28/05/2016 Click - Short Edition

This is East London, painfully trendy and somewhere I

Down Shoreditch way is the famous Brick Lane, an area famous for its

colourful street art that you will find lurking around every corner.

It is a real work of art, which we can all enjoy at no cost.

The creator of this really didn't expect to get paid.

That is rarely the case with other kinds of content, online news, video

content, as we know, the creators of those are in it for money.

Money that often comes from advertisers.

The problem is, our love affair with doing this is spilling online.

The way to skip these ads on the web is to install a browser

These are known as ad blockers, stopping annoying things popping up

Not everything that pops up on your screen is annoying, case in point.

You have been testing some of these ad blockers, haven't you?

While some people might not mind random interruptions,

for others advertisements are a real nuisance, particularly on mobile

devices because people don't want to use their data or battery power

I guess it is good news for us, definitely bad news

Absolutely, and although ad blocking is nothing new, people are

learning more about it and there are more ways of blocking adverts.

It seems it will only become a bigger business.

Adblock Plus is leading the way with 100 million users,

and once you install it, you should be free of advertisements.

Not quite, it creates a white list, a list of sites that adheres to what

Acceptable ads is a set of criteria, and those are criteria we developed

If advertisers or publishers have certain ads that meet those criteria

they can be white listed, and then the top 10% of those advertisers are

also charged a licensing fee for the work you put into doing it.

It is not just about bursting their bubble, the issue is

Even if advertisers make improvements, there will still be

room for ad blockers out there because the bottom line is there

will soon be a lot of really bad ads.

It is not just about bursting their bubble, the issue is

the general dislike of adverts, only about 10% of the company's

They don't like distractions or the idea of companies tracking

their data and habits, something ad blockers also aim to reduce.

Some content providers are going as far as blocking user access

if they detect that ad blocking software is in use.

Now, Opera has an ad blocker built into its latest browser, Apple

recently allowed them to function on its mobile operators, and others are

It is not all doom and gloom, at least not yet.

We haven't all downloaded ad blockers.

There does seem to be a growing trend.

Some try to shield themselves by going behind pay walls, and if

things don't get better we may start seeing subscription models where you

sign up for access to multiple publications in one place, or even

using cash trails, where you pay nominal amount each

Either of those would put an end to the freely available

At least one company is attempting to unite it all and change

PageFair is one of those ad blocker blockers, one of several out there,

giving back to those who are stung by the rise of ad blockers.

The company says there philosophy is more about bridging the gap

What users will start seeing is far fewer ads, respectful ads that

aren't snooping on their data, that aren't jumping around the page, that

aren't interrupting the traffic by taking so long to download, and also

ads that behave in such a simple way that they can't expose the machine

Companies need to use advertising because it pays the bills,

but they need to reduce the number of ads such that the ones that are

Each ad has to shout over every other ad. And each one has to do try

to shout louder than the next. The way beyond that blocking, where

you get to decide what ads to show on this now uncluttered space where

people have blocked out all the other ads, once you can decide what

ads you want to show beyond that blocking,

the answer is to limit the quantity What that will do is I

think it will cure what is Whether ad blockers or

the ad blocker blockers win, it seems we are the ones who will

come out glorious, with a less We are all used to seeing a lot

of CGI - computer generated imagery One thing that has become a lot more

common in recent years is the idea of the virtual actor - computer

generated humans doing things that It turns out that the Hollywood

minds behind virtual actors are now turning their attention

behind something much more serious. It is this technology that allowed

Marc Cieslak to meet a virtual The University of Southern

California is home to the Institute A place where cutting-edge

technology and Hollywood meet. The ICT has developed

a holster kit used to create visual For example, the light stage - this

is used to capture an actor's face This date can then be used to create

virtual renders of the actor. It is a pretty spectacular sight,

I have to say. This kit has applications way

beyond the multiplex. A similar setup has been used

as part of the process of recording interviews with

Holocaust survivors for a project which could eventually end

up in museums and even classrooms. Do you remember any songs

from your youth? This is what we call

the automultiscopic projector ray. We have

about 200 video projectors behind You walk around the display

at 130 degrees. You can see a 3-D image sitting

in front of you. This man was

an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor. He was in five concentration

camps throughout the war. The most dangerous thing that

happened is being in the camps. Because being in the camps,

every minute, every second of your existence, you were at the

mercy of someone who could actually take your life away, who could

torture you, who could beat you, who It took a week to film these

interviews and over 20 hours In order to record these interviews

with Holocaust survivors, 30 cameras were arranged around

the interviewees in a semicircle. The images they captured are

projected out of the projector ray, It provides the illusion

of three dimensions. It really does feel like this

man is in the room with you. But what rally brings these 3-D

images to life is the audience's ability to interact with the

interviewees, asking them questions We have

about just under 2,000 responses. They cover all

the top questions that people tend to ask Holocaust survivors and also

things specific to the story. So when you ask your question, we

use a natural language understanding similar to how your phone may

translate your speech into text. The system then uses an algorithm

to find the best video response As you ask a question,

we play the video response back to the listener so it feels

like you are having an actual You can read about the Holocaust in

a book or see it on a movie or on TV but until you actually interactive

with someone who has lived through this experience in person,

it does not have the same... the reality that this thing actually

happened and how horrendous it was, They say, if you ignore history you

are doomed to repeat it and as the survivors of the Holocaust

age, interactive recordings like this one have the ability to keep

their stories alive long after they From the beginning of the Nazis

taking over Poland, it was a nightmare from

which you did not wake up That is it for this week,

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