How Virtual Entertainment Is Merging Cutting-Edge Technology With Legacy Techniques

A pattern we see in many industries is that technology changes alongside culture and society, and this remains true for entertainment. The most obvious to consumers has been the shift from terrestrial television to streaming services like NetflixNFLX
and AmazonAMZN
Prime. The greater flexibility allowed consumers to decouple themselves from an entertainment schedule, being dictated by broadcast times. OTT platforms are aligned with the changing patterns of casualized work and study that focus on individual freedom. The expansion of these services also took place at a time when personal digital devices were becoming a norm and allowed for media consumption to be more private and personal.

As we move beyond the legacy media of TV, film, and music, other developments are taking place in the areas of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and virtual metaverses. By taking advantage of these technological leaps, the creators of Sensorium Galaxy have brought to market an inhabited metaverse that uses cutting-edge technology to power its AI-driven avatars and brings the idea of an immortal virtual being into the realm of possibility.

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VR More Than Reinventing The Wheel

While other developments in tech have been continuations of older formats, like streaming services selling a very similar product to television, one of the areas that could be considered truly new is virtual reality.

Since taking off in the 2020s, developers and artists began to get to grips with the technology and how it could be used. Most early VR projects were ports of other media like video games or smaller experimental games.

Sensorium is the first metaverse built with virtual reality as one of its foundations. The issue with early VR platforms was that they couldn’t represent a world that felt real, they were low-resolution and cartoonish. Despite the technical limitations acknowledged by Meta PlatformsFB
CEO Mark Zuckerberg in this regard, Sensorium managed to implement photorealistic graphics to immerse the user in their new world.

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Is Digital Immortality Just a Click Away?

While artificial intelligence has been used to populate a world in the past, primarily in video games, they have often been unconvincing and uninteresting to interact with due to repetitive or generic dialogue options that were often hard-coded by the designers.

In a departure from this, Sensorium has utilized a neural network to create virtual entities that have unique personalities, and memories, and can take contextual information into account. The nature of neural networks also means that they can continually learn and grow as they habit the world.

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These AI-driven virtual beings of the metaverse, as well as the user’s avatar, can exist in the world independent of outside interference and allow for the personality traits, appearance, and memories of a user to live on in the metaverse even after they’ve gone.

This AI-driven digital immortality has also been used to resurrect the father of Surrealism, Salvador Dali. Users can talk to him about everything from his opinions on Zombie Formalism to current affairs. By using advanced AI, metaverse users can have fluid conversations with the historic figure as if – to a degree – he never left.

These AI lifeforms can even extend outside of the metaverse. Relationships and conversations can be maintained through users’ mobile phones, with the AI personality shining through in their interaction with humans, taking photos and videos to share as they live out their lives in the metaverse.

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How Do We Redefine Our Legacy Techniques?

As we saw with technologies like video streaming services, music streaming, and online news; forms of entertainment become democratized and more accessible over time. They also all relate back to the core human activities of communal stories and music.

By pairing virtual reality with a perpetually inhabited metaverse, you can allow for concerts to take place outside of geographic and financial boundaries. While some of the early ‘proto-metaverses’ like Multi-User Dungeons allowed for a very abstract communal experience, this new focus on photorealistic graphics and being able to move through an actual environment and interact with avatars and human inhabitants fluidly, brings the experience close to a real world concert.

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By featuring artists like Steve Aoki and David Guetta, the platform could be a major next step in how we culturally express ourselves through technology. By continually pushing technology past its limits and using AI to create virtual companions, we stand a chance to reshape our experiences in the virtual realm, making them as impactful as those in the physical world.