Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Guides

Time Warner wants to know what to do with the future

Graeme McMillan
By

Exactly what do you actually do with the living room of the future after you’ve managed to build it?

That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way; Time Warner unveiled its 9600 square foot state-of-the-art facility designed and built to study customer behavior in January this year, and now it wants to know just what it should do with its particular brand of high-tech surveillance.

Recommended Videos

The Medialab, as TW calls the space, is based on the company’s Manhattan Time Warner Center headquarters and exists to, in official terms, “[incorporate] cutting-edge technologies and research techniques [to provide] an unmatched ability to test consumer engagement throughout the entire 360° media-to-retail experience.” Complete with biometric monitoring and eye-tracking capabilities, as well as focus group space for the old-fashioned analysts out there and broadcast capabilities to finetune test content, the massive location includes retail space, video game stations, an “in-home living-room simulation” and a 50-seat screening space to best sample product in a variety of settings. According to the project’s official website, “In order to foster the company’s continued growth as a progressive supplier of engaging content, Time Warner and its core divisions–HBO, Time Inc., Turner, and Warner Bros.–consider the Medialab an essential instrument in understanding consumer behavior, evolving media habits, and industry trends.” There is, it seems, only one problem: What to use it for.

Related

Via the Hollywood Reporter, it turns out that Time Warner’s solution to that problem is to open the space up to academic organizations, via an open RFP (Request for Proposals, for those who didn’t know) from those who have an idea or theory that they’d like to use the Medialab to prove. “The Time Warner Medialab wishes to fully utilize the capabilities of the Time Warner Medialab for university‐based research initiatives, especially for exploration, innovation, and original thinking in the arena of media and its usage,” the RFP explains, adding that “For that reason, the Time Warner Medialab plans to make the capabilities of the Medialab available to university research groups, as well as financially support use of the facility, in order to further the quality of research available in the public domain.”

(That last part is interesting; the RFP explicitly states that the Medialab is only available to academics for research that “will not be deemed proprietary in any way.” That’s not the only request TW is making of applicants; the RFP also states that “All writings, findings, and/or publications resulting from completion of research must include acknowledgement of the support of the Time Warner Medialab.”)

The Medialab is accepting proposals until November this year; those interested in finding out more can download the application process directly from the Time Warner Medialab website, and then work on brevity; proposals have to be 300 words or less (That’s less than two thirds the length of this blog post, to give you some idea of context).

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Graeme McMillan
Graeme McMillan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
A transplant from the west coast of Scotland to the west coast of America, Graeme is a freelance writer with a taste for pop…
Software upgrade could let smartwatches know exactly what our hands are doing
smartwatch context aware carnegie mellon chopping knife

Sensing Fine-Grained Hand Activity with Smartwatches

Smartwatches are increasingly becoming their own thing, rather than simply accessories which rely on and mirror the functionality of other devices. However, there are some scenarios in which it would be useful for our smartwatches to work more closely with the objects around us -- whether that’s knowing what we’re doing on our smartphones, working out when we’re typing on a keyboard, or even something as mundane as understanding when we're using a cheese grater or washing our hands under a tap.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more