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Gimnotopos, Epirus, Greece
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Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
Hollywood's biggest AI debut? Las Vegas Sphere's 'Wizard of Oz'
LAS VEGAS, Aug 21 (Reuters) - When "The Wizard of Oz at Sphere" opens off the Las Vegas Strip on Aug. 28, audiences will experience the 1939 film classic in a way its creators probably never thought possible. Nearly 18,000 people will find themselves in the eye of the swirling tornado that rips Dorothy's Kansas farmhouse off its moorings and hurtles it onto Munchkinland. The film has been enhanced to fill a 160,000-square-foot wall of LED panels that spans three football fields, encircling the audience and reaching 22 stories high, as 750-horsepower fans kick up wind and debris to simulate the twister. The $104 or more per seat spectacle is more than meets the eye. "The Wizard of Oz" marks one of the most significant partnerships between a studio and technology company to use artificial intelligence to forge a new media experience. Reuters spoke with nine people, including principals directly involved in the project and senior entertainment industry experts, who told the story behind a project that some industry veterans see as a potential watershed moment in Hollywood's use of AI tools. "It definitely represents a really meaningful milestone in AI-human creative collaboration," said Thao Nguyen, immersive arts and emerging technologies agent at CAA. "I think it will set a precedent on how we reimagine culturally significant media." Bringing Dorothy and the Wicked Witch to the massive Sphere, a globe-shaped entertainment venue featuring advanced technology, took two years and brought together its creative team, Warner Bros Discovery executives, Google's DeepMind researchers, academics, visual effects artists -- more than 2,000 people, in all. The development occurred during intense apprehension over AI's impact on jobs in Hollywood and the desire to preserve human creativity. Some visual effects companies initially contacted to work on the project declined because they were not permitted to work with AI at the time. Getting here took the blessing of Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav, his studio chiefs and lawyers who established guidelines for using AI. "Wizard of Oz at Sphere" drew upon archival materials from the film -- including set blueprints, shot lists, publicity stills and film artifacts -- as well as some 60 research papers to help deliver the movie in resolution representing a ten-fold improvement over previous work. "We had to reimagine the cinematography, we had to reimagine the editing, and we had to do all of this without changing the experience," said Oscar-winner Ben Grossmann, who oversaw the project's visual effects. "Because if you touch anything about this sacred piece of cinema, you're toast!" Rather than exploiting AI to cut jobs, they sought to use it to breathe fresh life into a classic story and create new experiences with existing intellectual property. "Hollywood embraces new technology, and everyone can't wait to be the second one to use it," said Buzz Hays, a veteran film producer who leads Google Cloud's entertainment industry solutions group. "What 'The Wizard of Oz' is doing for us is giving that first opportunity where people go, 'Oh my god, this is not at all what I thought AI was going to be.'" The project began in 2023 with Sphere executives discussing which project would push the technological boundaries of the venue that had already hosted U2 and Darren Aronofsky's "Postcard from Earth." "The Wizard of Oz" quickly topped the list as a familiar, beloved film well-suited for the Sphere's enormous canvas, said Carolyn Blackwood, head of Sphere Studios. It presented an opportunity to re-introduce the classic to a new generation in a way that would place them inside L. Frank Baum's world. Symbolically, the team chose a classic film that was a technical marvel of its time. While not the first movie to use Technicolor, "The Wizard of Oz's" dramatic transition from sepia tones to hyper-saturated color marked a cinematic milestone. Sphere Entertainment's CEO James Dolan and creative collaborator Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca Film Festival co-founder and noted film producer, envisioned a more ambitious project than a mere digital remastering of a classic. Rosenthal tapped Hays to bring in Google as a technical partner. Dolan approached Warner Bros Discovery CEO Zaslav, a friend and business partner from the early days of cable TV, to propose bringing "Oz" to the Sphere. "I had just been to the Sphere with a friend and was really blown away," said Zaslav, adding that Dolan and Rosenthal also won over his studio chiefs, "who loved the idea. It's an example of the great IP we own at Warner Bros." Before turning over one of the world's most important entertainment properties, Warner Bros set strict ground rules. Google could train its generative AI models on each major actor to reproduce their performances, but the data would remain the studio's property. None of the "Oz" training data would be incorporated into Google's public AI models. "One of the things critical to getting this project started was creating a safe place for experimentation," said Grossmann. "Warner Brothers and Google and the Sphere created an environment where they said, 'We don't necessarily know how it's going to end, but we're going to create a little quarantine zone here.'" The visual effects team initially tried enlarging images using CGI, which would have created photorealistic animated versions of the characters. That approach was rejected because it would violate the integrity of the original performances. "AI was effectively a last resort, because we couldn't really do it any other way," said Grossmann, whose Los Angeles studio, Magnopus, worked on such photo-realistic computer animated films as Disney's 'The Lion King.' AI enhanced the resolution of tiny celluloid frames from 1939 to ultra-high-definition images. It restored details -- like freckles on Dorothy's face or burlap texture on Scarecrow's face -- obscured by Technicolor's process. AI also helped "outpaint" on-screen images to fill gaps created by camera cuts or framing, as when it took a close-up of the Tin Man chopping a door of the Witch's castle with an axe to free Dorothy and completed the image of the woodman. It took months of repeated fine-tuning and Google's DeepMind braintrust to elevate consumer-grade AI tools to deliver crisp images with the Sphere's 16K "super" resolution. Musicians re-recorded the entire film score on the original sound stage to take advantage of the venue's 167,000 speakers. The vocal performances of Judy Garland and other actors remain unaltered. Despite attention to authenticity, the project has attracted criticism from some cinephiles who object to altering the cherished film. Entertainment writer Joshua Rivera called it "an affront to art and nature." "None of these people criticizing this have seen the film or understand what we are doing," said Rosenthal. In a private midnight screening for Reuters, Grossmann offered a glimpse of what's to come. Some changes are subtle, as when Uncle Henry stands by the front door while neighbor Almira Gulch demands Toto. AI places the performer, who spends much of his time out of view, back into frame, stitching together a wider view to fill the Sphere's expansive viewing plane. Other changes aim to realize the filmmakers' vision in ways that weren't technically feasible 86 years ago. As Dorothy and friends encounter the Wizard in the Emerald Throne Room, a 200-foot-high green head looms over the audience, eyes bulging and voice booming, creating a more imposing depiction than the original image of an actor in green makeup projected on smoke. "Whenever we made a change, it was because we wanted the audience to experience what Dorothy was experiencing directly," said Grossmann. "We completed something filmmakers were intending to do but were limited by 1939's tools . Coordinated physical effects add another dimension. Flying monkeys will swoop into the Sphere as 16-foot-long helium-filled simians steered by drone operators, one of many Four-D effects. The result is an amalgam of cinema, live production and experiential VR. "I think that's going to change the way people think about entertainment and experience," Grossmann said.
Reuters
a day ago
- Reuters
Rapid loss of Antarctic ice may be climate tipping point, scientists say
CANBERRA, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Rapid loss of Antarctic sea ice could be a tipping point for the global climate, causing sea level rises, changes to ocean currents and loss of marine life that are impossible to reverse, a scientific study published, opens new tab on Thursday said. The paper in the journal Nature aimed to describe in previously unseen detail the interlocking effects of global warming on the Antarctic, the frozen continent at the planet's South Pole. "Evidence is emerging for rapid, interacting and sometimes self-perpetuating changes in the Antarctic environment," it said. The study gathered data from observations, ice cores, and ship logbooks to chart long-term changes in the area of sea ice, putting into context a rapid decline in recent years. "A regime shift has reduced Antarctic sea-ice extent far below its natural variability of past centuries, and in some respects is more abrupt, non-linear and potentially irreversible than Arctic sea-ice loss," it said, referring to melting at the North Pole. Changes are having knock-on effects across the ecosystem that in some cases amplify one another, said Nerilie Abram, the study's lead author. A smaller ice sheet reflects less solar radiation, meaning the planet absorbs more warmth, and will probably accelerate a weakening of the Antarctic Overturning Circulation, an ocean-spanning current that distributes heat and nutrients and regulates weather. Loss of ice is increasingly harming wildlife including emperor penguins, who breed on the ice, and krill, which feed below it. And warming surface water will further reduce phytoplankton populations that draw down vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere, the study said. "Antarctic sea ice may actually be one of those tipping points in the Earth's system," said Abram, a former professor at the Australian National University (ANU) and now chief scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division. Reining in global carbon dioxide emissions would reduce the risk of major changes in the Antarctic but still may not prevent them, the study said. "Once we start losing Antarctic sea ice, we set in train this self-perpetuating process," Abram said. "Even if we stabilise the climate, we are committed to still losing Antarctic sea ice over many centuries to come."
Reuters
a day ago
- Reuters
Health Rounds: Human fetal kidney development mimicked in test tubes
Aug 20 (Reuters) - This is an excerpt of the Health Rounds newsletter, where we present latest medical studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox for free sign up here. Researchers are a step closer to learning how congenital kidney defects develop in the fetus and how they might be prevented, a new report shows. For the first time, they can watch miniature human fetal kidneys develop in test tubes over periods that simulate the course of a pregnancy. So-called kidney organoids have been grown in test tubes before, but only starting with pluripotent stem cells – immature cells found in early embryos that can differentiate into any cell type in the body but without the tissue-specific characteristics that would allow them to perform an organ's specialized functions. In contrast, the new organoids are grown in test tubes using the same fetal progenitor stem cells that are destined to develop into human kidneys. These cells are capable of building, maintaining and repairing specific organs – in this case, the kidneys. While kidney organoids grown from pluripotent stem cells have survived in test tubes for weeks, the new organoids built from the human fetal kidney stem cells can survive and grow for six to eight months, essentially allowing researchers to observe human kidney development as it would happen during a pregnancy, the research team reported in The EMBO Journal, opens new tab. 'Once we had the tissue stem cells coming from the developing human kidney in the Petri dish, they did the job because this is what they do in nature,' said Dr. Benjamin Dekel of Safra Children's Hospital at Sheba Medical Center and Tel Aviv University, who led the research. 'The cells are self-assembling. They know how to self-organize and how to self-renew, (that is) make copies of themselves,' Dekel said. At the same time, Dekel continued, the cells begin to differentiate, developing qualities that make them appropriate for different roles. Researchers can watch as kidney tubules, ducts, blood vessels and other renal tissues are formed. In his clinical practice, Dekel treats children with kidney diseases. He hopes eventually to use the organoids to study kidney malformations and to isolate genes that lead to birth defects, develop new treatments in the field of regenerative medicine and test the toxicity of drugs during pregnancy on fetal kidneys. In the meantime, he said, it's frustrating to watch as patients' chronic kidney disease worsen into end-stage renal disease. 'Then we need to give them a kidney transplant or to put them on dialysis, which is really a very poor solution,' he said. New findings help explain why experimental treatments for cancers caused by human papillomavirus infections have been less than effective, researchers say. The most common cancer-causing strain of HPV undermines the body's defenses by reprogramming immune cells surrounding the tumor, earlier research has shown. Blocking this process can boost the ability of experimental treatments for HPV to eliminate cancer cells, according to a report published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, opens new tab. While vaccines exist to prevent HPV infections, researchers have failed to develop effective 'therapeutic vaccines' for use after HPV infections have occurred – and the new study helps explain why. Experimental therapeutic vaccines target HPV-infected cells with immune cells known as T-cells. But in tests in mice and cell cultures, researchers found that two HPV proteins, E6 and E7, prompt nearby cells to release a protein called IL-23 that prevents the body's T-cells from attacking the tumor. 'In order to eliminate the cancer, T-cells need to proliferate and destroy infected cells. But IL-23 stops them from working effectively, so the tumor keeps growing,' study leader W. Martin Kast of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California said in a statement. Drugs that inhibit IL-23 are already approved for treating psoriasis and other conditions, the researchers said. 'The fact that these antibodies are already FDA-approved for something else makes this approach promising — and it also allows for rapid translation into the clinic,' Kast said. He and his team are now developing their own therapeutic vaccine, which they will test in combination with antibodies that block IL-23. IL-23 is also found at high levels in testicular and bladder cancers, the researchers noted, adding that further research is needed to clarify what role IL-23 plays in those diseases. Hearing loss is a known risk factor for dementia, but early intervention might lower that risk, a new study suggests. Researchers performed hearing tests in nearly 3,000 volunteers without dementia who were at least 60 years old. Over the next 20 years, the researchers saw a 61% lower risk for eventual dementia among those with newly diagnosed hearing loss who started wearing hearing aids before age 70, compared to participants diagnosed with hearing impairment at a similar age who did not get hearing aids, they reported in JAMA Neurology, opens new tab. Hearing aid use did not appear to protect against dementia in people diagnosed with a hearing problem after age 70, however. 'Only 17% of individuals with moderate to severe hearing loss use hearing aids,' the researchers noted. 'Our study underscores the importance of early intervention' to reduce the risk of dementia associated with hearing loss, they concluded. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox for free sign up here.
