What vendor is making these "immersive mixed reality" weather channel presentations about disaster conditions?
When the hurricane hit Florida a couple months ago, I started to see some videos of "immersive mixed reality" Weather Channel presentations where a presenter, standing in a small area on a stage, would be surrounded by dramatic animations of water level rising and falling.
Well, it turns out that the Weather Channel has been doing this for a while, to the point where I guess it's common now... which I didn't know because I get my weather from my phone. Anyway, they have a whole playlist of these videos on YouTube about different flashing natural disasters.
I saw all this because I saw someone repost this 6-year-old video of a wildfire presentation:
I found a thing on the Unreal website which explains the history of these presentations. It turns out that there is, indeed, a vendor working with them to produce these in Unreal - The articles call them "The Future Group" but now I guess they call themselves Pixotope and they seem to be trying to sell themselves as an AI tool for live TV production.
The Weather Channel has internal infrastructure now to produce these Unreal animations... I imagine they license Pixotope stuff. I feel like a doofus for not realizing that this shit has been on TV for years, but I straight up do not watch TV under any circumstances, so I have no idea what's going on out there. I basically do not even watch TV shows on streaming services.
I find myself wondering whether people who watch a lot of TV find this stuff impressive? Or whether six years is enough for people to start finding this stuff as cartoony as it really is? Full respect to whoever is animating these - I guess they gotta be good at broadcast-quality full-screen water animations - but they do strike me as, like, the modern equivalent of any sort of old-school live TV segment I used to find boring.
Like, this is the modern equivalent of panning over to a table at the side of the stage to show two kids have a pancake-eating contest, or some shit. The only difference is that now this is a hugely expensive product involving multiple different middleware brands and ongoing licensing agreements, and no kids get to be on stage.