CES 2024: The future of experience
[Music and Voice-over] How do you know what's real? The fundamentals of our perception are what we can see, hear and touch. But what happens when you can't discern the virtual world from the real world? What if we weren't bound by nature's rules? Day could switch to dawn in an instant. Clear skies could turn into a torrential rainstorm. Rain transforms into a sub-zero blizzard instantaneously.
And what if we want to move from our snow-covered forest to the snow-capped peaks of a mountain. With a sudden change we're sunbathing at the beach. Where you are is right here and nowhere at the same time. You're inside a simulation that's infinitely complex, yet simple enough a child can use it. But what's underneath it all? Millions of pixels powered by Vu’s ground-breaking virtual production technology. Real time rendering enables immediate feedback that helps teams test ideas and make decisions in the moment. What you see is what you get. Define and modify lighting, camera movement, characters and set dressing on a per shot basis.
All in service of your store with real time photorealistic ray traced rendering, real time compositing, cinematic post-processing effects and advanced physics simulations. Vu delivers everything it takes to create a story that's never been told, all while taking the complexity out of the process. Designed for creatives by creatives. With the ability to experience your changes instantly, you can iterate at the speed of your imagination and make creative choices when it matters most.
It's the future we've always wanted. And now it's here. And we've taken it a step further by unlocking The Vu Network. A growing collection of studios around the world connected by high-speed data and allowing for connected experiences with global creative support. Vu is complete freedom at the tip of your fingers,
only limited by your imagination. So the real question is: what will you imagine? Hello. Welcome to the future of experiences. My name is Tim and I'm the CEO of Vu. Vu is a creative technology company that specializes in virtual production.
Some of the tech that you just saw here. And today, we're at this exciting inflection point in technology where computer graphics and display technology is becoming so good that the camera can't actually discern between the person and the display behind it. And so this is allowing us to never leave the studio but be able to shoot all around the world. And even outside of this world. In fact, the last year we shot 2000 different productions across our virtual network. And what you'll see here is it's all across the board from top gun promos, with Tom Cruise to Super Bowl commercials with Carrie Underwood.
And even here in Las Vegas, a feature film with Nicolas Cage. The use cases we've been able to find in media and entertainment have become very obvious, because what you can do when you can control every part of the background allows the storytelling to be so much more exciting. In fact, we were on a shoot recently for an electric car company where we were moving around the cars that were in the background. And you know, if you're on set, that takes time to get into each of them, drive them around. But on a virtual set, you just pick it up with the mouse slide it over. And as the car went in the air, one of the creative director said, Wait,
wait, wait. You can make the cars fly. I was like, “yeah, at no extra cost”. We’re just, you know, dragging them up in the air. He said, “Well, we should actually make the commercial where all the gas cars are just floating up in the air." And on the spot we're changing the creative and the whole commercial came out so much better because of it. And what we found is that when you give creatives the freedom to really iterate at the speed of thought, when they have a spark or their imagination gets excited, so many cool results happen. Now, it wasn't always this way because 15 years ago I was shooting location, location. In fact,
most of our business was all around North America and traveling to the UK to shoot commercials. And when 2020 hit, COVID happened, our business was pretty much going out of business. You know, if we couldn't travel to where we needed to go, we couldn't shoot. You got to remember, the background's 50% of every shot. It's actually many times the biggest actor in the scene. It gives context to the content. And so if you have no location,
it's a very difficult job as a as a video director. And so we saw that Disney was doing with this technology and they were using it in The Mandalorian for some of the feature film work. But we thought, man, that's that looks so expensive. It was a bit of a science experiment. How are we going to figure this out? And so we started with a small screen and just shooting product. We were shooting
some Jack Daniels product on there. And when we saw this in the camera, it was very obvious that we were never going to take that product out into the field again. You know, that ten foot screen three months later turned into a 100 foot screen that we built. And we were very fortunate to have Mercedes come in and be the first shoot in there. But ever since that day, we haven't stopped with building the studio network. And so today,
for the past 28 consecutive months, we've been building studio after studio. And the turning point for us was really realizing the use cases we never saw coming. So I'm going to show you a quick example here and then I want to show you what Accenture has opened our eyes to. So this is the virtual background here. So the commercial maybe in the desert,
but with now with generative AI, the ability for the director to say, “I want trees on here” or “I want to bring in the haze” or “turn it to night time”. This ability to control just at the speed of your command is allowing us so much more possibilities. And I want to take you to an actual background here. Let's go to the city scene where you'll get to see what the camera's seeing in this and then what the output is. So on my left here, you'll see us in the studio and we're shooting on this sunset scene. But because we can control the parameters of the daytime, that magic hour lasts much longer than one hour. So in the TV world, you know,
you're always chasing sunrises and sunsets. It's the most beautiful time. But that that hour that that sunset happens is really five minutes when you pull the camera out and you're never guaranteed. So holding it up in the sky is really what a lot of videographers are chasing. When we had Accenture come in, we realized they had a much bigger vision for this, though. They weren't just using this to create content, they thought about this for creating ideas. Because what if you come in here and you wanted to have a product idea
or a business idea come on this screen at that same speed? And unlike green screen, where everyone has to co-hallucinate, each imagine a different thing. You could have a visual definition of “This is what I think it looks like”. “This is where I think it could go”. And that was what Dave and Jason were chasing. And it's been an incredible partnership ever since. Dave, if you want to come talk about what you guys have brought to this technology.
Yeah, I'm immediately going to go off script. My massive regret from last year at CES was Jason kept pulling me aside. He was like, “You've got to go visit the Vu team and see their studio”. And I just couldn't, I couldn't I didn't make it happen. And it was an immediate regret. It took a couple of months later and I finally visited and, you know, Tim and the team have been amazing showing us the potential of this. And then Jason and I and
the rest of the team that's been engaged, to us, we immediately saw the potential for our business because if you boil it down, we're storytellers, right? I took my daughter to work years ago, and she came home and said to the rest of the family, “I finally know what Dad does”. Everyone kind of paused and looked at her. Yeah, she was eight at the time. This is more than a few years ago, she said, “Dad draws pictures and tells stories”. And I looked at her like “Damn, you nailed it!” That's exactly what we do. We're constantly trying to bring conversations to
imagine something new and the possibilities and the power of this to be able to bring, you know, as Tim said, bring us to the to the context of the content of the conversation is wildly powerful. So we're going to have some fun. This is going to be this is going to be fluid. Things might break. We want to make this interactive to some degree, but we want to show you some of what our early thinking is around how this might apply not only to Accenture for its own business, but our work with many of you as our clients and how we might interact differently going forward.
I do believe this is the end of PowerPoint. So let's go. Let's go to where we do what we do. Let's go to one of our conference rooms. Look familiar? It's got a whiteboard. We might gather around. We'll brainstorm some things on sticky notes and, and we've got, you know, small LED screens that we might host an interaction with. So let's now go a step further. We've been doing a lot of work with NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform. We've got a huge lineage of doing work with digital twins in an
operational context and being able to work within a digital twin of an environment. We might pull Omniverse up on one of the LED screens in our environment and we'd all stand around it and invite everyone to come up and we'd stand. And the power of NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform is this amazing high fidelity really detailed – it's one of the heaviest digital twin engines out there – to really be able to envision shop floor design, workflow, operating model and be able to go into this in headset. We can be fully immersed in this, but you know, three of us standing around the size of an LED screen, it could be this. We get all of us. We are in the environment, in scale. We can walk it, we can experience it. The ability to be able to navigate this environment will show you some things later about, you know, the ability to navigate in this kind of context. But this now, we drive a totally different conversation. So
we've purchased a couple of these. We're starting to install them in our offices. The whole notion, if you look around CES, the size of the screens and all of the booths are getting bigger. This construct of “let's bring ourselves more to a scale experience all around us”. It's, building, it's moving. We're starting to apply it. We're having this conversation at scale is totally different than, you know, being on a small screen. Then you get into the interactive part of it. My favorite part of Omniverse is that it includes
a full physics engine. And so if I were to do an action to actually trigger an event, the fidelity of the physics of how these boxes are falling, how these shells are knocking over into each other, Omniverse platform, one of the special part is it encodes into each of the objects the notion of will it bounce or break? You know, the tensile strength, the reflection of light on top of it. Again, this just extends the notion of if you're in one of these environments, you can lose yourself to it, which is what we want to do. We want to bring people along a story and really envision and imagine the transformation that we're trying to trigger. So this is a lot of fun. Let's go to a totally different environment.
So we've been doing a ton of work with Microsoft Mesh and these environments and Jason and team have done an amazing job of building this onboarding experience. Jason, I want you to take it from here. Thanks, David. I'm Jason Warnke. I lead experiences here at Accenture and I was here last year actually talking about what we were doing with Microsoft Mesh to imagine new experiences for Accenture's employees, the onboarding experience in particular. And we talked a lot about deploying headsets and at the time we were all remote. And the way that you
interacted while you were remote in a more, more immersive way was to actually put on a headset. But as soon as we saw this, like Dave and I went to the studio with Tim, we immediately started to have the ideas. What happens when we get back together? We're going to be I'm going to borrow a line from my good friend James Temple, from his talk yesterday. We were doing a lot of we were in we were back together.
People are in conference rooms and our heads are down. They're all together. And they might be looking at an immersive world inside of something like Mesh. Those remote might have a headset on. But what happens for all those folks that have finally convened together? This is a much better way to go into that virtual environment and participate in that world with those remote.
But I don't have a headset. I don't have any controllers, so how do I move around this world? Well again, we're going to we're going to try some stuff here and there's a camera up in the corner. And through motion control, I am going to navigate my way around so if you can see the image on the far right. There's one behind me as well. The camera is tracking a ton of different points on my body. No mocap. This is just pure visual capture from the camera and a way to navigate through the space so that I can go visit my colleagues that are in headset, remote, actually from around the world. We have a lot of our colleagues from other parts of the world.
In fact, a number of my friends from India today, we're going to stop and say, hello, everyone, good to see you. They can hear me. Unfortunately, we didn't do the feedback back. We didn't want to have people talking. But you can see there are folks on the other side and that that interaction, by just moving through this space, you can see the different ways I can move through that and navigate through the space.
So you can start to imagine where you have these experiences, where there might be conference rooms or entire – oh I'm doing my motion, I better stay still – entire parts of your facility that have the environment where you can convene with your colleagues around the world in something like Microsoft Mesh. So we love obviously we love the experience in headsets. And as headsets become even less obtrusive and lightweight, you can wear them longer. Then you can imagine where you can walk around and you can do this sort of thing. But until that happens, this is possible now. So another thing we're doing
with Mesh and I talked about this a little bit last year, but I'm going to bring it to life. Larger scale is we now have completely changed the way that we design our offices. So I'm going to show you what we've done in this case with our new Washington, DC office. We started to build as soon as we get to a CAD drawing from the architects, we immediately take that into mesh so that we can start not only to imagine what that looks like, but we can actually have collaborative design sessions with our colleagues from around the world and make decisions at a much cheaper point in that in that process. So what you're seeing here is an event space. And one of the things we were worried about is what are all the possible configurations of that event space? When we brought it into the digital using the digital twin inside of mesh, we could play around with all kinds of configurations for events and meetings, workshops and then feel in headset what it felt like to be in those different situations. So it used to happen.
We get all the way to the point – you've all been there – you go through a design session, you get all the way to where you've built it. You're doing a ribbon cutting and a big executive comes through and they say, “Ooh, I didn't expect that room to be there and that size”. We've made the ability to make those decisions at a much cheaper point. So that's another great example. But Dave, you're doing some really neat stuff with our clients around how you use these digital twins, way beyond what I was thinking.
Just to one of them. We've all done fire safety training. Right? And it's pretty much looks like this, like grab the fire extinguisher, pull the pin, aim at fire, you know, sweeping motion, the ability now with, you know, these you know, Jason described a design scenario, the ability to actually do things like let's actually put people in the fire raise heart rate and blood pressure and, you know, and actually create much more sophisticated scenarios. These digital twins, the immersive collaborative digital twins, suddenly become operational. They become something that you can use, you know, not just for the production and build, but the ongoing operations. And so that notion of something as simple as fire safety training can be done in a way that actually really trains you. That's right. The other neat by-product of this, is as soon as we're done, we can start to put this
analysis into Mesh so that our new employees that will get the opportunity to occupy their new office soon, they can start to have events in that space before they've even gotten there. And I had an experience when we did this with our one Manhattan West office in New York City. I had been in that digital twin so much before I had gotten to the building that I knew where everything was at. So that's an incredible thing. We used to do a ton to like
welcome people in and give them tours and they'd have to give them 20 tours, especially in a space that size until they knew where everything was. Now you can do that digitally much earlier. So imagine if you had a space like this all the time. How might you change the way you do your business? Tim you have a really cool story about this. Yeah. So down in South Florida, we met a customer about two years ago
that that wanted a virtual studio of the kind we typically make. And after they started using it, they started realizing similar use cases. They're like, “you know what? Now we need a virtual operating room. We want to have a simulator on campus.” And so they built something called Studio X, which was this whole part of their campus now, that's all forward thinking on the simulation side and what was really interesting, it's exactly right to your point, Dave, that, you know, they're getting so much more productivity now out of everything they do training, marketing, because they realize that doing is expensive, but trying is cheap. And if you can try more, you can do more.
And so now their training sessions happen all here virtually. They're able to do their product design virtually. They're able to shoot their videos with zero travel. And so what we've seeing now, two years later is that it wasn't just the marketing department that got increased productivity, it was the simulation, it was the training, it was the onboarding, it was the internal comms and so it's been a way that embracing these virtual environments has really helped.
But I want to tell you a little bit behind this tech, because this room's interesting. We call it the holodeck because there's no control in there. So it's only a human control interface, meaning when you walk into the room, they have a 1500 product catalog. You say the name of the product that you want to see, it comes on the screen, just like Jason was showing you there. It has body tracking in it and it's aware who presented the request. So as they put it on the screen now they can move it around. Kind of like what
you've seen in the Minority Report. And we start to see these themes emerge that, you know, the holodeck out of the Star Trek and gesture tracking out of the Minority Report, things that we used to see in science fiction films are now science fact. They're here. And this isn't a future. This is things that are deployed and are being
used today. But I want to show you this next slide, because what we've found is, this is a very custom integration, but this is a product that we felt a lot of enterprises would benefit from. And so we created something called The Vu 1. And that's essentially everything that you would see in a smart TV, but put it in a large format display with all the capabilities we just described. So no longer having a year long process of a custom integration, but being able to really get a product into the boardroom in a month or two and now have this capability, you know, for a lifetime.
So you want to talk a little more on that Jason. We think this is a really cool opportunity to have different form factors in our offices. We can't all have space this size, so these different form factors that you can get in front of and have that interactivity I think is really cool. So another use case we thought about is again blending virtual and physical. What if we brought in a live individual from somewhere else? And so who better to do that than to invite our own global head of innovation, my friend Adam Burden? Adam, welcome to CES.
Jason, I am doing great and hello Las Vegas CES… wow! Well, hey, Adam, I think you have a talk tomorrow. What's your talk all about? My session tomorrow is going to be called Survival of the Boldest, and it's about how we bring innovation and how organizations break innovation into their corporate cultures in times of change. That’s very cool. I have no idea where you're at, but I can tell you
it's going to be a long time for you to get here. How are you going to get here? See Jason there are advantages when you get to ___________. And one of those is we get to work with amazing innovation in the fields of robotics, quantum technology and even space tech. In fact, we're working on something right now and the areas are time dilation and I think it's going to help me get there. Okay, you have a few hours. Let's see how you do it.
Adam Just give me a moment. Jason Warnke Adam? Oh, there he is! [Laughs] Now we can go to the next screen. Let's continue to run with the scissors here. So that was bringing a real human digitally into our environment. Now, for those of you haven't, if you've seen the mAIr demo, we're going to bring Mary Hamilton as a digital human into our environment and interact. So, you know, hey, mAIr, how's it going? Hi, David. And hello to everyone joining us today. It's fantastic to be here. Excellent. Yes, I brought the whole CES crew. So what's new?
Well, as Mary Hamilton's digital twin, I'm thrilled to share that Generative AI is emerging as a key trend this year. David, I'm curious to see how we can bring this trend to life in a creative way. Want to help add a cool image to my wall? Sure. What image would you like? I give you carte blanche. Or, as they say in French carte blanche. Okay, that's great. I know you're a Trekkie. So how about a spaceship heading for Mars?
That would be amazing. And yes, I am a Trekkie. And for the record, I love Star Wars just as much. By the way, for our conversation today, I've added a little extra security to make sure no one can override your suggestions. Oh, yeah? What type of security? I've added Yolby voice technology that isolates your voice. Even in
a crowd. So I'll only respond to you. Go ahead, test it out. Billy come here. Try to talk to mAIr. Billy Hi mAIr. Can you hear me? Nope. mAIr, can you hear me? Mary Yes. Loud and clear. Awesome. All right. What a cool security feature. It looks like
the image is ready. There it is. Do you like it? Actually, the space motif may be too cliche at this point. Can we try one more? Sure. Okay. What do you have in mind? Well, we are in Vegas, so let's dream big. Okay. How about a bird's eye view of the Vegas strip in the style of Basquiat? Let's do it. And while the GenAI is working on that, I just wanted to let everyone know
that they can interact with me at the Looking Glass hologram booth later on, I can help them create customized CES itineraries, learn about Accenture's tech trends, tell them where the bathroom is, and more. For your businesses, there are so many ways of leveraging an emotive digital human like me to represent your brand. Help your customer support experts, assist in onboarding sales and more.
All right. That's a great point. Hey, let's pose and take a selfie. Okay. Sounds great. Here we go. One. Two. Three. Cheese Dave Treat All right. My fault. Okay. Again. Cheese! Everyone, once more. Cheese! That was fun. Thanks, y'all. All right. Sounds great. Bye mAIr! So if you're paying attention over in the corner, that was the code capturing my voice. And, you know, and then obviously the
prompts and then the security feature, you know, was truly on. And she couldn't hear you couldn't hear Billy’s voice. We have that applied over there. That's why you're speaking into a microphone that can be coded to an individual human.
[Dave Treat] All right. So from here, let's go back to the… we're not going back to the board room. Where are we on? Well, we could do a live demo, if you like, of the Generative AI. Yeah. Okay, so let's go. So going back to where we started, right, we pulled up. Maybe we might invite one of the retail companies in to do a shoe product design. Right? What would that have looked like or what does that look like today? So
today that's, you know, a design thinking session. We go into one of our offices. Maybe we've got an artist in the room. They start to draw on the whiteboard. We get ideas from all of you. We get Post-it notes, we rank them, we sort them. Maybe we then send it out to an artist. They're going to do a rendering. We've got a whole linear process to be able to try to envision a product design, but there is a better way.
So let's give it a go. You can do this in real time. You see the camera up here with the little red light? It's going to look at this shoe, and we'll show you a reference video so you can see it on here. Now, let's go ahead and bring this up. All right. Oh, there's me. So a couple of things I'll just tell you about real quick here. So it’s taking this image and it's unprompted right now. Actually, it's hearing every word I'm saying on this prompt, so I better be careful what I'm saying. But we’re doing
two constraints. One is we're telling the AI we want it to look at this shoe and emulate something back that's going to be like the shoe. But I can modify it with a speech prompt. That's going to be an interesting one, which will then modify itself to give the best result.
So let's see here. All right, good. We got to switch the camera. So I'm going to say diamond studded shoe in a Louis Vuitton fashion with gold bottom. All right. And so what you'll see here is it's starting to make a variation from what it solved and now in real time putting some of those attributes. And what's really interesting is we're doing “free think”, and the computer right now… We have it set to about one frame every second. So it's having a thought every second. But we can have this free think over time and continue to go. In fact, if we see something we like, we could iterate on it. And so, if you guys don't mind, pull up
one of the ones from earlier when we just pulled this out, and we can show you across the screen. So if we wanted to take one of those and then iterate, you could have hundreds of ideas off of a single idea. Now we've done this before and we actually left the room and forgot that the system was on and it was creating thousands of ideas that honestly, half of them were pretty good, and so when you think about how computers will think with us in the future, it's not just intelligence.
Now we're looking at creativity. Does anyone want to come up and give it a prompt? Let’s go from a shoe to a hiking boot in the mountains. All right. One thing I'll tell you too that's really interesting is in between the model change, so now we're seeing it was generating the Louis Vuitton and then there's about three different ones in between before it switches over. What we found is that if you're throwing a lot of ideas at it, the most interesting ideas are actually in between two ideas. So you had one different than me, but the intersection of your idea and my idea is a really good idea sometimes.
A shoe inspired by a sports car. An orange sports car. So it's really cool is now if think about having all of the brainpower of your team in the room and the blending of their ideas together, coming to life. So one of the abstractions we can do is how much we want the constraint of this composition. So if we want it to be just a shoe-like figure, then we put it at 100%.
But let's abstract it slightly here. In fact, let's, let's call for this shoe to be a car and let's see if we can do that. You want to do that, Dave, on the mic. Oh, I have to do it. So a car inspired by the shoe. And you can not even say shoe and let's see where it takes it.
Go ahead and say it without shoe in the problem. There it goes. Got it. And you'll see here as I'm moving it, it'll actually change what it's doing. So if we even want to make a manual design change. So let's say for instance,
let's put this water bottle here, hopefully that it doesn't throw off the weight. We'll start to see that it'll take the composition of the newly added item right here on the reference monitor, and it's going to add that into it. All right. So you've seen this a couple of times in the break. So let's open this up.
We'll let the group come up and play with it afterwards. But let's bring up just a montage of all the different things that we've demonstrated here. Yeah. So just give you a quick summary of what you saw because we threw a lot at you. Let's go to the next screen. So today we talked about using Omniverse as a 3D game engine with real
physics to see and simulate how your digital twin may react to things, the real time Generative AI in a creative thinking session or using it to generate marketing backgrounds. We talked about the digital twin navigating through Mesh not just by yourself, but with your team collaborating in a big real scale simulation and then even Mary – having a digital human on the screen. So these are just some of the things that we're exploring now with the view on display, but we're excited as it continues to get more capabilities.
Yeah, so I hope I hope this was inspiring to you. It's been inspiring to us to think through how this will change the future of how we interact with clients, how we host these kinds of conversations. We're trying to envision a new future, certainly break us away from presentations that were on nine by 11 pieces of paper and a flat construct and really get into the context and content of the conversation and really be immersed in it. And it's, you know, a tool among many that are now emerging in the spatial computing, spatial and immersive domains. So I hope you've enjoyed it. Jason you want to…? Yeah, I just want to say, every time we go into one of their studios and the tech evolves so quickly, we're finding mechanisms to change the way teams interact, to create and imagine the future and what we'd love to have each of you do… any of our clients. We'd love to have you to a Vu studio. We can actually bring this to you as well to do these on site. But
it happens every time we've done this, a number of client sessions, we brought them in and had these imagination sessions and they absolutely love what comes out of it. So thank you very much. We're happy to answer questions. You can actually do… so the Vegas studios. How far away? Yeah, it's about three miles down the street. Three miles down the street. So. And you're available for the next couple of days. If anybody does want to come to the Vegas studio, it's 150 feet. So it's about a half the size of a football field. You get a real simulation at scale. You know, it's exciting to see. So it's open to anybody.
[Dave Treat] Thank you. [Jason Warnke] Thank you, everyone.
2024-02-04 05:14
