Computer Graphics (4)
MFW released the promotional video for Quickshaka.
It showed a teenage girl named Anna surfing out on the sea in Quickshaka surfwear, and it also unveiled a beach editorial of her in a rash guard and swimsuit.
Quickshaka was one of the hottest brands around these days, so the model behind the campaign drew intense attention as well.
The video and the photo spread racked up an enormous number of views.
And just as everyone was busy wondering who the model really was, MFW made a bombshell announcement.
Anna is a metahuman who runs freely through the digital world. Please support her.
People were stunned by the news.
It wasn’t as if there had never been any promotion using virtual humans before.
But because of the usual awkwardness, those efforts had never won over the public. Anna was different.
Fortunately, most people accepted it naturally, though there were still plenty who felt uneasy about the fact that she wasn’t a real human being.
And then, right in the middle of all that, the famous British tabloid Yellow Express floated a conspiracy theory.
The paper interviewed an anonymous insider who claimed to have gone to school with Anna, then argued that she might actually be a real person trapped in Korea and forced to shoot photos and videos. It even analyzed the shape of her fingers and the way she squinted in the footage, insisting that those were distress signals and that she was pleading for rescue.
The article spread across Facenote and ignited the internet. Before long, people were signing petitions to rescue Anna from captivity.
Before the controversy could grow any further, MFW released another video.
It showed Anna running wild through the digital world. While she was playing Block Valley at home, she literally jumped into the game itself.
Her appearance changed to match a Block Valley character. Anna roamed through the game’s worlds, meeting other characters, and then she leaped straight into the middle of a battlefield in Nightlight.
Her appearance changed again, this time reshaping itself to fit Nightlight.
As soon as the video blew up, the outlet that had published the first article quietly deleted it.
When people protested, Yellow Express fired back, saying that if they were locked inside a computer and someone was freely producing videos and photos of them, then wasn’t that still imprisonment and forced labor?
Now that it had been exposed as a virtual human, people naturally became curious about how MFW had made the video in the first place.
No matter how widespread computer graphics had become, a video this meticulously crafted would normally have been possible only at a Hollywood CG studio, and the price tag would not have been small.
That question was answered sooner than anyone expected.
Prisoner released the teaser video for Zombienado 3.
The short teaser, just one minute and thirty seconds long, showed zombies fighting in the zero-gravity void of space.
Ever since Zombienado 2, public interest had skyrocketed, and within a day of its release, the teaser had already racked up more than ten million views on ATube.
What was shocking was the quality of the video.
Even though Zombienado was widely respected as a B-movie series, no one had ever praised its CG.
Even Angry Rabbitjo, the famous film critic who had showered the series with praise, had once said, “I could make better CG by kicking it together with my feet.”
But the CG in this newly released teaser was on a completely different level.
“This is insane!”
“Zombienado 3 is being made with graphics like that?”
“Prisoner can make CG at this level?”
“Wait, why are zombies fighting in space, though?”
“Is the genre space zompera or something?”
“Ah, that’s a little disappointing. Bad CG that looks like it was made with their feet is kind of Zombienado’s thing.”
“LOL, for real. The CG is too clean—it actually feels weird.”
“I’m still hyped, though. This is going to be insane in a theater.”
“Is the third one going to get a theatrical release too?”
“I’m bingeing Zombienado 1 and 2 right now!”
Prisoner CEO Linus made an official statement.
Prisoner also founded a CG-specialist subsidiary called Alcatraz and began recruiting staff, with the intention of taking on the Hollywood CG market.
Hollywood was thrown into chaos by the announcement.
“A program made by Snow Crash?”
“So AI analyzes the data and stages the most natural-looking scene possible?”
“If it can render a virtual human that naturally, then deepfakes and de-aging should be no problem.”
“It could be useful for animation too.”
Visual effects, or VFX, were born alongside movies themselves.
Filmmakers had studied every possible method for creating scenes that were impossible in reality.
They used special makeup on actors, built miniatures, painted backgrounds onto cellophane and filmed them through the camera as matte paintings, or even drew directly on the film strip frame by frame.
But after computer graphics entered the picture, the market was transformed.
Work that had once been done painstakingly by hand could now be handled through the computer’s processing power.
It was now hard to find a film that didn’t use CG, and it had become routine for actors to perform in tights before green screens with sensors attached to their bodies.
De-aging someone to make them look younger, or swapping in another person’s face, was now entirely possible.
As Hollywood’s film market grew larger every year, the video CG market exploded right along with it.
The two companies that stood out most were IML, under Dazzney, and Newland Digital in Australia.
Those two had in effect formed a duopoly, with a scattering of smaller companies clustered around the edges.
And then, out of nowhere, a company appeared that could crack that monopoly wide open.
Absurdly enough, it was a B-movie studio that Hollywood had always looked down on.
I got a call from Prisoner CEO Linus.
"Ever since Loki was released, Hollywood’s been in an uproar. Movie studios and broadcasters are all contacting us first, saying they want to sign contracts."
He probably just meant they wanted to start with some simple CG work and see what kind of quality they could get.
As far as recent films were concerned, Hollywood’s CG had already reached a point where the human eye could no longer tell the difference.
Deepfake and de-aging were now commonplace.
Everything Loki could do was already possible with existing software.
But if you used Loki, you could slash both cost and time dramatically, while also getting better-looking results.
That alone was a massive advantage for production companies.
"Thank you so much. I never expected you’d make such an incredible program for us."
“Not at all.”
I hadn’t made it myself anyway.
"When your CEO came by with CEO Lucas and told us about it, I honestly wasn’t expecting much... Wait. Don’t tell me you intentionally arranged for CEO Lucas to meet us that day? So he could make Loki for us? I’ll never forget this kindness!"
“Well...”
I already knew Sid had made Loki for Prisoner, but I hadn’t expected him to decide so impulsively in the middle of that meeting.
Still, if Linus wanted to think it had all been my doing, there was no need to correct him.
After ending the call, I thought it over.
Chairman Song Gazuki had adopted an AI swarm strategy, investing with Softbox at the center and linking the startups he backed into an organic network.
The way I operated was similar.
The key here was Snow Crash’s cloud.
Through cloud computing, I connected every company into a single organic system. That was possible because I had the world’s best AI program, Mimir, and the world’s greatest genius, Sid Lucas.
Loki, the new platform that had just come out, was one piece of that system.
Originally it had been meant as a tool for Prisoner’s CG work, but I adapted it to fit the related companies as well—using it to create virtual humans and expanding it into fashion and management.
And there were still a few more ways to make use of it.
Senior Dongho asked me, “Tizen’s up for sale this time. Aren’t you interested?”
“How much are they asking?”
“Three hundred billion won.”
Tizen was a homegrown Korean OTT service.
It had about 1.3 million subscribers, but it had been put on the market because it couldn’t keep up with the snowballing losses.
OTT stood for Over The Top, and in this context the “top” referred to the set-top box used to receive video.
In other words, OTT meant VOD and internet broadcasting that went beyond the traditional set-top box.
The pioneer in this market was Netplay.
Starting out as a company that rented videos and DVDs online, Netplay created a service that let users subscribe to videos on computers and smartphones, and it became a massive hit.
At first, broadcasters and film studios gladly handed their content over to Netplay, because they regarded it as nothing more than extra revenue.
But as internet speeds improved and content consumption surged, OTT became the core of the video market, and Netplay grew into the largest content company of all.
Once everyone realized OTT was a money-maker, broadcasters and studios pulled their content back from Netplay and launched their own services, and then big tech companies joined the race too.
Dazzney Plus, Enple TV, AMZ Prime, HOB Max, and more.
With domestic Korean OTT services added to the mix, around ten companies were now competing in the space. The price war was so vicious that the firms that couldn’t keep up either merged to bulk up or were put up for sale.
I thought for a moment, then shook my head.
“Forget it. There’s nothing worth grabbing here anymore.”
No matter how big the OTT market got, it still couldn’t compare to games. Games were one pillar of the metaverse, while video was a market of its own.
I told Dongho, “What matters is content.”
“Content?”
“If you’ve got good content, you can line every OTT platform up and charge whatever price you want. So let’s invest in content.”