Twitch streamers are really getting creative. Besides completely AI generated content, others have been experimenting with viewer participation in unique ways.
Shindigs is one of the streamers really experimenting with new ideas. He’s streamed as a gun with eyes, a “biblically accurate angel McRib vtuber”, and a Costco hotdog. He also mixes real and animated footage. In one stream, Shindigs went “back in time” every time he died in Lies of P, eventually turning the broadcast into a radio play. He recently let characters play Christmas songs with chat and created music experiments live.
While playing Helldivers, he recently allowed his viewers the ability to use chat to type things in and they pop up in the stream like a helmet cam. The viewers quickly started riffing on numerous themes while he played.
I gave everyone in chat text-to-speech to roleplay as Helldiver HQ.
He created this effect using SAMMI, a stream tool that connects Twitch chat and Channel Point redemptions to Open Broadcast Software. With it, he created his Twitch plugin called ‘Bug Twitter’ that allowed this functionality. He also created a plugin called ‘strategems’ that uses OBS’s Advanced Mask. Viewers can use Twitch channel points to activate effects like distorting the screen to make it more difficult or ‘Australia mode’ that flips the screen upside down.
I gave Twitch Chat the ability to call down Strategems for Helldivers 2 streams.
These Strategems effect the stream layout in different ways.
He’s not the only one being creative. CardboardCowboy built a cartoon RPG world where the NPCs are played by Twitch chat with TTS (Text To Speech) complete with proximity-based audio that fades off as he moves away.
We are witnessing the evolution of content.
This streamer set up an cartoon world where chat controls NPCs with TTS.
The level of details is incredible, even the TTS audio is based on proximity so NPC's get quieter as the streamer walks away.
Young streamers on Twitch seem to be exploring a lot of extremely creative ideas with a more publicly interactive form of streaming. There’s likely an interesting balance between interacting with the viewers and yet maintaining some sense of cohesive sanity and avoiding trolls seeking to ruin the experience – but what they are doing and trying are wildly creative. Give it a look
It seems like this kind of technique that over-arches the generation from one topic to the next might be very useful in maintaining continuity relating to temporal stability.
The Dead by Daylight Twitch streamer Hens333 was curious about a streamer’s meteoric rise, and couldn’t figure it out. The streamer didn’t appear to have any decent content, didn’t seem very big in the community – but was getting massive viewer counts.
So, he dug into it and then went on a massive data deep-dive and believes he found what the internet dreads – that it could likely be a whole empire of fake views and purchased popularity – all to get lucrative sponsorships.
Doing a little napkin math, he is likely spending $1000-2000 per month for bot accounts based on his viewer counts. Why would you do this? Ego?
A quick look at his Twitch page clears it all up. Sponsorships. His Twitch page is littered with dozens and dozens of sponsors.
If all this is true, then it means he might be making $10,000’s per month on sponsors with only a $1000-$2000 per month outlay. Some note he isn’t even playing the games many times – just showing replays of previous sessions. One more highly suspicious data point is that just about ALL his youtube videos have less than 50 views:
The streamer in question is realzbluewater, and if he is doing this, he is likely committing criminal fraud by misrepresenting his actual viewer count to advertisers.
This could come with serious legal repercussions as well as criminal charges. He wouldn’t be the first. Charlie Javiceis now up on charges that she deceived JP Morgan about the number of actual users of her college financial planning company called Frank. They alleged that Javice even paid a data-science professor $18,000 for a list of more than four million fake student names. She claims JP Morgan simply didn’t do their due diligence. Right now, she’s up on Federal charges for securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy.
I personally believe there is a lot of the kind of fraud Javice is accused of. It’s been pretty much rampant by people on Forbes 30 under 30 list (more comically being called Forbes 30 doing 30 list). It’s also ridiculously easy. Purchasing views and reposts for any social media account is just a google click away. You can buy thousands of re-Tweets, Twitch views, Youtube views, fake comments, Instagram followers, Facebook upvotes – and just about anything else for just a little bit of money. Just google it and you’ll find tons of services that do all these things for under $50.
I sure hope realzbluewater is legit. If he’s not, he’s likely committing criminal fraud and could be sued by his sponsors and face jail time.
Twitch is likely not cracking down for 3 reasons. Firstly, they get ad revenue if the views or real or not. Secondly, even if they detect this, they can’t ban streamers when they detect bots swarming a channel or others could use those kinds of attacks to get streamers taken down or banned. Finally, the increase of numbers helps Twitch too. Twitch has been struggling financially and definitely could use all the viewers they can get – even if the majority of them are bots.
Just one more likely datapoint for the Dead Internet Theory. If this kind of fraud is becoming more rampant (and I believe it is), there is going to be a reckoning. Advertisers are going to start asking questions about fake numbers and realize they’re getting ripped off. When the reckoning starts, people better have long, clean records when the investigations begins – because the hosting sites will blame the streamers, and the streamers will likely be thrown under the bus.
Note to self: great business idea. Start a company that does user/data verification and fraud analysis services. When the day comes, everyone will want you.
About 15 years ago, people noticed that rendering virtual scenes with ray tracing was a lot like how sound propagates through an environment. Light rays travel through open spaces, hit objects and then reflect, refract, and bend. Sound waves follow many of the same principles.
What if you use the same ray casting methods to simulate sound traveling through an environment? Instead of standard hacks on sound to make something sound like it’s in a tiled bathroom or a big orchestra hall, you could accurately simulate it – reducing artist time. Simply play the sound and let the algorithm figure out how it should sound.
Not sure what other research has happened since. It was too computationally expensive for real time back then, but it was a cool idea and maybe we have the compute for it with today’s GPU’s.
This could make a fun little demo – flying through a cityscape with buildings that are constantly generated by AI – getting funkier and funkier as you go along
Instead of ear-splitting roar of an engine, this Tesla cybertruck quietly pulls as far as 2500-3500 diesel engines.
Honestly, it’s probably inevitable. I mean, trains use diesel-electric combo where the diesel engine powers the electric motors that do the actual pulling. If someone hooked a few train motors into a frame, slapped a auto/truck body on it and took it to a pull, it would likely out-pull anything out there…
In Sierra Leone, there is a step in learning to drive – playing a board game. The game is called The Driver’s Way and is a “Roll and Move” type game where players to roll traffic-light-themed dice and move model cars around a board. The game aims to teach learners the rules of the road in a more entertaining way than standard textbooks.
Makes me wonder if there’s an opportunity for a board or teen-oriented video game like this for learners – even children to learn how to drive, walk, and bike in shared traffic spaces. Maybe it could be structured like the Oregon Trail or something quite fun.
While this is faked with green screen and adding the graphics in post using motion tracking, this should be absolutely possible to make. Mangazi Music shows off a guitar neck that has the lyrics and graphics of what he’s playing on it. Sounds like an interesting idea to me…
LG OLED Signature T announced at CES it is going to be the first commercially available transparent TV. It definitely could add a lot to minimalist living spaces. Samsung, not to be outdone, introduced its micro-LED display technology which seems to deliver an even brighter, better image.
Transparent OLED and LCD screens have around for a while – in fact, you’re probably using one. People were making cool transparent panels by taking a standard backlit LCD, remove the LCD antiglare coating, do a little wiring, then put a lot of light behind it.
Personally, I don’t think just making a standard TV out of a transparent display is understanding what new things are possible with this technology. The Verge review even points out that the tv came with a movable backing screen that slid behind it to help it act more like a traditional TV – so why go transparent? I personally think this opens up a lot of new ideas for innovative new products and experiences instead of just being a minimalist TV.
To that point, the LG Dukeboxshowed up at CES 2024 and is one of the first devices to make use of a transparent LCD as part of the product design. It’s essentially a re-imagined jukebox. You get to see the internals of the system while the user interface is displayed on the transparent display.
While a good start, I can think of a number of interesting new products that simply COULDN’T really be made in other ways than using a transparent display. Those are the kinds of product ideas that I think are ripe for this kind of technology.
