Ryan Faughnder | Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Remember the metaverse? It was just a couple of years ago when it seemed as if every technology, media and entertainment company was scrambling to adapt to a future in which regular people would live parallel digital lives online, walking around as virtual reality avatars in 3D computerized worlds.

That hype hasn’t amounted to much so far, perhaps because audiences have watched movies like “Ready Player One” and “The Matrix” and absorbed their dystopian lessons.

And, besides, there was a new shiny object. With the emergence of ChatGPT, big tech moved on to a much more immediate and seemingly concrete futuristic subject: artificial intelligence.

Studio heads — from Sony Pictures’ Tony Vinciquerra to Paramount’s soon-to-be owner David Ellison — are banking on AI models to streamline production and save money. Even Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which sunk billions of dollars into its metaverse dream, has, like many others, turned more of its focus to AI.

Suffice to say that much has changed in the two years since author and investor Matthew Ball wrote the book “The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything.” Ball, whose essays are highly influential in the spheres of media and tech, has revised and expanded his opus, even giving it a new subtitle: “Building the Spatial Internet.”

When I talked with Ball last week, he certainly hadn’t given up on his ideas about the web of the future, even though AI has clearly eaten the metaverse’s lunch in terms of tech industry enthusiasm and consumer anxiety.

Apple’s Vision Pro has made some progress toward growing the market for headsets, despite its $3,500 price tag and the lingering stigma against wearing a computer on your face. Meanwhile, crypto currencies and other blockchain technologies, which feature prominently in plans for the metaverse, have quietly rebounded after a bumpy period, he said.

Ball also has been writing a bit about the state of the theatrical box office.

This conversation is edited for length and clarity.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the space since you published your original metaverse book a couple of years ago?

The three most substantial shifts are in head-mounted displays, inclusive of wearable glasses, as well as goggles, blockchains, and then artificial intelligence. Each of those three categories seems to have experienced decades of development just in the last two and a half years.

Let’s take ’em one by one, starting with headset computers. Apple comes out with its Vision Pro, and suddenly people are talking about VR and AR goggles again. What happened?

That’s a great example. We saw the category’s most high-profile and probably most important product launch, bringing massive validation of this as a category from a company with unprecedented experience disrupting stale, stagnant or unsuccessful categories and being able to overcome the stigma.

Seeing all of those things come together — Apple’s investment, Apple’s brand, Apple’s retail footprint and their attendant ability to communicate value proposition — is a remarkable case study.

It does feel like the Apple Vision Pro was a chance to take the technology more mainstream. Did it work?

Look, I don’t believe in citing anecdotes as though they’re data, but my followers on Twitter should be as over-indexed to the Vision Pro and head-mounted displays as anyone. I regularly ask those who own one, how many of you used the device within the last 48 hours, and how many of you haven’t used it in the last 30 days?

And the result usually shows that only about 20% of people have used it within the last 48 hours, and two-thirds haven’t touched it in a month. And if you have my followers as an example, who spent $4,000 on a device and after owning it for five or fewer months haven’t touched it for 30 or more days, it’s clear that it’s missing the mark, at least thus far.

Is it a content problem that’s keeping these devices from reaching the masses? Or is it a technology or hardware problem?

The consensus answer is that it’s three different things. It’s the price, it’s the form factor and it’s the applications or content. And right now, all three of those things are limitations, and they’re also interconnected. One of the reasons why the device is uncomfortable and heavy is because it’s high-powered. It’s high-powered so it can run better content experiences. But that also means it’s expensive. If you trade off on the power, the price comes down, but the experiences become diminished.

OK, what about blockchain?

Blockchain has probably gone through puberty over the last two and a half years. Of course, we’ve had the combined market value of cryptocurrencies fall from $3 trillion to $800 billion and then nearly reclaim its all-time high. And along that path, you had the decline of FTX and many others.

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That is to say, we have a much larger sample size and better understanding of the technological limitations, the culture around these products and the extent to which they were often confused with financial speculation and, in some cases, regulatory arbitrage. You’ll find that there are many constituents who still believe that crypto is an essential aspect of the future of the internet, but we certainly can better understand the shortfalls.

Well, this technology also has one of the worst branding problems possible, to the point where the biggest laugh line of the Tom Brady roast was Nikki Glaser making fun of him for pitching crypto.

I agree that it has a stigma problem. That’s certainly true. And NFTs have not really recovered in any way, shape or form. But crypto overall has seen a resurgence. There’s greater legal clarity, there’s greater institutional adoption and it’s back to about 85% of its all-time high, even though we’ve gone from a zero-interest-rate period to a 45-year high in interest rates.

Where does AI come into your theory of the future of the internet?

It is absolutely true that artificial intelligence has taken marginal dollars away from investment into AR, VR and the metaverse. It has changed the narrative around the metaverse hype cycle. I do think that there’s not enough appreciation of how intertwined these topics have always been, and the essential ways in which everything that the metaverse requires and all of the technologies around it are fundamentally reliant on AI.

The CEO of Roblox has said that he believes that within a few years, it will be possible to speak entire worlds into existence. Disney’s ability to create a virtual space even a shred of the size of Disneyland is incredibly cost-prohibitive. If you wanted to actually create something equivalent to Galaxy’s Edge in a virtual world, it’s actually not clear that that would be cheaper than constructing the actual Galaxy’s Edge as it exists today.

Through artificial intelligence, we are actually seeing those costs start to come down extraordinarily, and that’s transforming what’s possible. At the end of the day, the dream of going to a virtual Disney theme park is not just to walk through the Avengers Campus, it’s actually to go there and interact with Iron Man, as played by Robert Downey Jr.

You recently wrote about the long-term declines in theatrical movie attendance per capita. Do you see the broader adoption of these digital technologies further disrupting traditional entertainment consumption?

Yeah. As I detail in the piece, there’s kind of a misconception as to what has caused the decline in theatrical moviegoing. It’s essentially limited to 2- to 24-year-olds, who are going less than ever.

Among that younger demographic, we often hear the argument that no matter how much you play Roblox or Fortnite or Call of Duty, that doesn’t displace going to the movies one more time per year, right?

And yet, we do see that social media platforms, social video platforms such as TikTok and social gaming experiences have substantially displaced typical behaviors, whether it’s going to the movies, babysitting or going to the mall with friends. And this is consistent with broader measures that show that we spend more time by ourselves than ever before.

This trend has been going for long enough that it’s hard to argue it’s going to slow down. The question is, of course, where is the floor?

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Why aren’t actors like Jon Bernthal, Oscar Isaac and Walton Goggins “the biggest movie stars in the world right now?,” someone wondered on social media recently, comparing their talents to Robert De Niro and his peers in the 1970s.

Hollywood has weathered shifting tides since the dawn of cinema. But it’s only more recently that stardom itself, as a pop cultural force, has taken such a hit. Even so, the question gave me pause. What are we being denied, if anything, when actors we admire aren’t “the biggest movie stars in the world”? What are actors themselves being denied?

Maybe audiences are feeling nostalgic for a time when the world around us, even notions of stardom, seemed more simple. What’s the difference between a famous actor and movie star, anyway? I tend to think it has something to do with an aura that builds around a performer when they reach a certain level of commercial and artistic success. It’s also something about their persona — a compelling force of nature — both on screen and off.

Fame has its perks. Kevin Bacon recently told Vanity Fair that, as an experiment, he went out in disguise, experienced anonymity and wasn’t impressed: “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a coffee or whatever. I was like, ‘This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.’” But even Bacon isn’t considered a global movie star.

There’s an endless gap between being recognizable and well-liked and a star who is the sole reason audiences flock to a movie. If you consider Bernthal, Isaac and Goggins, each has found success across the professional metrics that matter. How much more stardom is required of them? They seem to be doing just fine, lacking neither opportunities, nominations nor financial stability. Maybe it’s healthier for actors, as human beings, to not carry the mantle of Movie Star?

Either way, the importance of cinema has become diminished. Films don’t occupy our preoccupations the way they once did. If an actor’s stardom is still measured by ticket sales, it’s worth considering which movies were the highest earners in the past. In the ’70s, it wasn’t just the popcorn films that made money (though they certainly did). It was also movies that offered something different than spectacle. Stories that created room for leading actors to stretch their talents were regularly among the top earners: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “A Star is Born,” “Kramer vs. Kramer” (the latter of which was the No. 1 grosser of 1979; try imagining a movie about divorce and single parenthood achieving that today).

Hollywood has done its best in recent years to diminish the power movie stars once had, relying instead on intellectual property and the franchise-ification of familiar titles. Turns out, that will only get you so far. Now those same industry executives are embracing the movie stars that are still around, from Will Smith to Tom Cruise to Denzel Washington, but they remain flummoxed as to how to recreate an enduring system for newer, younger actors. Look how hard Glen Powell’s team is trying and … it’s proving to be a challenge. If you’re wondering why the likes of Bernthal aren’t considered major movie stars today, you also have to contend with the fact that non-white actors have had these same frustrations for years.

“Maybe this is controversial but I don’t think we live in a very glamorous era,” Izzy Custodio says in a recent video for Be Kind Rewind, her YouTube channel about Hollywood history. The lack of Hollywood glamor extends to a subject that may surprise you: The Muppet known as Miss Piggy. But Custodio calls her “the ultimate reflection of Hollywood ambition, obsession and glamor run rampant.” Some aspects of the character are timeless, but it’s been a struggle to adapt her to the current era because “many of the references that originally made her resonate” — her distinctive movie star aspirations and affectations — “aren’t really relevant anymore.”

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Premiering this weekend on HBO, a documentary about Faye Dunaway touches on some of these elusive qualities.  “Faye is perhaps someone I have created,” Dunaway says, referring to herself in the third person. “It’s a persona that is related very much to my work, that’s specific to my career — that’s the actress, I suppose.”

We don’t often hear stars talk about how they navigate this psychologically. We all have a public self. But for celebrities, this is exaggerated and intensified — a deliberate and calibrated performance all its own.

“In a lot of my films, the clothes have created statements,” she says. Yes, that seems to be missing right now, too. She also talks about Steve McQueen, who was her co-star in 1968’s “The Thomas Crown Affair.” The pair had a “wonderful chemistry,” she says, “because he was an actor, for sure, but he was also Steve. He had a persona that was something that defined him perhaps more than this quote-unquote acting.”

Maybe an actor like Austin Butler comes closes to that at the moment. But what Dunaway is describing is a larger-than-life quality, which used to have a literal meaning: Projected on a massive film screen, movie stars were larger than life. Now, we’re usually watching them on our TV screens and iPads, which have shrunk them back down to size.

In 1950’s “Sunset Boulevard,” about the vicissitudes of stardom, Norma Desmond, a grand dame of silent film who is past her prime, talks with a screenwriter who doesn’t recognize her at first — and then suddenly he does. You used to be big, he says. “I am big,” comes the retort. “It’s the pictures that got small.” A great line that has nevertheless been proven wrong two decades into the 21st century.

If Hollywood is unable to cultivate new stars, AI companies are all too happy to use this to their advantage by resurrecting old stars — from Judy Garland to James Dean to Burt Reynolds — for modern times. Their voices, at least. The possibilities are endless. And creepy.

“They took the idols and smashed them,” goes another line from “Sunset Boulevard.”

“And who’ve we got now? Some nobodies.”

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Alex Brown | Stateline.org (TNS)

For decades, states have relied on gas taxes to provide much of the money to maintain roads and bridges. But as cars become more fuel efficient, and some Americans switch to electric vehicles, state leaders say the gas tax won’t pay the bills for much longer.

At the same time, many cities have seen their streets crowded with delivery trucks from Amazon and other companies, as consumers increasingly opt to have products delivered to their homes. In a few states, lawmakers think fees on those deliveries could be part of their road-funding solution.

“If you’re going to be creating wear and tear on our roads, you should help pay to maintain them,” said Colorado state Rep. Cathy Kipp, a Democrat who chairs the Energy and Environment Committee.

In July 2022, Colorado became the first state with a retail delivery fee, a charge on all vehicle deliveries to consumers within the state. The fee, which currently stands at 29 cents per delivery, provides funding for highways, bridges, tunnels, electric vehicle charging stations and projects to reduce air pollution and to electrify vehicle fleets and transit systems. It has brought in more than $160 million.

Colorado leaders have had to simplify the law to help businesses comply with it, but they say it’s largely been a success story. Minnesota enacted its own retail delivery fee in 2023, and lawmakers in New York and Illinois have proposed similar measures. Meanwhile, legislators and transportation officials in several other states have commissioned studies to consider the concept.

Some retailers and Republican lawmakers have argued that the fee hurts consumers, and many businesses in Colorado initially had trouble complying with the law.

“The 27-cent delivery fee is not trivial, its effects are not imperceptible, and it greatly affects our citizens — especially those who are already struggling to pay the bills and provide for their families,” Republican state Rep. Rose Pugliese, the House minority leader, wrote in a Colorado Springs Gazette guest column several months after the law was enacted.

But backers of the fee say they see growing interest across the country, especially as delivery trucks become ubiquitous in many neighborhoods.

‘Future-proofing’ transportation funding

State law in Colorado limits the ways in which lawmakers can expand taxes. With gas tax revenues dwindling, legislators didn’t have an obvious solution to pay for roads. They eventually settled on the retail delivery fee, which is not characterized as a tax.

Initially, the program was a struggle for many businesses, due to a requirement that they detail the fee separately on each receipt.

“For our medium and small businesses, it was a real complicated thing and very burdensome for them to have to reprogram their software with a whole extra line item,” Kipp said.

Last year, Kipp joined a bipartisan group of lawmakers to amend the program. They rescinded the requirement that businesses itemize the fee on each receipt and allowed companies to cover the fee themselves rather than breaking it out on each order. They also exempted retailers with less than $500,000 in sales.

Since the fix was adopted, Kipp said she has stopped hearing complaints about the program. Chris Howes, president of the Colorado Retail Council, said he too has not heard any recent gripes.

“We’ve got it straightened out by now,” he said. “People have accepted it and moved on.”

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Amazon did not grant a Stateline interview request, and the National Retail Federation deferred questions to state chapters. Chamber of Progress, a tech industry advocacy group, did not arrange an interview by publication time.

Last year, lawmakers in Minnesota enacted their own retail delivery fee, a 50-cent charge on purchases of more than $100. Lawmakers heard from local governments that they were struggling to maintain their roads and badly needed state aid to make up the gap.

“This is trying to future-proof our transportation funding,” said Democratic state Rep. Erin Koegel, who sponsored the bill. “We keep getting performance grades from civil engineers saying we’re at a C- or D for our infrastructure. We needed to think about ways to get more revenue in the system.”

Koegel said the measure was a compromise. Her initial draft, which did not have a $100 threshold for purchases, was intended to be a deterrent, much like cigarette taxes. She said delivery trucks are increasing congestion in many cities and damaging streets that weren’t built to support large vehicles. However, lawmakers ultimately decided to limit the fee to more expensive purchases in order to protect lower-income consumers.

Minnesota’s fee is projected to generate $59 million in its first fiscal year. The funding will be distributed to cities, counties and towns to help with their road-funding needs.

Traffic throughout the day

Cities and counties in Washington state also have asked for help, and some local leaders have asked state lawmakers to consider a retail delivery fee — or to authorize cities to collect one. State lawmakers commissioned an analysis, published last month, looking at the potential for such a program. The report found that a fee could generate $45 million to $112 million in revenue in 2026, depending on which businesses and orders were covered.

“We’re now seeing that there’s traffic on our system throughout the day, and the growth of these delivery services is a part of that,” said Democratic state Sen. Marko Liias, who chairs the Transportation Committee. “We’ve had a history in transportation of user-based fees. This feels like a mechanism that could help in that regard.”

Liias emphasized that some version of the fee is likely to be a big topic of discussion in the next legislative session. He said he’s already heard strong arguments on both sides of the issue.

In some areas, the rise in retail deliveries has put the greatest burden on the infrastructure surrounding shipping facilities. Illinois’ CenterPoint Intermodal Center, the nation’s largest inland port, connects interstate trucking, railway lines and Mississippi River barges.

“There really needs to be a shift in the tax structure, since many of these facilities are not generating the local sales tax you’d get at a brick and mortar,” said Democratic state Sen. Rachel Ventura, whose district includes the CenterPoint facility. “We have a lot of traffic going in and out, and the environmental burden and road repairs and the tax burden fall locally.”

Ventura has drafted a bill that would allow communities to assess fees on intermodal facilities — locations that transfer products from one type of transportation to another. Local governments that opted in would be able to spend the funds on roads within five miles of the facilities. The fee, which would be based on the weight of each shipment, is projected to generate $33 million to $68 million per year.

The bill has not passed out of committee, and Ventura said lawmakers are still discussing the path forward amid opposition from the trucking industry.

In New York, a Democratic bill to impose a 25-cent fee on deliveries within New York City has been introduced but remains in committee. Meanwhile, state agencies in Nevada and Ohio have commissioned studies examining the feasibility of retail delivery fees. Those reports have not yet led to legislative action.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.