Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks, the animation studio, thinks the Internet is too text-centric. At the recent Techonomy conference in Tucson, AZ, Katzenberg predicted the dominant communications vehicle on the net would begin changing next year to audio and video clips.
"Text is a learned process, but what we do [at DreamWorks] is intuitive and instinctual, and you do it from the moment you are born," Katzenberg told the conference. "We're trying to see if we can move many of these things we can do today in text but moving up to video and audio … do it with sight and sound."
That push will begin next year, in 2012, when DreamWorks will start to spin out its latest 3-D animation technology into the world of the Web. Dreamworks has been working with Intel for almost four years to create 12-core chips and specialized software able to create photorealistic animation in real time.
Dreamworks began the collaboration to end the need for computer animators to wait for their work to mature overnight before seeing the final version of a scene they'd made, speeding up the creative process by an estimated 50 to 70 times, the report said.
At the conference, Katzenberg was vague about just how the technology will transform the Web, but he did say it includes social media. "An immersive audiovisual experience will be able to compete against text in a lot of situations," he said.
Katzenberg pointed to Apple's talkative virtual assistant, Siri, as evidence that "whether we do it or somebody else does it, we will move from a text world into an audiovisual one."