Hola Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

🥽 Curing Lazy Eye With… TV?

👧 A Tilly Norwood Welfare Check

🍿 Kernels: 3 links worth making popcorn for

Curing Lazy Eye With… TV?

I’ve written a fair amount about VR headsets and how the use case for the tech always seemed fairly limited to me. As I wrote just two months after the initial release of the Apple Vision Pro:

Not to toot my own horn too much, but sometimes I really nail it! It also doesn’t help that VR headsets get associated with stuff like this:

Still makes me cringe almost two years later!

Anyway, to my delight it turns out there really is an actual very cool use case for VR headsets besides making cringe content for Tesla fanboys:

This is from TechCrunch’s coverage of the company Luminopia, whose VR headset has gone on to become an FDA-approved treatment for lazy eye in children 4-12, a prescription to watch an hour of TV on the headset, six days a week.

This rules! I can only imagine my own childhood delight at being forced to watch TV every day as part of a health regimen.

The Hollywood Reporter recently reported that Crunchyroll has been added to Luminopia’s programming, which is fantastic because as THR points out “59 percent of U.S. teens say they’re anime fans.” Obviously an activity that children enjoy will be much stickier than other more standard options like eye patches or eye drops.

Frankly, reading this story was a huge pick-me-up: an actually-useful tech application with real, measurable results which helps a population in need. Sometimes I forget how good that feels!

A Tilly Norwood Welfare Check

It’s been about a month since friend of the newsletter Tilly Norwood appeared on the scene via the industry press’s braindead reporting and it led me to wonder: what’s the latest on Miss Norwood? Surely there’s lots of new Tilly Norwood updates since she was imminently going to be signed by talent agents, right?

The answer: nothing. “Her” TikTok account is gone, the last post on “her” Insta was over a month ago, and there are practically no new mentions of “her” other than bundled in general criticisms of AI like this one by Sharon Waxman in The Atlantic (although I did enjoy this interview with Stella Hennen, a singer-songwriter to whom Tilly bears a suspicious resemblance).

What does this tell you? Hopefully it suggests that my thesis in “The Entertainment Press is Failing Its Readers” remains correct: almost all reporting on generative AI by the industry press (and much of the mainstream press) must be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism as to the claims made by peddlers of these tools and products.

Here’s Forbes writing about R&B sensation “Xania Monet” in “Al Singer Xania Monet Just Charted On Billboard, Signed $3M Deal. Is This The Future Of Music?”

Wow, an AI singer-songwriter! The AI is so powerful it’s writing its own songs and becoming a star. However, the stats mentioned do belong to a breakout human star, as the article gets around to stating:

This is the silly framing issue to which I keep returning. The use of musical generative AI tools like Suno is interesting! How does the training data used by Suno impact royalties? Can this music actually be considered original?

“Xania Monet” is a persona, a concept familiar to any music fan. Did we treat David Bowie’s Thin White Duke or Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz as though they were independent entities? Why not? Because for some reason the press insists on couching all their AI coverage from this golly-gee I, Robot goofery. Again, whenever you read these stories, just replace the AI character they’re talking about with “Shrek.” It works every time!

Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

Why Netflix and AMC Theaters are finally teaming up. (link)

Surprise! The leading micro-drama streaming service is not TikTok. (link)

Explore some of the lighting designs behind Fantastic Four: First Steps. (link)