Monday, August 04, 2014

The Next Big Thing

Globalization. Of a sort.

A familiar issue for many businesses these days is a scarcity of top talent.

Chinese film studio Light Chaser Animation has taken an unusual approach to help to solve this problem - it bought a robot.

The device is a "telepresence robot", which it acquired from California-based Double Robotics. It consists of a battery-powered mobile platform to which an iPad is attached.

The wi-fi controlled device can move around the company's offices and it allows animation director Colin Brady - who lives in Los Angeles and did not want to move to China - to communicate with the rest of the team in Beijing. ...

Company founder Gary Wang says the robot is just one example of the new communication tools that are now available to make working easier for teams that are dispersed across the world. ...

Mr Wang says the goal of the company is to produce animated movies like those made by Pixar and Dreamworks, aiming to achieve the same level of quality as the giant US studios. ...

I have every confidence this will go really, really well.

(But why should I be a smart-aleck about this? Illumination Entertainment makes a version of this business model work, so who knows? No doubt the day will soon come when L.A.-based story artists and directors have their remote-controlled droids supervising and snapping off orders on the other side of the world. And we'll all be working for $15.50 per hour.

If we're lucky.)

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Does this robot automatically translate English to Chinese? Is it accurate? Or does the director/robot talk to a translator who then talks to the crew? Great films are made with passion, and this type of technology diminishes that to the extreme.

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