News At Seven: 100% artifical news-broadcast
wow, this looks like some awesome patchwork of technology! News At Seven is a video news-show, 100% automatically generated from content-bits all over the net. claimed to work totally autonomous, the engine fetches news-stories from various blogs and websites, runs the text through speech-synthesis, mixes it with matching still-images and video-clips and add’s a Halflife-character as virtual news-presenter - voila, instant virtual news! from the creators:
In this, our first deployment of the system, the show produced is a three-minute daily news update, featuring national, international, and human-interest stories, with commentary from blogs on the national story. After the material has been assembled, the system is ready to present the news using preset scripts. The engine, and our extensions to it, allows us to present believable human-like newscasters as well as more imaginative scenes and sets that are only possible because the show is virtual. We also use techniques to make the generated vocal audio more interesting and believable.
though the quality of speech-synthesis could be better and some of the clips look out of place, this feels like an impressive glimpse of how news/TV could be produced in the not-too-distant future… (and it reminded me of the short news-casts featured in Starship Troopers ;)…)
(Screenshot courtesy of Boing Boing)
I linked to this post (and somewhat translated it in French,….well, sort of) : http://lorenzo100.hautetfort.com/
good nite
Back in March I worked on something related: I call it Semifiktive Halbwahrheiten - Reality Generator.
http://www.rafelsberger.at/sf-hw
It’s an experiment with RSS-Feeds. First the site fetches recent news headlines from major news agencies (Reuters etc.). Then it selects a headline and uses words from it as search terms in yahoo images.
I’m working on a video using the same technique.
mfG Walter
lorenzo100, thx for linking!
walter, I like your mashup, it really produces some unique stuff: f.e. http://tinyurl.com/wc2yh