The Technicolor Experience Center: This Is Where Shift Happens

Today is a very good day: A day that proves without question that shift happens. That creativity is alive and thriving. What goes on? Today is the grand unveiling  of the Technicolor Experience Center, a milestone moment for seeing around corners, and I get to be here.

Called “TEC” for short, the Technicolor Experience Center is a 10,000-foot salon, designed to be a world-class content creation playground — a place where industries come together to create with VR, AR, and MR, and learn how they best convey into the different components of video production. Picture lots of vendors, partners, and startups; artists, colorists, technologists — all co-inventing to advance the state-of-the-art in visual arts, one Jungle Book at a time.

(Aside: If you missed the The Jungle Book hoopla from last year, the movie won an Oscar for best Visual FX for its photo realistic scenery, animals, and stunning beauty. Fun Fact: it’s hard to remember while you’re watching that the characters are mostly digitally and artificially created in huge render farms spanning across Technicolor’s MPC division and the public cloud.  Talk about shifts happening.)

Just the TEC space alone is an experience — picture a former fashion warehouse, all marble and velvet, redolent with the vestiges of haute couture and avante garde design. When you walk in, you see one, big, open space, with different staging areas — one to try out different VR goggles, another to create content using AR. Production, too: Spaces to, say, look at a 3D rendering of a scene, and be able to move a tree back by six feet, without sending everything to rendering.

Cisco’s part in all of this started with our intent to help enable the shift of IP-based technologies deeper into the video eco-system — to edge it closer and closer to video capture, production, and that glorious haven for creatives and technologists. Collaboration spaces, we call them, to expand what it means when people say “immersive experiences.”

As video experiences go, it’s no longer enough to just cover walls with multiple displays, no matter how dazzling. It’s about having that augmented reality, live statistics, and analysis, all going on at the same time. It’s already happening in stadiums, but it can go much wider, and deeper: Bringing the director onto the remote site, for not just multi-way video, but multi-way content sharing, directional input, and handling of production details that used to be deemed too important to handle remotely.

The details of what we’re bringing to the TEC table are still a bit under wraps, but I can say that it involves next-gen collaborative spaces, and will include our Spark solution — to capture the conversations, drawings, white boards, and other creative elements, for further vetting/analysis/collaboration, inside and outside of main TEC salon.

And with that, it’s time to get over to Culver City for The Big Extravaganza…