How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Storytelling
Intel just announced a collaboration with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that will bring VR, 360 replay technology, drones and AI to future Olympic experiences. In a recent press release Intel notes, “The power to choose what they want to see and how they want to experience the Olympic Games will be in the hands of the fans.”
In the context of development, future technology will change the way we interact with global communities. Researchers at Microsoft are experimenting with a new class of machine-learning software and tools to embed AI onto tiny intelligent devices. These “edge devices” don’t depend on internet connectivity, reduce bandwidth constraints and computational complexity, and limit memory requirements yet maintain accuracy, speed, and security — all of which can have a profound effect on the development landscape. Specific projects focus on small farmers in poor and developing countries, and on precision wind measurement and prediction.
Microsoft’s technology could help push the smarts to small cheap devices that can function in rural communities and places that are not connected to the cloud. These innovations could also make “the Internet of Things devices cheaper, making it easier to deploy them in developing countries,” according to a leading Microsoft researcher.
But the fact is, the non-western setting is currently the greatest challenge for AR/VR platforms. Wil Monte, founder and Director of Millipede, one of our SecondMuse collaborators says currently VR/AR platforms are completely hardware reliant, and being a new technology, often require a specification level that is cost-prohibitive to many.
Monte says labs like Microsoft pushing the processing capability of machine learning, while crunching the hardware requirements will mean that the implementation of the technologies will soon be much more feasible in a non-western or developing setting. He says development agencies should be empowered to push, optimise and democratise the technology so it has as many use cases as possible, therefore enabling storytellers to deploy much needed content to more people, in different settings.
“From our experience in Tonga, I learned that while the delivery of content via AR/VR is especially compelling, the infrastructure restraints means that we need to ‘hack’ the normal deployment and distribution strategies to enable the tech to have the furthest reach. With Millipede’s lens applied, this would be immersive and game-based storytelling content, initially delivered on touch devices but also reinforced through a physical board or card game to enable as much participation in the story as possible,” Monte says.
