables (combined with 5G connectivity)
will usher in a new wave of immersive content experiences.
“We are mostly locked today into looking at blocks of pixels
on flat, rectangular screens but the next screens we are experimenting with —
as are companies like Sony, Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft — take the
visual compute experience to the next horizon,” the futurist says. “We will
start to take these static pixels that we currently create in a grid and park
in front of our faces and change them to dynamic spatial pixels that move with
us and track with our body and our eyes.”
Emerging displays will ditch the remote for more intuitive
ways to interact with the content.
“When we start to get a touchscreen interface, or one we
navigate just by our eyes, or with haptic feedback, you start to blend the
branching narratives of games into the world of a mainstream audience
narrative,” he outlines.
Netflix, which financed the pioneering branching narrative
show Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, is reportedly exploring an expansion into
gaming which would put interactive content development on the fast track.
Schilowitz says ViacomCBS streaming platforms like
Paramount+ and PlutoTV are ripe for similar exploitation. “What we’re doing is
exploring what we should do with those platforms in the future as we move them
past just a passive entertainment place to a space where people want to truly
engage,” he says.
“Gamers who have played largely narrative driven games know
what a true branching narrative means and that it doesn’t hold up on a regular
TV screen with a remote. You need to be much more engaged connection to the
characters and the story.”
None of this means the going to the movies will go out of
fashion. On the contrary, he believes theatrical will live on just as we all
enjoying see a play on Broadway.
“Seeing a motion picture with other people on a large screen
won’t go away in the same way that live theatre and live music hasn’t gone away
despite our ability to experience these events digitally. People will go to the
movies because they want to have that experience and not because it’s the only
place to see that movie.”
Building Video With Spatial Pixels
Studios like Paramount however, want to be ready with the
content when new devices capable of reaching mass audiences in AR/VR/MR arrive.
“Interactive branching entertainment will really thrive with
the next-gen of wearable headsets,” Schilowitz says. “[They] will bring story
and interactivity together in a way only a large theme park simulator could
have done in years past.”
The building blocks of MR content creation are here in the
form of real time pixel generation from games engines and graphics cards.
“That’s on the high-end content creation side but there are
platforms for people without traditional coding skills to build their own
universes and make money with it.”
Examples of such virtual sandboxes include Roblox, Rec Room
and Manticore (in which Epic Games has invested).
“We will see a YouTube for interactivity,” he predicts. “The
way we create content doesn’t mean you have to have a traditional computer
science background. A wider audience with almost no computer programming skills
can start to build things in a way that traditional video tools have been
democratized. Everyone has a high-end camera on their phone now. We are
starting to do that with real time graphics and animation at scale.”
That’s why a lot of Schilowitz’s R&D is focused on tech
and creative start-ups just as much as the well-resourced studios and tech
giants.
“You learn where things are headed from that start-up
companies,” he says.
He is an investor or founder of several, including 3nfinite
(formerly HypeVR) which has developed an app designed to enable the viewing of
volumetric video over 5G connections.
He thinks we need ways to “build” video for the Metaverse.
“Currently video has a 2D representation. What we need is to create new styles
of video. Volumetric video [the capture of scenes using multiple imaging
devices] broadly blends the idea of gaming-style spatial pixels with true video
pixels. Lots of companies are working on this.”
The timeframe for these developments is startlingly
proximate. The Metaverse is already here if below the radar, according to
Schilowitz, and a more evolved version will arrive within the decade.
By 2024 the next set of consumer AR/MR wearables will be on
the market. By 2027 this ecosystem will be mature if still at the early adopter
phase. 2030 will see the beginning of mass adoption.
“By 2030 we will still be using smartphones for certain
things but also other more evolved tools used in tandem with or as replacement
for smartphones,” he says.
Rather than a single all-in-one device, we will interface
with the Metaverse from multiple devices — just as we do today via the 60-inch
living room TV, laptop, smart watch or pocket phone.
“There will be devices we wear on the street like glasses,
those designed for home entertainment and those designed for special places to
connect with other people in real and digital worlds. All of this is the
Metaverse.”
He adds, “The pandemic has shown us that people are
comfortable in their digital individual lives. By 2030 there will be a lot of
creative experience that have come to scale. We can see the edges of it now.”
The Metaverse is poised to become a multi-billion dollar
playing field for every company from Roblox to Nvidia, Facebook to Microsoft,
Google to Epic Games. They all want to own a slice.
“There are major questions about how we do cross collaboration
and how we make sure there’s an open ecosystem,” Schilowitz says. “And also
that profit should not be the only motivation.”
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