6 ms·

I think it will be commonplace to virtually walk around in movie scenes turned into 3d scenery by AI by the end of next year. I can see this turning into a real

by Tepix 4y ago

I think it will be commonplace to virtually walk around in movie scenes turned into 3d scenery by AI by the end of next year. I can see this turning into a real industry. Who wouldn't like to wander, fly and swim around Pandora, the world of Avatar? It will also lead to questions about the copyright of the resulting models, probably somewhat dependant on how automated this process is.

avian 4y ago
> It will also lead to questions about the copyright of the resulting models I'm sure there will be no questions there. The questions about the copyright of models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. exist solely because it infringes on the rights of thousands of random artists all around the world. There is no one single entity with enough power to clearly oppose it so people making the models can get away with "questionable copyright", "legal gray area", etc. kind of talk. Try the same with a model trained on a single movie created by a multinational with infinite money and all this will be resolved and defined real quick and strongly worded cease & desist letters sent out by end of work day.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  The day after movie-to-VR becomes easy to do, movie owners will monitize it, which will end the current free-for-all. Want to walk around The Shire in VR? You better have paid for the Hobbits Online subscription package.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    Sam: This is it. Frodo: What? Sam: If I take one more step, I'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been. Popup: And you can do that for just $29.99 when you buy The Hobbits Shire Expansion DLC!
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    > The day after movie-to-VR becomes easy to do, movie owners will monitize it, which will end the current free-for-all. The movie making studios already own those 3d "digital assets" from their films. IDK if there is a real "free-for-all" right now, but the monetisation play has already been planned for.
- sfifs 4y ago
  > There is no one single entity with enough power to clearly oppose it so people making the models can get away with "questionable copyright", "legal gray area", etc. kind of talk. Never underestimate the power of a sufficiently motivated rich individual to create legal hell (see Gawker). There are many very rich artists. There just needs to be an obvious large enough irritant which will happen as these generative models start getting used beyond toy amusements. The class action lawsuit against Copilot was filed just as pricing models started. This is going to be an interesting area to watch. Use in commercial projects at your own risk of exposure to liability.
  - worldsayshi 4y ago
    The wrong and easy reaction to this is to limit these services to not include copyrighted content. The more right and really really difficult solution would be to give the original copyright holders partial rights to the output. It really feels like the textile factory worker problem all over again. We can't let the big players be the benefactors every time.
    - astrange 4y ago
      > The more right and really really difficult solution would be to give the original copyright holders partial rights to the output. That is impossible (assigning credit to training images from the output is arbitrary, not deterministic) and wouldn't help anyone (imagine Spotify except it pays you even less). > It really feels like the textile factory worker problem all over again. We can't let the big players be the benefactors every time. Industrialization is better for society because it produces more customer surplus. Even Marx thought the Luddites were wrong.
      - worldsayshi 4y ago
        >Industrialization is better for society because it produces more customer surplus. Also my point. >Even Marx thought the Luddites were wrong. Sure they are wrong in that they confuse what the problem is. If workers owned the factory they would be happy to automate the work. But their feeling of being left out has some validity because if they weren't the total value would improve. The real issue is that the revenue brought back through automation doesn't benefit the worker. If it did, the automation would happen sooner because incentives would align better and the total value for society would thus likely improve faster.
- Tepix 4y ago
  What if you train your AI model with three dozen films about ancient egypt and then generate a new 3d world out using the model? Seems fuzzy. But what if you use only three films? Or two?
- me551ah 4y ago
  I think it would be the other way around. A lot of movies(and tv shows) have games these days. You can already experience Star Wars in VR with “Star Wars Squadrons” and I’m sure we will start to see a lot more games with VR support in the future, many being based on Movies. MNCs are there to make money and they will just license it.
- astrange 4y ago
  > people making the models can get away with "questionable copyright", "legal gray area", etc. kind of talk. Where are they saying that? Nobody thinks it's a gray area, they think it's explicitly legal and they're probably right too. Claiming it's a copyright violation is actually a rather weak case artists are just saying is obvious. Microsoft has licensed DALL-E. They're not venturing into legal gray areas.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    Well, I think it is a grey area. The argument I heard most often goes along the lines of: "people also learn from a lot of examples and other artists, and that is not copyrighted". It is an interesting argument, but AI is not people and the argument could easily be the opposite (not taking sides here). They might think it is legal, but it is far from clear, IMHO. IANAL, but it will be interesting to see if this is enforceable and by whom.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > Microsoft [...] not venturing into legal gray areas. Their history as litigation defendants would suggest your optimism may perhaps be unfounded.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > The questions about the copyright of models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. exist solely because it infringes on the rights of thousands of random artists all around the world How does it infringe? Are your memories of a movie copyright infringement? https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ajedi32 4y ago
    Not normally, but if you use those memories to re-create the movie and sell it to someone else then yeah, that's totally copyright infringement.
    - luma 4y ago
      If I am an artist and I go to art school, I'm going to spend years studying the masters to learn their techniques and style. If I then produce an impressionist portrait on canvass, informed and influenced by the years of study of existing works.... am I violating copyright?
      - Ajedi32 4y ago
        If you're creating new works inspired by copyrighted works, no that's not (or should not be) copyright infringement. If you're creating exact reproductions of copyrighted works (e.g. The Gates of Argonath from Peter Jackson's adaptation of Lord of the Rings), just in a different format (3d instead of 2d) then yeah, that probably is.
        bscphil 4y ago
        Right. Most of the conversations about IP on this site seem to rely on extremely abstract reasoning or idealist thinking about what constitutes "property" or what a "copy" is. My understanding is that judges are not so easily misled. If you are selling a "replica statue of two kings" online that is clearly intended to resemble the Gates of Argonath, you are setting yourself up for a lawsuit. It doesn't matter if you built it from your memory of the LOTR films, used an AI to generate a bunch of similar looking statues and picked the ones most similar to the films, or what have you. In practice any judge will see that you are attempting to make money off of the LOTR IP. (Note: not legal advice.) Note that this doesn't mean that Stable Diffusion (and friends) are copyright infringing just because they're trained on copyrighted material. My brain doesn't infringe the LOTR copyright because of my memories of the films. If I turn my experience of fantasy epics into a new novel with a different storyline than LOTR, that's not copyright infringement. That's creativity. But those same memories can likewise be used to make works that are infringing. The question of infringement isn't in the creative act, it's in the artifact. I think it's plausible (though not certain of course) that IP questions will be settled for AIs in the same way: it's not infringement to train your AI on copyrighted material. It is infringement to use your AI to generate works that a reasonable person would conclude are intended to replicate or imitate copyrighted material.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  The copyright protected material isn't in the model. This can be figured out easily because, if they did, the models are so much smaller than the input data that it'd be literal unobtanium for compression algorithms. Copyright also has nothing to do with the tool. What a piece depicts and how it is used are much more important than how a piece was created. If I paint a picture by hand of a particular scene from a Disney movie, that's clearly a derived work and may be subject to copyright protection (it depends, there could be a fair use argument in specific situations, so even "it's copyright!" is not a cut-and-dried argument). If I paint a picture of Hercules in the style of Disney, that's trademark violation. But I can paint Hercules in any other style and Disney can't say shit (though they certainly try). This is an age-old argument. Some artists think they should have a monopoly on certain ideas. As a society, we've already said no, you only get to own your expression of your ideas. And as ideas go, "like a trending artist on ArtStation" isn't a particularly strong one.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  I think it would be almost trivial to build in a “generate 30% different than” (the legal amount of difference before a work is considered different than the original). That could either sidestep the entire legal question, or throw Hollywood in to a blender since so many movies/shows have been made on the back of that difference.
hutzlibu 4y ago
"Who wouldn't like to wander, fly and swim around Pandora, the world of Avatar?" Me, but I doubt it will be the same experience, if the scene is highly optimized by hand like the movie is vs. some AI generation.
auveair 4y ago
> I think it will be commonplace to virtually walk around in movie scenes turned into 3d scenery by AI by the end of next year. I would take the opposite bet, I doubt most movies have complete enough 3D scene to be AI enhanced, let alone something good enough to walk around, you wouldn't model what you won't film after all and nobody wants to see hallucinated aliens in middle earth.
- Tepix 4y ago
  No, AI will generate the 3d scene just by looking at the 2d footage. It can fill in the blanks (i.e. provide textures for areas that are invisible in the film).
  - automatic6131 4y ago
    It will make a chuffing good effort but fail hilariously in >99% of cases but then people will parade the fraction that make sense.
    - Tepix 4y ago
      It's getting better all the time, check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y1-KlTEmwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y1-KlTEmwk
AussieWog93 4y ago
>Who wouldn't like to wander, fly and swim around Pandora, the world of Avatar? Sure, like once or twice? I could see it getting old fast, though.
- andybak 4y ago
  You might get bored with a specific location but not the general concept.
  - lajamerr 4y ago
    I'd like a version of Tokyo that is hyper detailed and functioning transit system/lines. Spend a week preparing for a trip on how to navigate the city before actually going.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      I'd like a version of my city without trash and traffic!
    - astrange 4y ago
      You don't need practice for that, all the signs are in English and you just use Jorudan for route planning. Or Google Maps if you must, though it's gotten worse over time. nb: you may need practice to navigate Shinjuku station
  - bemmu 4y ago
    Make them hangout spaces for VRChat and people will spend a lot of time in them.
  - markus_zhang 4y ago
    I don't know but then agree. The general concept sounds boring to me but I can see how this can be interesting for many people. For example as a Starwars fan someone must want to fly the same scenes in VR for a few times. But I think the better is to train AI to generate scenes based on description such as "dogfight in P-51 with German ME-109 in WW2 for 15 mins" and after some computation the player gets to play this game in VR for 15 mins. The problem is how to make it possible at low cost as player will probably just pay a few bucks for such experience (but you can always resell the popular ones many times)
oneoff786 4y ago
> Who wouldn't like to wander, fly and swim around Pandora, the world of Avatar This is a good example of the fundamental limits of headset VR. Jumping into a lake will never feel real. Not by touch, obviously as you can’t get wet. Not by physical movement because you almost certainly can’t move downwards irl. Not by the weight of water around you or the buoyancy you expect to feel. Not by the rotation you would expect to have in water. Probably not by the stroke propeller movement or the correlation of your breath. And of course probably overly smooth movement to avoid motion sickness. The difference between controlling a flying camera through water and believing you’re swimming is pretty big.
- Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  This led me to imagine people who learn to swim in VR and, because breathing is counterproductive underwater, then drown IRL.
  - ChoGGi 4y ago
    Then the family suing as the city doesn't have signs warning of holding your breath while underwater.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > Not by touch, obviously as you can’t get wet [et al] What you need is a home version of the 4DX cinema setup. If VR lasts another 5 years, I'd put money on someone making one of those in that timeframe.
- baandang 4y ago
  Exactly. We don't have virtual reality at all. We have virtual remote viewing with sound. We are basically at the Eliza stage of VR with a bunch of people pretending Eliza is not that far from passing the Turing Test. Once we have virtual skin sensation and virtual physical movement there is no intellectual debate about any of this. Just instruction tutorials about how to have the experience because no marketing needed. Once we have this I can think of far more interesting things than swimming around in the Avatar movie.
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> It will also lead to questions about the copyright of the resulting models I very much doubt it. Within the Movie business, the ownership of "digital assets" such as 3d models, who keeps what, and what they can legally do with it, is the subject of long and detailed contracts between the film studio, VFX houses, subcontractors etc. Ownership is well-covered, if not exactly "clear" if you're not versed in the law regarding it. A third party using any technique (AI included) to re-create a look-alike of such an asset, and to monetise this, would surely attract the "eye of Sauron" of the big studios to turn it's withering gaze upon them, and to send out a well-armed detachment of lawyers.
intrasight 4y ago
>lead to questions about the copyright It will lead to questions - but those questions will be answered by the platform owners not the courts. The platform owners will just remove your models even in cases where a court would rule it fair use. VR of real places is going to be huge - bigger than for imaginary places. My guess is that most VR worlds will be a combination. Here's a question. What if you model the real world and an architect of a building. I know that copyright doesn't apply to buildings or other functional works. But again, this will be decided by the platform owners and not the courts. Clearly there are good reasons to not have "platform owners" in the metaverse.
onion2k 4y ago
I can see this turning into a real industry. Who wouldn't like to wander, fly and swim around Pandora, the world of Avatar? Me. It sounds boring. I couldn't give a damn about exploring someone else's fantasy world. This is a bit odd because I love open world video games. I guess I need a reason to spend time there.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Once we can generate the world quickly, how far are we from generating things to do in that world?
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    I think ChatGPT showed exactly that we are not that far away. ChatGPT fine-tuned on the specific world could generate quests and make every NPC able to get interacted with
- dvngnt_ 4y ago
  if you watch TV, movies, read books, post games, or exist, you're already exploring someone else's world
Arelius 4y ago
Why by the end of next year? That seems optimistically short. Why hadn't it happened this year, or last? Nanite is great, but IMO doesnt change the equation that dramatically. The cost for a studio to manually decimate game quality versions have been small enough that of the will had been there, we could have been doing it for years.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > Why hadn't it happened this year, or last? Having loosely followed this space, I think I might actually have some input! First off, you need a VR-ready environment. Not many companies are making these, so the only people equipped to roll this out is Valve, Meta, and possibly Unreal/Epic. Valve already did this alongside Half Life Alyx; they released certain map portions so you could freely walk around them with friends without playing the game. Meta is getting there, but the combination of low-power hardware and headset attrition doesn't leave them with much of an audience. There's also Epic, but they don't really do much in this space yet either. So, obviously a paradigm shift is needed. And frankly, I think Universal Scene Description will be that paradigm shift. TL-DR: Nvidia came up with a new standard for 3D environments that interoperates game technology with digital effects. In theory, you could take your favorite Andor or Rings of Power scenes, drag their file into another app, and just start walking around in-scene. You may end up adjusting a few things vis-a-vis scale, but once it reaches adoption I can see it being pretty easy to work with and popular. Maybe 'next year' is a little close, but the stars have definitely aligned already.
  - astlouis44 4y ago
    Thoughts on the web and the role that WASM, WebGPU, and WebXR have as a distribution channel for these immersive experiences?
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      WebXR feels like a solid building-block to me. Adoption will be (and has been) shaky, but with Apple being forced to adopt third-party browser engines it's revival seems likely. WASM is neat but extremely finnecky at the moment. I've seen cool stuff done with it, but I'm not convinced it's funny production ready yet. WebGPU is sorta in the same boat as WASM, if a little more realistic of a bet. People will want hardware-accelerated browser experiences soon, and WebGPU will probably do most of the lifting there.
VikingCoder 4y ago
Have you read "Ready Player One"? The author predicted that players will play a game where they will be dropped into their favorite movies, and will be given points for exactly mimicking the dialogue, inflection, and movements of the characters. Spoiler: the first one is War Games.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
The Trek community created a pretty detailed model of the Enterprise-D, but took it down due to copyright concerns. It's still floating around if you know where to look but it's a real shame that development on it had to stop out of legal fears, well founded or not.

by Tepix 4y ago

avian 4y ago

> It will also lead to questions about the copyright of the resulting models I'm sure there will be no questions there. The questions about the copyright of models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. exist solely because it infringes on the rights of thousands of random artists all around the world. There is no one single entity with enough power to clearly oppose it so people making the models can get away with "questionable copyright", "legal gray area", etc. kind of talk. Try the same with a model trained on a single movie created by a multinational with infinite money and all this will be resolved and defined real quick and strongly worded cease & desist letters sent out by end of work day.

sandworm101 4y ago
The day after movie-to-VR becomes easy to do, movie owners will monitize it, which will end the current free-for-all. Want to walk around The Shire in VR? You better have paid for the Hobbits Online subscription package.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  Sam: This is it. Frodo: What? Sam: If I take one more step, I'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been. Popup: And you can do that for just $29.99 when you buy The Hobbits Shire Expansion DLC!
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > The day after movie-to-VR becomes easy to do, movie owners will monitize it, which will end the current free-for-all. The movie making studios already own those 3d "digital assets" from their films. IDK if there is a real "free-for-all" right now, but the monetisation play has already been planned for.
sfifs 4y ago
> There is no one single entity with enough power to clearly oppose it so people making the models can get away with "questionable copyright", "legal gray area", etc. kind of talk. Never underestimate the power of a sufficiently motivated rich individual to create legal hell (see Gawker). There are many very rich artists. There just needs to be an obvious large enough irritant which will happen as these generative models start getting used beyond toy amusements. The class action lawsuit against Copilot was filed just as pricing models started. This is going to be an interesting area to watch. Use in commercial projects at your own risk of exposure to liability.
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  The wrong and easy reaction to this is to limit these services to not include copyrighted content. The more right and really really difficult solution would be to give the original copyright holders partial rights to the output. It really feels like the textile factory worker problem all over again. We can't let the big players be the benefactors every time.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > The more right and really really difficult solution would be to give the original copyright holders partial rights to the output. That is impossible (assigning credit to training images from the output is arbitrary, not deterministic) and wouldn't help anyone (imagine Spotify except it pays you even less). > It really feels like the textile factory worker problem all over again. We can't let the big players be the benefactors every time. Industrialization is better for society because it produces more customer surplus. Even Marx thought the Luddites were wrong.
    - worldsayshi 4y ago
      >Industrialization is better for society because it produces more customer surplus. Also my point. >Even Marx thought the Luddites were wrong. Sure they are wrong in that they confuse what the problem is. If workers owned the factory they would be happy to automate the work. But their feeling of being left out has some validity because if they weren't the total value would improve. The real issue is that the revenue brought back through automation doesn't benefit the worker. If it did, the automation would happen sooner because incentives would align better and the total value for society would thus likely improve faster.
Tepix 4y ago
What if you train your AI model with three dozen films about ancient egypt and then generate a new 3d world out using the model? Seems fuzzy. But what if you use only three films? Or two?
me551ah 4y ago
I think it would be the other way around. A lot of movies(and tv shows) have games these days. You can already experience Star Wars in VR with “Star Wars Squadrons” and I’m sure we will start to see a lot more games with VR support in the future, many being based on Movies. MNCs are there to make money and they will just license it.
astrange 4y ago
> people making the models can get away with "questionable copyright", "legal gray area", etc. kind of talk. Where are they saying that? Nobody thinks it's a gray area, they think it's explicitly legal and they're probably right too. Claiming it's a copyright violation is actually a rather weak case artists are just saying is obvious. Microsoft has licensed DALL-E. They're not venturing into legal gray areas.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  Well, I think it is a grey area. The argument I heard most often goes along the lines of: "people also learn from a lot of examples and other artists, and that is not copyrighted". It is an interesting argument, but AI is not people and the argument could easily be the opposite (not taking sides here). They might think it is legal, but it is far from clear, IMHO. IANAL, but it will be interesting to see if this is enforceable and by whom.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > Microsoft [...] not venturing into legal gray areas. Their history as litigation defendants would suggest your optimism may perhaps be unfounded.
concordDance 4y ago
> The questions about the copyright of models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. exist solely because it infringes on the rights of thousands of random artists all around the world How does it infringe? Are your memories of a movie copyright infringement? https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  Not normally, but if you use those memories to re-create the movie and sell it to someone else then yeah, that's totally copyright infringement.
  - luma 4y ago
    If I am an artist and I go to art school, I'm going to spend years studying the masters to learn their techniques and style. If I then produce an impressionist portrait on canvass, informed and influenced by the years of study of existing works.... am I violating copyright?
    - Ajedi32 4y ago
      If you're creating new works inspired by copyrighted works, no that's not (or should not be) copyright infringement. If you're creating exact reproductions of copyrighted works (e.g. The Gates of Argonath from Peter Jackson's adaptation of Lord of the Rings), just in a different format (3d instead of 2d) then yeah, that probably is.
      - bscphil 4y ago
        Right. Most of the conversations about IP on this site seem to rely on extremely abstract reasoning or idealist thinking about what constitutes "property" or what a "copy" is. My understanding is that judges are not so easily misled. If you are selling a "replica statue of two kings" online that is clearly intended to resemble the Gates of Argonath, you are setting yourself up for a lawsuit. It doesn't matter if you built it from your memory of the LOTR films, used an AI to generate a bunch of similar looking statues and picked the ones most similar to the films, or what have you. In practice any judge will see that you are attempting to make money off of the LOTR IP. (Note: not legal advice.) Note that this doesn't mean that Stable Diffusion (and friends) are copyright infringing just because they're trained on copyrighted material. My brain doesn't infringe the LOTR copyright because of my memories of the films. If I turn my experience of fantasy epics into a new novel with a different storyline than LOTR, that's not copyright infringement. That's creativity. But those same memories can likewise be used to make works that are infringing. The question of infringement isn't in the creative act, it's in the artifact. I think it's plausible (though not certain of course) that IP questions will be settled for AIs in the same way: it's not infringement to train your AI on copyrighted material. It is infringement to use your AI to generate works that a reasonable person would conclude are intended to replicate or imitate copyrighted material.
moron4hire 4y ago
The copyright protected material isn't in the model. This can be figured out easily because, if they did, the models are so much smaller than the input data that it'd be literal unobtanium for compression algorithms. Copyright also has nothing to do with the tool. What a piece depicts and how it is used are much more important than how a piece was created. If I paint a picture by hand of a particular scene from a Disney movie, that's clearly a derived work and may be subject to copyright protection (it depends, there could be a fair use argument in specific situations, so even "it's copyright!" is not a cut-and-dried argument). If I paint a picture of Hercules in the style of Disney, that's trademark violation. But I can paint Hercules in any other style and Disney can't say shit (though they certainly try). This is an age-old argument. Some artists think they should have a monopoly on certain ideas. As a society, we've already said no, you only get to own your expression of your ideas. And as ideas go, "like a trending artist on ArtStation" isn't a particularly strong one.
joshspankit 4y ago
I think it would be almost trivial to build in a “generate 30% different than” (the legal amount of difference before a work is considered different than the original). That could either sidestep the entire legal question, or throw Hollywood in to a blender since so many movies/shows have been made on the back of that difference.

hutzlibu 4y ago

"Who wouldn't like to wander, fly and swim around Pandora, the world of Avatar?" Me, but I doubt it will be the same experience, if the scene is highly optimized by hand like the movie is vs. some AI generation.

auveair 4y ago

> I think it will be commonplace to virtually walk around in movie scenes turned into 3d scenery by AI by the end of next year. I would take the opposite bet, I doubt most movies have complete enough 3D scene to be AI enhanced, let alone something good enough to walk around, you wouldn't model what you won't film after all and nobody wants to see hallucinated aliens in middle earth.

Tepix 4y ago
No, AI will generate the 3d scene just by looking at the 2d footage. It can fill in the blanks (i.e. provide textures for areas that are invisible in the film).
- automatic6131 4y ago
  It will make a chuffing good effort but fail hilariously in >99% of cases but then people will parade the fraction that make sense.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    It's getting better all the time, check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y1-KlTEmwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y1-KlTEmwk

AussieWog93 4y ago

>Who wouldn't like to wander, fly and swim around Pandora, the world of Avatar? Sure, like once or twice? I could see it getting old fast, though.

andybak 4y ago
You might get bored with a specific location but not the general concept.
- lajamerr 4y ago
  I'd like a version of Tokyo that is hyper detailed and functioning transit system/lines. Spend a week preparing for a trip on how to navigate the city before actually going.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    I'd like a version of my city without trash and traffic!
  - astrange 4y ago
    You don't need practice for that, all the signs are in English and you just use Jorudan for route planning. Or Google Maps if you must, though it's gotten worse over time. nb: you may need practice to navigate Shinjuku station
- bemmu 4y ago
  Make them hangout spaces for VRChat and people will spend a lot of time in them.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  I don't know but then agree. The general concept sounds boring to me but I can see how this can be interesting for many people. For example as a Starwars fan someone must want to fly the same scenes in VR for a few times. But I think the better is to train AI to generate scenes based on description such as "dogfight in P-51 with German ME-109 in WW2 for 15 mins" and after some computation the player gets to play this game in VR for 15 mins. The problem is how to make it possible at low cost as player will probably just pay a few bucks for such experience (but you can always resell the popular ones many times)

oneoff786 4y ago

> Who wouldn't like to wander, fly and swim around Pandora, the world of Avatar This is a good example of the fundamental limits of headset VR. Jumping into a lake will never feel real. Not by touch, obviously as you can’t get wet. Not by physical movement because you almost certainly can’t move downwards irl. Not by the weight of water around you or the buoyancy you expect to feel. Not by the rotation you would expect to have in water. Probably not by the stroke propeller movement or the correlation of your breath. And of course probably overly smooth movement to avoid motion sickness. The difference between controlling a flying camera through water and believing you’re swimming is pretty big.

Jeff_Brown 4y ago
This led me to imagine people who learn to swim in VR and, because breathing is counterproductive underwater, then drown IRL.
- ChoGGi 4y ago
  Then the family suing as the city doesn't have signs warning of holding your breath while underwater.
zimpenfish 4y ago
> Not by touch, obviously as you can’t get wet [et al] What you need is a home version of the 4DX cinema setup. If VR lasts another 5 years, I'd put money on someone making one of those in that timeframe.
baandang 4y ago
Exactly. We don't have virtual reality at all. We have virtual remote viewing with sound. We are basically at the Eliza stage of VR with a bunch of people pretending Eliza is not that far from passing the Turing Test. Once we have virtual skin sensation and virtual physical movement there is no intellectual debate about any of this. Just instruction tutorials about how to have the experience because no marketing needed. Once we have this I can think of far more interesting things than swimming around in the Avatar movie.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago

> It will also lead to questions about the copyright of the resulting models I very much doubt it. Within the Movie business, the ownership of "digital assets" such as 3d models, who keeps what, and what they can legally do with it, is the subject of long and detailed contracts between the film studio, VFX houses, subcontractors etc. Ownership is well-covered, if not exactly "clear" if you're not versed in the law regarding it. A third party using any technique (AI included) to re-create a look-alike of such an asset, and to monetise this, would surely attract the "eye of Sauron" of the big studios to turn it's withering gaze upon them, and to send out a well-armed detachment of lawyers.

intrasight 4y ago

>lead to questions about the copyright It will lead to questions - but those questions will be answered by the platform owners not the courts. The platform owners will just remove your models even in cases where a court would rule it fair use. VR of real places is going to be huge - bigger than for imaginary places. My guess is that most VR worlds will be a combination. Here's a question. What if you model the real world and an architect of a building. I know that copyright doesn't apply to buildings or other functional works. But again, this will be decided by the platform owners and not the courts. Clearly there are good reasons to not have "platform owners" in the metaverse.

onion2k 4y ago

I can see this turning into a real industry. Who wouldn't like to wander, fly and swim around Pandora, the world of Avatar? Me. It sounds boring. I couldn't give a damn about exploring someone else's fantasy world. This is a bit odd because I love open world video games. I guess I need a reason to spend time there.

AlwaysRock 4y ago
Once we can generate the world quickly, how far are we from generating things to do in that world?
- LeanderK 4y ago
  I think ChatGPT showed exactly that we are not that far away. ChatGPT fine-tuned on the specific world could generate quests and make every NPC able to get interacted with
dvngnt_ 4y ago
if you watch TV, movies, read books, post games, or exist, you're already exploring someone else's world

Arelius 4y ago

Why by the end of next year? That seems optimistically short. Why hadn't it happened this year, or last? Nanite is great, but IMO doesnt change the equation that dramatically. The cost for a studio to manually decimate game quality versions have been small enough that of the will had been there, we could have been doing it for years.

smoldesu 4y ago
> Why hadn't it happened this year, or last? Having loosely followed this space, I think I might actually have some input! First off, you need a VR-ready environment. Not many companies are making these, so the only people equipped to roll this out is Valve, Meta, and possibly Unreal/Epic. Valve already did this alongside Half Life Alyx; they released certain map portions so you could freely walk around them with friends without playing the game. Meta is getting there, but the combination of low-power hardware and headset attrition doesn't leave them with much of an audience. There's also Epic, but they don't really do much in this space yet either. So, obviously a paradigm shift is needed. And frankly, I think Universal Scene Description will be that paradigm shift. TL-DR: Nvidia came up with a new standard for 3D environments that interoperates game technology with digital effects. In theory, you could take your favorite Andor or Rings of Power scenes, drag their file into another app, and just start walking around in-scene. You may end up adjusting a few things vis-a-vis scale, but once it reaches adoption I can see it being pretty easy to work with and popular. Maybe 'next year' is a little close, but the stars have definitely aligned already.
- astlouis44 4y ago
  Thoughts on the web and the role that WASM, WebGPU, and WebXR have as a distribution channel for these immersive experiences?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    WebXR feels like a solid building-block to me. Adoption will be (and has been) shaky, but with Apple being forced to adopt third-party browser engines it's revival seems likely. WASM is neat but extremely finnecky at the moment. I've seen cool stuff done with it, but I'm not convinced it's funny production ready yet. WebGPU is sorta in the same boat as WASM, if a little more realistic of a bet. People will want hardware-accelerated browser experiences soon, and WebGPU will probably do most of the lifting there.

VikingCoder 4y ago

Have you read "Ready Player One"? The author predicted that players will play a game where they will be dropped into their favorite movies, and will be given points for exactly mimicking the dialogue, inflection, and movements of the characters. Spoiler: the first one is War Games.

deleted 4y ago

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Mountain_Skies 4y ago

The Trek community created a pretty detailed model of the Enterprise-D, but took it down due to copyright concerns. It's still floating around if you know where to look but it's a real shame that development on it had to stop out of legal fears, well founded or not.