The 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea opened with a high-tech display involving 1,218 drones flying in tight formation, making various shapes including the Olympic rings, a snowboarder, and other fabulous coloured shapes in the sky. It totally wowed the crowd at the event and viewers around the world, and was a tour de force of what this article is about: entertainment engineering.
Have you seen Ready Player One? In a not-too-distant future, the film depicts humanity spending most of its time in a virtual world called the Oasis. Built by fictional software genius James Halliday, the Oasis becomes a refuge for the world’s population in the face of grim living conditions in the real world due to a breakdown in geopolitics and overpopulation. In this VR world, you can be anyone or anything you want, go anywhere you like, and live out your fantasies. It’s like Second Life on steroids.
Modern smartphones have a host of software tricks to make photos look better, plus cameras in some models that are as good as dedicated digital cameras. Almost everybody has a good quality camera in their pocket at all times now. But, as the saying goes, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The technology takes care of a lot of things, like exposure, colour and effects processing, but it does not (yet) point the camera in the right place and compose a scene for you.
The current record for fastest rapper is held by Spanish rapper Chojin, who rapped 921 syllables in one minute on December 23, 2008. It’s an impressive feat, but the only trouble is that at that speed he is totally unintelligible. Good rap isn’t about speed but about rhythm and good enunciation. It’s a shame to write or improvise lots of words and garble them out so that nobody knows what you’ve said. When you’re a professional wordsmith, it’s best not to waste your words.
Many of us have dreamed about a simple and wholesome life making something at home with our own hands and selling it to make a living.
That’s cool when you’re selling samples of your handiwork to friends and family, but how will you fare on the open market with real customers making real buying decisions? They have the power to buy whatever they need from Amazon with a few clicks, and will generally only buy things with lots of five star reviews.
The world always needs new songs. They put a spring in our step as we hear them on the radio, help us reflect on painful experience and offer new angles on love, sex and death. As an important part of what makes us human, songs are always going to be valid cultural currency. And there will always be a need for people who write good ones.
Niche careers can be a good move if chosen carefully. Anyone who commits to a BSc program like the Leather Technology (Hons) from the UK’s Northampton University had better be sure the industry has a future. This one is probably a safe bet – people will always need shoes.
Wicca is a contemporary pagan new religious movement developed in England by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant, and introduced to the public in 1954. A duotheistic religion, it worships a goddess and a god - the Moon Goddess and the Horned God respectively. Wicca is based on older nature-worshipping pagan practices: Druidism, Shamanism, Heathenism, and others.
A new breed of software platform is emerging onto the training management market. It brings together in one place the many diverse functions that training managers need to keep track of, and streamlines processes for maximum responsiveness to change and increased profitability. It is known as a Training Administration System (TAS) – but what is it exactly?
When you see a child’s eyes light up at the sight of a Star Wars lightsaber, an Arduino kit or a LEGO Technic set, there’s really only one thing to do: sign them up for out-of-school geek classes. They will find themselves in their element, surrounded either physically or virtually by like-minded kids with a burning passion for technology. This welcoming environment might do something for their social skills, too, if they are lagging a bit behind their technical skills.
80 students from all around the globe are displayed on a curved screen measuring 45 square metres. The lecturer is a hologram moved around the lecture hall by a robot. The students collaborate on documents and take part in simulations in real time. The professor uses artificial intelligence and big data to run simulations that test the students’ abilities. He or she has a rolling live feed of data on students’ participation, including their emotional engagement. There is no back row of seats where students can hide. Everybody sits front and centre on the giant screen.
