News and Announcements
How Virtual Reality Could Change Moviegoing – 8i
- Published January 29, 2016 11:07AM UTC
- Publisher Wholesale Investor
- Categories Company Updates
28th January 2016, CNN By Lorenza Brascia and Stephanie Elam
You’re standing on the edge of a cliff, hundreds of feet above a snaking river. Your palms are sweaty. Your heart is beating fast.
Someone tells you to jump, but everything in your body screams, “Don’t do it!” Your brain is having a hard time overriding what your eyes are seeing in the goggles you wear on your face.
“Jump!” you’re told again.
It’s actually a harmless request, since this is virtual reality. Instead of a cliff’s edge you’re standing on a carpeted floor in a lounge at the Sundance Film Festival and you’ve been watching “The Climb,” a brief film made by 8i, a startup that creates virtual reality, or VR, content.
“Your logical side is saying, ‘I’m in a headset. I’m in this room.’ But your emotional side is saying, ‘I’m on a cliff. I could die here. I don’t want to jump,'” said 8i co-founder and CEO Linc Gasking.
Virtual reality, the emerging technology that is poised to transform video gaming, is also coming to the movies. Here at Sundance 2016, more VR experiences than ever are being showcased as part of the film festival’s New Frontier program, which celebrates new or alternative forms of creative expression.
Ramzi Haidamus, president of Nokia Technologies, says the development of VR for filmmakers has been a long time in the works. He recently spearheaded OZO, the first virtual-reality camera designed specifically for Hollywood-grade filmmakers. Haidamus has been experimenting with virtual reality for years and says the technology is making huge strides.
“I couldn’t jump,” Haidamus said after trying out “The Climb.” He credits audiences’ hunger to be closely connected to stories and VR’s appealing price point as being a “perfect storm” for the technology this year.
To read the full story, please click here.
Company Updates
BlackRock has named the next Economy. What this latest paper means for Private Market Investors.
BlackRock has put a name on something the smart money has been circling for two years. Its digital assets research team calls it the machine-native economy. The thesis fits in one line. AI is machine-native intelligence. Digital assets are machine-native money. Both are built on the same architecture, and they are converging into a single […]
Where’s the beef? Blackstone just answered the AI question.
In 1984, a fast food ad asked a question that became a catchphrase. Where’s the beef? Jon Gray, President of Blackstone, used that line this month in front of global LPs. It is the question every capital allocator is asking about AI. Trillions of dollars are going into chips, data centres and power. That is […]
The Best of Both Worlds: How Omnique Fund is Rewiring Real World Assets via Tokenisation
For decades, the playbook for Australia’s wholesale investors has remained relatively unchanged: pick between the slow-moving, illiquid reliability of tangible assets like property and gold, or chase the frictionless, high-velocity liquidity of public equity and digital markets. But as macroeconomic volatility spikes and a structural housing deficit reshapes private debt demand, sophisticated investors are demanding […]
Backed By Leading Investment Groups and Family Offices
