Performance in XR, facial animation, and AI as co-creator
A weekly digest charting developments across live performance, technology, and the emerging Metaverse
New Forms and Audiences
Expanding the reality of the performing arts with XR-media
The Danish mixed reality studio Makropol announces the launch of XR BLACK BOX together with Studio Jakob La Cour. It will facilitate industry networking, produce experimental performing arts in XR, and help develop technical best practices.
The group is kicking off the initiative through the VR chatroom Mozilla Hubs on December 15 at 10:00 am ET.
Tech and the Metaverse
Roblox Acquires Loom.ai, Accelerating Development of Avatar Realism and Emotions
Loom.ai's acquisition hints at the future of real-time facial animation for 3D avatars in virtual worlds. This comes only a few weeks after news of Epic Games' purchase of the facial motion capture company Hyprsense.
How the proliferation of user-generation content and the evolution of AI as a co-creator and companion will facilitate the emergence of the Metaverse. As pointed out, one of the biggest challenges with building the Metaverse is figuring out how to create enough high-quality content to sustain it.
Product Designer and Software Engineer John Palmer expands on a previous essay offering insight into how spatial interfaces might be used outside of gaming. Palmer explains that because spatial software comes with more degrees of freedom, whether to move around or view things differently, there are creative ways of using the software, not just designing it.
Entangled Histories
This week we're looking back to David Blair’s hypermedia masterpiece Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991). Originally presented as an 85 minute theatrical feature, audiences could watch the full linear movie online, or access the “hypervideo” version—disarticulated and amplified across several thousand hypertext links, thousands of stills and more than 500 segments and interactive 3D objects. By navigating across a mesmerizing labyrinth of tiny visual and spatial fragments, each viewer composed their own surreal narrative about life, death, memory, annihilation, and rebirth.
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Part aggregator, part independent journal, Scenospace delivers a digest charting developments across live performance, technology, and the Metaverse. Scenospace is delivered every week to your inbox.