When discussing the pinnacle of the audiovisual industry (such as Hollywood-level virtual production, top-tier AR broadcasting), we often marvel at the splendor of the images. But if you strip away the artistic sugar-coating, this is actually an extremely brutal economic game.
If you gaze upon today's highest-spec virtual production (VP) sets, or AR esports broadcast centers with millions of viewers, you'll find they are undergoing a frenzy of species evolution akin to the “Cambrian Explosion of Life.”
We are experiencing an unprecedented “visual trust crisis.”
When we talk about audiovisual content production, we are usually trapped in a very rigid “3D physical box”: The physical area of the studio determines the scale of the scene; the latency of the network video stream determines the disconnect in remote collaboration; the flat nature of the 2D screen determines the flatness of on-screen graphics and subtitles.
For a long time, the pinnacle of the audiovisual industry—Hollywood-level visual wonders—remained stuck in an expensive “handicraft era.”
Watching a top-tier virtual production film or an expensive XR live stream is essentially a “subconscious game” of mutual understanding between the audience and the creators.
If we zoom in on traditional audiovisual content production to a microscopic level, you'll find it is pieced together from hard “solid substances.”
When you step into a multi-million dollar virtual production (VP) studio, or a top-tier AR esports broadcast center, you are actually facing a highly chaotic “Technological Babel.”
For a century, the audiovisual industry has been built upon a deeply ingrained “binary opposition”: on one side is “reality”—composed of wood, steel, real flesh, and light; on the other is “virtuality”—made of code, polygons, and rendering engines.
Entering any top-tier virtual production (VP) studio or large AR broadcast center, you feel as if you are on the stage of a heavy industrial symphony about to begin.