He Holds AI's Highest Visual Bar, Here's What It Can't Do

making a lot of noise.

Yeah, that's good.

Very good, though. It avoids absolutely every any obstacle that's there. It sees what it is and it avoids it. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's amazing. I'm also talking with a robotic company CEO. Wow. If you imagine what's coming, it's crazy.

But I think that's going to be the change, like the combination of AI and robotics. That's going to be massive.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. All right, I can get started. All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to 2CET AI. Today I'm talking with Joris Courthout. Am I right? Okay. Yeah, sorry. Today I'm talking with Joris Courthout, CEO of Prismax.

Sure. Yes, sure, of course.

They're the team behind the visuals for Tomorrowland in ⁓ the Las Vegas sphere. They created some of the most demanding visual experiences in the world. So 16K resolution, real time, synced to live music. So for anyone building AI vision products, he holds the highest possible bar. So Joris, thanks for joining.

Thanks, that's quite an introduction.

Yeah, I do think so. think you are the highest possible bar looking at all those AI visuals, right? They're child-pulling.

We always try to do something new, something that nobody has ever done before and using game technology to do so.

Would you like to introduce ⁓ about yourself a little bit more? Yeah.

I'm a your so I've been a CEO at Prismax. I founded the company exactly 20 years ago ⁓ so we started out as a Graphic studio I would say but we were mainly making visuals for the entertainment industry So when you have a fashion show or a nightclub all the visuals that played there, that's what we were creating using ⁓ old school, now I call them old school tools like After Effects from Adobe or Cinema 4D from Maxon. We used to create lots of visuals with that for say 19 years, 18, 19 years. No, I would say 17 years more, but till before COVID. And then all of a sudden COVID hit. And since we were in the event industry, everything stopped. So I had to, we were a small company still, eight people, but I really had to start looking like, woof, this is not good. ⁓ What should we do? When do we go bankrupt even? And then I just, just on one evening, me and my business partner, we were both gamers. We were playing a game online. We were like, we've been playing this game now for a whole month just because there's no work. Let's just reinvent ourselves and use the technology. that we are playing in right now, Unreal Engine, let's start using that ⁓ for what we do. So we contacted some of our clients, the biggest one, of course, being Tomorrowland. And we told them, like, hey, ⁓ what if we, your festival can't go. We can't this year because it's COVID. Should we do that online? Let's create it in Unreal Engine and see what that does. And they said, yeah, sure, let's do it. So we thought, ⁓ we're going to create one stage or two stages, and we're going to record eight or 10 DJs. But in the end, it was eight stages with 100 DJs running for two days. So it was a big undertaking, but we managed to do so. And from then on, we just started using Unreal Engine game technology in everything we do. ⁓ We started creating lots of immersive experience with it. We started ⁓ using it for more virtual production, virtual festivals. But then when the world opened up again, the virtual event thing kind of died. We were like, we have so much know-how now in Unreal Engine. Let's create a product where we can run visuals on a big screen at festivals, at concerts, but not run movies like we do, like small video clips that we mix together. But let's do a real time 3D world that we can manipulate on the spot. And that's exactly what we're doing right now all the time.

That sounds like the best of both worlds, right? It's the virtual and the live together.

LUL both together and thanks to game engines like Unreal Engine, can really get that graphical quality that we will get from our old school way of working. The only big difference is it's in real time, it doesn't have to render anymore.

⁓ What does that mean?

So before, the traditional way, what we used to do is we would create a whole world in 3D, put all the light, put a camera, and then to create the actual movie, you have to render it. So GPUs are in the back in the day were CPUs. Now it's more GPUs that are rendering this. They are calculating how the light falls, how it bounces, how the reflections are. like Hollywood movies, like Pixar movies. they would take like a day per frame sometimes to render, just to calculate. But when you have a real-time gaming engine, ⁓ can do everything, everything calculates in real time. Because video is 25 pictures, 25 frames. Well, in Europe, it's 25. In America, it's 30. ⁓ Pictures per second, that makes a movie. And each and every one of those frames needs to be rendered. And in the game engine, you can render that in real time. You can manipulate it in real time. Like before, ⁓ if we had a big theater show and the director would come in and he would see our graphics and he would say, yeah, I want this forest to be a little bit lighter and have a bit of a different ⁓ vibe than we would have to change that in our software. And he could come back in 48 hours when it was rendered. Now we can just adjust all the lighting, all the lighting, adjust the textures, whatever parameters, and it will be. The result will be instant. There's no more rendering. The rendering is happening in real time.

Why is real time needed?

⁓ Flexibility, would say. ⁓ No more waiting on rendering and more creativity. For example, when we have a huge stage, we can put big flames. You have these big fireworks and flames. And if you have, say, 10 big real flames that are going, we can multiply those flames in our virtual world on the screen and have 50 more. And the data coming from the Fireworks guy pressing the button doing the real flames, that signal also go into our software and translate it to Unreal Engine and make our virtual flames go off at the same time. And then you can really extend the real world into the virtual world.

Mm. So there is an interaction component that happened, right?

Absolutely. We can use whatever data coming from whatever place ⁓ to interact with our visuals. We have another project. I can't talk too much about it, but it's a world that is being influenced by the real world. So it's a virtual world, but it has the same weather system as our real world. So what we do is we have an AI miner. He's mining all the weather data ⁓ of of that area and sending it into our software so that the weather in our virtual world displayed in somebody's home is reflecting what is happening outside. A window, but a window on a virtual world with the same weather as the outside world.

Mm. Wait, it's a window, right? The window.

Well, it's green, but I call it the virtual window into a window into a virtual world, I would say.

What do people use that for? am I sitting in my home and I want to experience Mars weather? I'm just kidding, no not Mars, maybe somewhere in the desert.

That's exactly what they're using it for. For they want to be more want to be on Mars. They want to be in the desert. They want to be in Paris. They want to be wherever you could imagine. And you can just simulate what is happening there in 3D in real time. You don't have to put a million cameras around the world. You can just simulate in a 3D world what is happening on the other side of the world with data coming from there. That's being mined by an AI.

I'm curious, what are the users actually wanting to experience?

They're looking for something different most of the time. ⁓ They're looking for something in their home that nobody else has. And these are people that don't have lots of spare time. They're CEOs, very high placed people that want something completely different. Like in the morning, if they wake up, they want to be able to have a run in the Amazon forest. In the afternoon, in the evening, they want to have dinner on a time square with their wives without moving anywhere in the world.

Mm-hmm.

So without actually going there, without taking the private jet and flying there, yes.

actually going there. Yeah. And how is this experience created? Do you have an example? It's not a TV, It's not on my TV. It has to be an emergency.

It's a huge screen. Now we have a concept where all the walls in a room, we can create a room and all the walls are 100 % video screens, LED screens. An LED screen is made up out of, the word says it itself, small LEDs right next to each other. And you can make them as big and as small as you want in very high resolution. For example,

That's crazy.

The one we use now for this experience is here. The distance between the dots is 0.7 millimeter. That's very sharp, but it creates very, very, very big resolutions. Like one room can be ⁓ thousands of pixels wide and thousands of pixels high. So we need a lot of computing power to then generate this world that they're standing in in real time in 3D. So there's lots of Nvidia GPUs ⁓ working on those world all at the same time, all synchronized.

So luxurious, I have to say. guess it's not a problem. Yeah. Do you think, I'm curious, do you think this technology will go into ordinary people's lives at some point, it will be cheap enough to, like everybody can experience that?

It's a niche to me. I think yes. I mean, if you look at it, an LED screen when I started out 20 years ago, nobody could afford it. Now it's starting to pop up in these people's houses, like they don't watch regular televisions anymore, just the whole wall is a big TV. It's becoming cheaper and cheaper. So give it another 10 years and it will be accessible to everybody.

and we can all do it. Yeah, yeah, I will send you a message and like, I finally can afford this virtual TV room.

could achieve the same with projection if you have a completely dark room with wild wall. It's a bit more, it's less immersive than an LED setup, LED wall. LED wall is much more powerful, but you can get the same sense.

Yeah. Yeah. Good point. How's your recent project goes? Do you have an example? mean, for people who have really, because you explain a lot to me, right? But I think people doesn't have any visual understanding of, instance, what is Tomorrowland? Maybe what? Like what is? If you can share any demo, that would be awesome.

there. can show, I have a small demo reel that I can show you. swear at you It's a very fast movie and I'll try to talk over it.

Cool, cool, Give a little bit, visual is always easy to see what it looks like. By the way, for people who don't know what Tomorrowland is, what is Tomorrowland?

Morland is the biggest and most beautiful dance music festival on the planet, I would say. They exist as long as we do. No, a bit longer. They exist 21 or 22 years. And they've grown from a festival being attended by 18, 20,000 people per day to now a festival that is being attended by in one weekend 400,000 people. So it's a... a big one. ⁓

Is it similar to the UK's Glastonbury? ⁓

Yeah, but Glastonbury is more like a rock festival, I would say. Tomorrowland is all about electronic music. And Tomorrowland, they really build like a fairy tale world with a stage that is like 150 meters wide and 40 meters high with an attention to detail that no other festival can match. ⁓ That's what makes them so special. You should be able to see my screen right now.

Yeah, I can see your screen now.

So this is our demo reel of past projects that we've been working on. See, this is a big dance event. This is more pop music. So virtual festival. This is Alicia Keys.

Is this real? is it like the person? This is on the screen so must be rendered.

That's well, it's a mix of real things and ⁓ and unreal things I would say. This is the sphere. So that's a real screen. This is also a real festival. This is Formula One.

Cause it's hard to tell.

This is tomorrow and last year. this as well. Big stage using our AI software, not AI, our real time software, I would say. This is the opening of Dota 2, a very big gaming event. Dota 2 Championship, the International. So those are some of the projects we've been working on. And then one of the biggest ones we did last August, we start, no, this is the virtual festivals. I'll tell you a bit more about that. So here we put the DJs are real and all the other things that you see around the DJ, they're not real, they're added by us. It's a complete 3D world. And this is what we used to do during COVID. We used to...

Are they? Yeah, wow.

People used to watch these festivals from their computer. They used to watch them on projectors in their home, have a small private home party. And this is a virtual studio that where we created the graphics together with Belgian national TV and everything is interactive and it looks like the people are standing inside this virtual world. Same with Alicia Keys. We put her in a virtual world. The only thing that's real here is her. Even the piano wasn't real.

Really, the piano looks completely real to me. ⁓

No, no, she wanted to bring her piano, but it's very heavy and we didn't have lots of time to record her. So we recreated her. ⁓ She has a bespoke piano and we recreated that in 3D. So this is not a real piano.

Yeah, it looks so real. It looks like she's there, she's on it, she's playing.

Yeah. But then in August, we went to the Sphere in Vegas. And there, we did the biggest real-time show we've ever done. 16,000 by 16,000 resolution, all in real time. So everything you see here is running in real time in Unreal Engine. And we're pushing the buttons and making this whole world come alive. And we're using data from the light guys, from the laser guys. to sync up all the effects on the screen with the effects that are happening down there with the lights and the lasers. So you get a very interactive ⁓ world that really is animated on the music during the performance. So those are some of the things that we've been working on lately.

Mm. Yeah, these are amazing technologies. It's crazy. It's definitely not something like I can use like ⁓ Google's Nano Banana and just to generate some images and stitch them together. It's definitely not that.

It's a different, I mean we use nano, no we don't use nano banana but like we use mid journey for now. But I've been using it for a long time. But we mainly use that in the pre-process, the pre-production process I would say. Like a client comes to us, they say we have a festival and we want to have lions as a theme for example. Then we will go to mid journey and we will generate ⁓ a whole storyboard and a mood board. We used to draw that out. I really had a guy sketching everything out by hand. Now we prompted out. So instead of spending one week, two weeks making a proposal, we now spend one or two days and it looks 10 times better just because you you can prompt it. And the results coming out, I've started using version 1.0. Now we're at, I don't know, 7.2 or something. And the results they get, they keep getting better. And every, yeah. And we've been doing experiments with, from experimenting with what comes out of mid journey to then animate it as a video with all kinds of software. mean, software, all kinds of AI models. The results are okay, but it's not there yet.

I don't know.

if you look at, I always use as a good reference, the way Will Smith eats spaghetti. If you looked at it, ⁓ at him eating spaghetti in AI eight months ago, and now it's incredible what they did. But for our, our job, need huge resolutions. ⁓ what's coming out now is, is an HD, ⁓ not even a 4k sometimes. And you could upscale it. There's lots of AI upscaling tools. ⁓ video but They're not they're not doing the resolutions that we need and you still miss that control like if you I have my 3d artists create a whole world and animate the trees or birds or certain things We have complete control over that and with ai I am prompting You don't have complete control yet, which i'm missing and you can't run it in real time and it Probably on the other side uses so much power

Right. Still no.

just to generate these images that it's not there yet. But I'm sure that in a few years, it's gonna be a completely different story.

Yeah, I wanted to ask, how's AI fit into all these technologies? And you just answered that. I remember I chat a little bit with you around ⁓ this LinkedIn post from Google, Gemini. And they were doing this particle ⁓ resolution, the movement of particles. So can you see it? Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, and you were and there's an interactive component around it, right? People can move these particles and things like that with your hand. And I feel that's some similar experience you are creating. Unfortunately, they're at the resolution level, they're not good enough. And the complexity, all right, this is a bunch of dots.

Mm-hmm. Exactly. But I mean, it's a start because this, if this is, this is completely generated by AI. ⁓ And that's completely different from what we're, we are doing in real time. We use a game engine. We would use a, a particle system in a game engine. And then we would use our hand and a lighter camera, a lighter sensor to then read out our hand and influence those particles in that.

apologize.

In the game we would then manipulate those particles. But this is, every frame is probably, I mean, it is rendered with AI. So it's an AI, it's a set of AI generated ⁓ frames all played after each other and the hand influences the AI image, which is a completely different way ⁓ of calculating the way these particles move. So for us to use it in our business, it's not there yet, but I'm sure that it will come.

⁓ Let's say if someone from an AI video startup pitched to you today, what would you need to see before you actually use it in a show?

Total control and high enough resolution. But funny enough, an AI startup texted me two days ago that they want to talk. So maybe.

Can share? Can you share what they are trying to show you?

They just said like, we're working on, we are VJs. You have a DJ, a DJ, he's playing music and mixing ⁓ tracks together. We are VJs, video jockeys. We are mixing video together. So he said, I'm creating a VJ software, but there's no visuals there and no video clips that you would mix together. And there's also no real time world like yours. That's a real time 3D world that you can manipulate. But all the videos or all the effects not videos yet all the effects that are there in my software they are ⁓ Real generated in real time by AI So that's again the difference ⁓ For example You have doom the game the very old game Back then it was also a 3d engine one of them one of the earliest but there's people now that managed to simulate Doom in AI. So you're not having a graphics card render out a 3D world, but instead you have each frame being generated in real time by AI depending on the input of your keyboard and your mouse. So you can play Doom, but you can play it in an AI generated environment instead of having a 3D simulated ⁓ environment.

What do you think? What are your thoughts on that?

I think that will demand a lot of power, a lot of rendering power because yeah, you need to, if you look at, ⁓ if you use mid journey now and you need to generate one frame, it takes a few seconds and probably lots of power in the background to generate that image. If you want to play a game, you need 25, 30, 40 images per second for it to run smooth. So the amount of I'm not sure if the amount ⁓ of power that needs, the amount of CPU, GPU power will be enough locally to ever run that in AI compared to running a 3D simulation.

But also sounds like a complete waste of, you know, resources.

Yeah, but it's a very nice experiment. for the it's very nice. Also what you just showed that's running just in AI generated frames. It's amazing. It's a very good experiment.

Yeah. Are you going to meet with the AI company? They texted you? Are you going to meet with them?

Yeah, I'm kind of like going abroad for a week or two now. So somewhere in February, we're seeing each other.

What did they say to you that motivated you feel like you're going to meet with them?

We were thinking of, I mean, I have a whole team of programmers working on our real-time, ⁓ and developers working on our real-time system in Unreal Engine. But we're also quite looking at AI-generated imagery, because, that's the future, and can we integrate that? ⁓ And we were always so busy working on ⁓ actual products and actual shows. that experimenting is sometimes there's no time for it. And it's been very busy with these fear shows that we haven't been experimenting as much as we would like. And this guy, he just started, he sold his previous company and now he just, he's a maker and he just started experimenting with it. if I'm sure that he will, he did a good job because his previous company was completely crazy what he did. ⁓ So I'm very interested in looking at what he did because we didn't have the time yet to experiment. It's a bit of a big problem. We started now going into this real time 3D using game technology, but we're kind of stuck in it because we have jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, to make, and we need to make the next step. need something like COVID where need, where a company stops, comes to a halt and you say, now we need to reinvent ourselves.

Right.

But we still have quite a lot of work with our game tech-driven solutions. We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg there. We just started. ⁓ And before AI catches up to the level that we need, it's going to take some time. So we're at a good spot right now.

Yes. Yep. Yep. I see. Yeah. Yeah. And are you actively watching any AI tools or startups? Anything you feel is close to being useful for your work? Other than mid journey. I know you're using that already.

Oh, yeah, lots of things. I were looking at Nana banana looking at VO three, I closely monitor like the big ones, Google. Hey, Jen looking been looking into that been using it as well to change people's voice. Yeah, trend at the CEO. He wanted to come on to the stage as a hologram. But a hologram is a projection on if you project on a see through gauze, then you can create a hologram that

the voice.

That's technology behind that. But it's just a plain video playing there. ⁓ What we did was we recorded him on a green key studio, in a green key studio. So the wall behind is completely green. Then we removed the green. And then we said to Heijen, like, this man needs to say these sentences like, hello, welcome to our presentation. needs to say it in eight different languages. He doesn't speak eight different languages. But because of Heijen,

Mm.

we could make him speak eight different languages. His voice was completely changed. Well, no, he had the same voice, but he spoke different language and his lip sync was very good. So that was a nice use of that. think now this is I'm talking about a year and a half ago. think if I would have to do it now with AJ and it evolved like, like crazy, it will look a lot better.

Yeah.

⁓ Other things we are using, ⁓ well, Mid Journey, Runway, they have a nice set of tools with video. ⁓ in my, haven't used it myself, but lots of people in my office are constantly playing with the video generator of Grok. So they're a big fan of that because it's not that censored as all the other. ⁓

Mmm.

The other ones as soon as you put something political or want to make something funny It might say like that's against our guidelines. Let's not do it and crock is owned by Elon Musk if I'm not mistaken and He just said there's no censorship. You can do whatever you want. So

Okay, so yeah, so what are they using it for? Is it just for fun or they're actually kind of experimenting?

We're experimenting, definitely. And sometimes we get this 60, I call it old school 16, nine videos, because our what we do is we the screens we have are very seldomly the dimensions of the television, I would say the aspect ratio of a television, which is sorry, 16 by nine. But when we do have to make a 16 by nine video, we can we started experimenting.

Right.

with using a combination of all these AI video models. One is better at futuristic worlds, more like 3D animated looks. One is more like Google Vio is super good ⁓ in real persons and making them talk. And so we've been using them ⁓ to experiment and make some actual

Mm.

⁓ actual products with that. For example, we don't really do that. We don't make commercials, but I think the people who are making commercials, they have a real problem. Also actors and you don't need actors anymore. I mean, if you're shooting a commercial with neutral actors, just a beautiful man, a beautiful woman, mean, AI generate them. Why would you pay ⁓ for a

Mm-hmm. Really excited.

for a real actor, while if you go into something like V03, you can just do whatever you want. And it's consistent, it stays consistent.

Yeah, consistency seems to be getting really better. Last year, now, right? So it used to be a problem. Now you can have consistency in the people, in the nuances, in what they're wearing, and then the surrounding.

Exactly. There's just some like you can tell sometimes ⁓ if you have a hallway and there's lamps like these lamps might differ. The model of the lamp might differ a little bit from the left side and the right side and you can see it's AI.

Mm. The lighting, right? The lighting. If you pay real attention.

Yeah, I mean, I've put stuff on fire in AI and then the way the fire reflects on the on the people that are there. It's amazing. mean.

Well, that's great. Wow. So what do you do? What does your team use it for? Like, are you like for smaller projects for like little commercials for 16?

We don't really do commercials, but when we get asked to do a commercial or like a promotional video, which is 69 or goes on Instagram or whatever, we start using parts of it will be AI generated because it becomes possible. And why would you spend... Yeah, why would you spend... If our client says, yeah, we want to a... Say something stupid, a dancing bunny that is throwing Easter eggs at the screen.

the time.

Why would you if you need to model that Easter bunny and then animate it put somebody in a capture motion capture suit It's costing a lot of money. It's cost it takes up so much effort While in AI, sometimes you get a very nice result with two hours of prompting

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And is this something, this is not your core business though. you don't do a lot of those, right?

No, no, but sometimes the events we do, I mean the event where we have the big screens on the stages and there we create the visuals. Now they started asking like, yeah, it would be nice if the social campaigns reflect a little bit what is happening on the screens at the going to be at the screens at the festival. And then we create ⁓ some movies. But it's seldom, so seldomly that we do that. So for us, it's

Mm-hmm.

It's still to actually use it in production. I would say 0.05 % of the time because it's not there for us yet. But in the concept phase, yes, most definitely.

I see. And among all the hard things you're doing that AI is not ⁓ capable enough, which one is the hardest thing? Like if you were to pick one thing that AI is like furthest away from?

Well, the high, high, high resolution staying consistent and giving that crisp image quality that we get from a game engine. While if you AI, if you do something in AI and you blow up the resolution and then you have a big screen and you're close to that screen, you will see that it's AI generated. Like, I mean, I see it because it's my job, but for example, you go on to Instagram and you see these models popping up. They have like half a million or a million followers and everybody's commenting, wow, you're so beautiful. And then she moves and I just see in the hair, the small details that she's AI, but it's very well done. And if you're not into the business, you don't see. But I see like the hair, very small things, like if we would make mountains with lots of small leaves,

No. Yeah. You just. I don't.

And we do that in a game engine. Every small leaf stays the same small leaf stays in this place when we move the camera. But if you do that in AI, the consistency of millions of leaves being in one shot, it cannot keep the same consistency. The leaves will every frame differ a little bit. And you see that I see that.

Yeah, yeah. I think it's ultimately a problem with AI is not deterministic. It's right. Yeah, you can't control it very consistently. Yeah. ⁓

Exactly. Not yet. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Or now I experiment sometimes I take a picture of somebody holding a can with a straw in it and I say, drink from this drink from the can and it will just put the straw completely through. I mean, it would physically go through its head and then it's standing there like it doesn't know yet. Well enough like how how this should look like to to calculate it correctly. But it will get there. mean, if you see where we were eight months ago and where we are today, it's crazy.

What do you think is the benefit of it actually gets there? And, know, based on what we're seeing, could be more consume more compute, right? If AI is to generate every frame, then it could be very expensive.

The amount of energy that a movie generated in AI uses, it's, I mean, it's not serious. ⁓ It's also not sustainable, I think, for open AI. Well, we're also using chat GPT open AI. Sora is not available yet here, but I mean, the results you see of Sora are also amazing. But yeah, I mean, it's not sustainable. If everybody in the world starts making videos for fun. You're gonna need a few power plants, nuclear power plants built next to your company to have that amount of energy.

Yeah, yeah. You know, coincidentally, I just interviewed someone from Denmark who wrote a book, a professor from ⁓ the University of Copenhagen. He wrote a book about sustainable AI and he was sharing like, you know, the amount of water that people are, you know, the company OpenAI used to train GPT-4 is basically 300,000 person, human beings, one month's worth of use of water. So That seems like a lot. I imagine of the... if we were to make movie. ⁓

⁓ And now it's not only open open AI but every I mean all the big companies are training and investing and so the amount of power that is going there is it's too much ⁓ Same with for example basic hardware like like RAM ⁓ Random access memory. ⁓ I Mean you the price went up three times like a times three. I mean Something that was 300 bucks is now 900. Because all these AI farms, need more random access memory. So yeah.

That's another problem. So what's, what's your gut feeling about where this is going? Or do you feel like in your pipeline AI is probably not going to take a place for all these reasons.

If they keep on, ⁓ if the big companies keep on giving it away so cheap, it could be interesting for me if the quality gets better. But there has to be a point when ⁓ these big companies start asking the actual money that it costs in energy to generate what you just made. And then it could be very uninteresting. for what we do because you might have to make 50 iterations before you get the actual result that you need. then cost-wise, it's probably more interesting to have a human create this in 3D software. Then again, if you have a commercial that doesn't need to be high resolution and has actors in it and it has a very clear storyline, and it's very clear what needs to happen, then I think it is worth the cost versus hiring a camera team, ⁓ renting out a whole restaurant to shoot a commercial. It's going to beat that. But for me, I mean, we have all these crazy, a show that we make, can be a crazy 3D underwater world that we're flying through in very high resolution, but it could also be a show that's completely based on

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

futuristic world with cars flying around and it's all so specific and in that high resolution that I'm not sure if it's going to be feasible. ⁓ I mean the amount of energy that's going to be wasted to create that show compared to putting some humans to work and making that show from their own hands with their own hands and their own mind.

Yeah. Good point. maybe people working with you guys for the quality requirements, their jobs are safe. AI will not.

Yeah! But everybody's afraid. Also in my company, they're like, ⁓ AI is coming. AI is coming. Yeah. But I mean, if you're creative, like we are, we are creative slash technical people. I mean, if use your creativity, embrace AI as a tool and make your product and yourself better with AI. I mean, then you have lots of steps ahead from your competition. I mean, I don't read my contracts anymore or whatever I get in. I I agreed my contracts, of course, but I throw them in AI and AI gives me its opinion. I mean, I throw them in chat, GPT, chat, GPT knows everything about my company and I, I asked the opinion about certain contracts and then I checked with my, my lawyer, same opinions, 90, 95 % of the time. mean, it's

It's good enough for that kind of thing.

Definitely, I don't write my emails with AI because I think you can see that when an email is written with AI But I mean, I'm not a native English speaker. So sometimes I have Gemini clean up my emails or give me suggestions like ⁓ I think for that it's it's amazing ⁓ The language because it's still all just not just language models. That's what it is language models and AI generators

you Yeah, I agree.

It's thinking.

It's much lower resolution. If you think about text, it's so low resolution. was important. It's low, right?

Yeah. Text takes up nothing compared to an image that needs to be stored. Text is really nothing. But I'm amazed sometimes when I asked ChatGPT a difficult question. Sometimes it also tells me something that's completely wrong. And then I'm like, then I tell you're wrong. And then it corrects itself itself. But then the next time I ask the same question, it will give me the same wrong answer just because it's been trained on a specific data set and only

Right. Right.

the next time it will be trained, will maybe take the correct answer. So it's all not there yet, all use it with caution, but I think it's gonna have a huge impact on our lives.

Yeah. I think so too. So let's say if I started AI Studio on visual art or videos and I approach you to collaborate, ⁓ I ask the question, let's build something for Prismax or maybe I can build something for you. What would you ask me to build?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, at first, yeah, at first, we run worlds in 3D, 3D worlds in real time. And the big difficulty there is assets come from several artists, like an artist will make a tree, another artist will make a car, somebody will make a metahuman that is walking around, somebody will make flowers. But ⁓ it really depends on the qualities, game

or reason. Yeah, go ahead.

qualities of the 3D artists, ⁓ if that asset is usable in real time or not. If an artist is not used to create assets for a game engine, he will ⁓ probably use way too many polygons. And then the asset becomes too heavy to run in real time, especially if you put them all together. ⁓ So we've been looking into creating something ourselves now that optimizes it through the use of AI. Now we're doing it without AI, but things like that, optimizing 3D models, even generating 3D models that are completely optimized for real-time workflow. That's something that will be very interesting for us. Or a system that takes our whole database of everything we ever created in 3D in specific themes. Say we created 50 different kinds of trees. 50 different kinds of castles, example. We created 50 castles already. And we say we have an AI train on those castles. And then we say, now generate us a castle ⁓ from the 18th century ⁓ with three gates and no windows. ⁓ Then it would use all the data that we created already to build in 3D by itself a 3D castle. That would be very interesting. That runs in real time. That doesn't have too many polygons. That could be very interesting technology for us.

Mmm. So it's real time. So taking your data, vast amount of data, do the generation real time. ⁓

No, not real for use in real time. ⁓ Yeah, yeah, because now I bet there's generators that already generate lots of 3d models, but they're probably too heavy to be used in a game engine in real time, they will have too many polygons too many triangles that ⁓ builds up this, this 3d model, and then it's too heavy to use it in a real time environment, then you can only use it to to render.

for use in real time. you I wonder if it's a problem with the model itself. It could be a specific problem. ⁓

video. In our case, it's usually the human who makes the model that is not used to modeling for game tech. Yeah, that's a thing. We need modelers, ⁓ humans that ⁓ know how to create a model that will end up in a computer game. And then we're good.

Yeah. Okay. Got it. I have a lot of builders on my channel, so hopefully somebody will reach out to you. have great to do. I hopefully they'll reach out to collaborate. ⁓ And I have a question on a high level. So you've been doing real time these visuals for 20 years. What do you know about human perception and the attention that, you know, the AI researchers or the models haven't figured out?

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Well, that's also a thing. Like we create shows and a show should be like a sinus. People shouldn't be dancing the whole time. Well, they should be dancing as much as possible. But if you like would have a machine create a show, it would probably for now just give energy all the time. And humans can put into a show, they can put a human factor, can put... put a nice break and then it goes up and then goes down and goes up and you need to look at the same as a DJ does a DJ looks at his audience and he sees like this track works they're dancing but you should have his crowd dancing but he shouldn't wear them out he shouldn't have them dancing at full force the whole time because then you won't have a good show a show needs to be a sinus and for a machine to replicate that there's no way

Mm-hmm.

I mean, you need humans to build a very good show. And if a show is too perfect, like you have these time coded shows, that means that you know what's coming and everything is pre-programmed. It looks very nice, but it looks very fake because everything is too perfect. If you have something that is being made by people in real time pushing buttons, then it looks and it feels much more human and not fabricated.

Right. Mm-hmm.

Because at Tomorrowland, example, there's almost during the shows when the DJs play, nothing is automated. Everything is pushed by humans by hand. And you really see that. I mean, it looks more human than some of the other shows I see.

Mm-hmm. And people, the audience want that.

The audience, the audience are humans, and they're looking at a show. And if it's too mechanical, too much computer generated, the feeling then it won't work as well as, as when humans created humans that have a feeling for rhythm, have a feeling ⁓ for color contrast, balance between video and lights. And that's something that you cannot learn a machine. It's something that only we humans can do. You can have an AI write a poem, but it will never be as good as when you take one of the best poets in the world and have him write a poem, because he will put some humanity in it and the other is written by a machine.

Right. What do you think of those performances now? I've seen some like the robotics playing violin, there's an orchestra, had the robotics playing those things. It looks like, wow, different as well.

It's different, but I prefer having a real person play a violin over a robot playing a violin, because the robot was trained in AI to play the violin and that person trained probably 25 years before the person could play the violin perfectly. I think some things shouldn't be touched. And my next product is going to be exactly about that. We are going to...

Why? What is

bring classical music, ⁓ but in an immersive experience with a 3D generated world in our game technology. But we keep the real musicians played it. Nothing is AI generated. We have real musicians. We recorded an orchestra of 120 musicians. And what they bring is being translated onto the screen through gaming technology. It's still humans at the basis and technology enhancing what the humans are doing. Not everything is just generated by machines.

Mm. Wow, so the musicians are playing, they're real human being playing. It's just the surroundings and the perceptions and the looks could be different. They could be in a dather, they could be on top of a pyramid.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly like that. We created worlds with our game tech. ⁓ Say we're playing a very classical piece about the Alps, then our system will... We created Alps, a simulation of Alps, and these artists will be playing on the Alps virtually. So it will look like they're sitting on the Alps together with a real weather system and everything. But it will be played by these real people and not by anything that is AI generated or not real. No 3D models there. They're the real artists.

Sounds amazing. I mean, if your event is coming out and you're releasing it, I'm happy to share it in the the description. just share.

Yeah, we're aiming for September ⁓ worldwide release.

There is time. OK, there is time. There is time for sure. You also mentioned that you're hiring. What kind of people are you looking for? And what's the pitch for someone thinking about joining your team?

Yeah, we're looking for people ⁓ with 10 or more years of experience in ⁓ 3D ⁓ modelers for games, 3D animators that are used to game technology, and programmers, C++ programmers, Qt programmers ⁓ that are all into the gaming industry, working with ⁓ Unreal Engine. That's what we're looking for. ⁓ Since we spoke, hired like three new people and found some very good programmers. Yes, very nice. Thanks.

Hmm. So congratulations. Yeah. I mean, thank you so much, George, for the conversation. I really appreciate it. I know it's really late for you. It's like 10 PM or 11 PM. Yeah. So you are like one of the hardest working founders I've talked to us. And I think what you do is a craft. It's just, it's not like I have to lose respect for people who are honing on their crafts, like the violinist, the real human doing that. And you're.

11. The evening's just started. ⁓ Mm-hmm.

you're experimenting with AI, but you're not chasing technology for AI's sake.

No, we shouldn't use AI because it's a popular right. No, use it when it makes sense.

Yes. Yes, good point. And you're chasing the moments that make people feel something. And I feel I want to go to one of your events and I'll ping you. I'm here. want to meet you in person.

Last two weeks until I come over to Belgium. We have tomorrow in there.

I will take I mean, I'm in San Francisco Bay Area.

And we're coming back here. Where are you from? Vegas. ⁓ ⁓ yeah, yeah. We're probably coming out ⁓ later this year to do some shows over there. So I'll keep, I'll stay in touch. No, not specifically San Francisco, but not that far.

In San Francisco? In San Francisco or is it in... All right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I would love to go to one of your events and I know that you hold again, you're holding a really high visual visual bar for whoever is building the next generation of visual experience. So yeah. And thank you for sharing how you think about what you're doing, your craft and being so generous with your perspective and time today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thank you so much. Give me one second. Yeah.

Good luck with your forecast.