Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1453602
32 cgw j a n u a r y • f e b r u a r y • m a r c h 2 0 2 2 A slow and steady recovery from the COVID-19 crisis has been mission-crit- ical for 2021. As we head into a new year, it's hard to predict what the future holds for a world still hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. One thing remains comfortingly famil- iar — the rapid pace at which technology continues to evolve and adapt, giving rise to new ways of working, thinking, and creating. Here, then, are the top fi e 2022 trends set to affect the media and entertainment industry, and what they mean for content creators everywhere. THE METAVERSE Mark Zuckerberg's ringing endorsement of the metaverse, coupled with Facebook changing its name to Meta, meant that the term and all it entails came barreling into the common zeitgeist earlier this year. At 2021's Facebook Connect main keynote, Zuckerberg described the metaverse as an " even more immersive and embodied Internet" where "you're going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create… as well as entirely new categories that don't really fit h w we think about computers or phones today." Zuckerberg mentioned the term "metaverse" 80-plus times in a 90-minute presentation, admitting that "the best way to understand the metaverse is to experi- ence it yourself; it's a little tough because it doesn't fully exist yet." What we do know is that the possibilities of the metaverse are endless. The common picture is a collective of avatars existing in one universe to interact with, along with the ability to own, create, and exchange virtual property as you would physical property, existing within a shared universe featuring IPs from multiple companies. The final esult may be full-3D telepresence via VR or AR glasses, Ready Player One-style. Several technologies are combining to make the metaverse — also sometimes referred to as "Web 3.0" — gain steam. Advances in virtual and augmented reality, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and 5G net- works combine to promise a metaverse that is immersive and decentralized. Later down the line, human augmentation in the form of brain-computer interfaces may further blur the lines between physical and virtual worlds. What does all this mean for visual effects, animation, and beyond? Certainly new ways of creating content, to support new means of viewing from a much wider audience. Anticipating this, Unity's acquisition of VFX giant Weta Digital comes as no coincidence — the deal is meant to unlock the full po- tential of the Unity engine for future content creators expanding into the metaverse. The merging of different tech and tools as in such cases means further pipeline disrup- tion can be expected, as the lines between production are blurred. Yet, there are some caveats that come with the rise of the metaverse. The question begs as to whether this next-generation Internet will mirror today's, with user data monetized by proprietary platforms such as Facebook and Google, or whether it will reject the control of big tech and be more open and decentralized. Should the latter happen, then content creators can anticipate a level of never-before-seen artistic freedom. MACHINE LEARNING As expected, advances in AI continue to move at pace. The emergence of low-code machine learning (ML), enabling developers around the world to engage in the funda- mentals of ML without the rigors of tricky coding, has made it more accessible than ever before, bringing about its adoption in bigger droves. Low-code ML platforms for beginners include Microsoft owerApps, Visual LANSA, and OutSystems. Google AutoML is a completely no-code platform that trains high-quality custom machine learning models with minimum effort. Meanwhile, Foundry's own NukeX and Nuke Studio feature updated AI tools as part of Nuke's recent 13.1 release to accelerate the artistic process — namely new sup- port for third-party PyTorch models in the Inference node. With PyTorch being one of the leading machine learning frameworks, it's a key part of many ML pipelines. The new support allows artists to load custom and third-party models into Nuke, which, in turn, opens Nuke up to a vast range of communi- ty-generated machine learning models. Other key compositing tasks, such as keying and rotoscoping, can be mastered by machine learning. Just this year, Foundry's research team wrapped Project SmartROTO, which aimed to speed up the traditionally time-consuming rotoscoping process via artist- assisted machine learning. The idea was that artists would create a set of shapes and a small set of keyframes, and Smar- tROTO — specifi ally, the ML tech behind it — would speed up the process of setting in- termediate keyframes across the sequences. While productization of SmartROTO is still a long way off, the story behind the project stands as part of Foundry's ongoing efforts to make ML accessible to artists by taking complicated algorithms and making them available to solve hard technical problems in an artist-friendly way. Elsewhere, key movers and shakers in the ML space include Digital Domain, whose proprietary facial capture system, Masquerade 2.0, can deliver a photoreal- istic 3D character and dozens of hours of performance in a few months. Meanwhile, at Nvidia's November 2021 conference, CEO 2 0 2 2 T R E N D S F I V E T R E N D S S E T T O S H A P E 2 0 2 2 — A N D B E YO N D Foundry (www.foundry.com)