Pathway Launches Manchester-Based Virtual Production Innovation Lab

pathway

Pathway has launched a Manchester-based LED VP Innovation Lab and Production Facility in Partnership with HP.

The company brings to market a 6,000 square foot offering dedicated to the development and production of in-camera visual effects that utilise real-time technology and includes moving image R&D and digital cinema production for filmmakers.

In partnership with HP, the new studio will also provide Virtual Production skills and training offerings that are designed to amplify knowledge transfer to filmmakers. HP will facilitate Pathway’s studio with the latest hardware such as Z-series workstations and scalable digital workspaces via the Engineering Emmy award winning HP Anyware.

“It’s been incredible to see how the film and media industry is moving towards virtual production, and the capabilities Pathway have to offer with the Z by HP suite of solutions for its clients means it’s exciting times ahead, both for commercial users and the young filmmakers of the Future,” said Richard McGuinness, Advanced Compute and Solutions Lead Workstations and Thin Clients, HP UK.

Pathway’s Trafford Park site consists of a 5k square foot soundstage, in-house Virtual Art Department, make-up, wardrobe and dailies room. The new studio’s LED stage technology is powered by ROE Visual Ruby LED panels, MoSys StarTracker, MegaPixel VR Helios processing platform and Unreal Engine.

Speaking about their launch, Pathway co-founder Nathan Newman said:

“It is a delight to have the innovative support of HP in our mission to make virtual production more accessible and an even greater creative experience for filmmakers.

We are also thrilled to welcome Amanda [Nevill] to our advisory board who bring’s to Pathway a wealth of hard earned experience from working at the very heart of the British film industry.”

Newman’s eclectic career spans two decades across the video games industry, viral marketing globe trotting, immersive technology and award-winning moving image production.

Former BFI Chief Executive, Amanda Nevill CBE said:

“Pathway’s contribution to the industry will make it possible for more filmmakers to produce content with the very latest technology and to chase down new ideas for LED wall produced cinematography. During this time of industry growth and change, Pathway’s plans will be a big win for Manchester.”

Nevill’s impressive background spans helming the British Film Institute as Chief Executive for 17 years and is currently a strategic advisor to the international screen business.

Pathway’s £1m facility has been invested in by business partners Neuron Audio Visual, a Manchester based AV solutions company with an international reputation for creating extraordinary experiences at events and through venue installations. Neuron’s impressive client list includes festivals such as Glastonbury and Parklife and brands such as Redbull and Beats.

Speaking about the direction of the new studio, co-founder Alex Wareham said, “Virtual Production isn’t just about recreating old ways of producing content, it is about discovering new heights to moving image product development for our clients.” Pathway’s clients include agency Collective, fashion photography house Chris Davis Studio and creative powerhouse Arrow International Media.

Stashh and Sienna Network partner on NFTs

Secret NFTs are about to enter an explosive phase of growth due to its privacy enhancing features from Secret Network. Stashh, the first NFT marketplace on Secret Network is launching soon.

Sienna Network has announced a partnership with Stashh to enable the SIENNA token as a payment option on Stashh.

NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) are unique tokens that contains rare or unique content. The NFTs prove ownership of the content and we have recently seen artists from digital art to movie makers auction these unique pieces in NFT formats.

NFTs are a growing market and the demand increases rapidly and with the successful launch on AnonsNFT, a series of NFTs with avatars with anonymous faces that sold out almost instantly, and Quentin Tarantino auctioning 7 uncut scenes from his legendary movie Pulp Fiction, the private NFT space is positioned for explosive growth.

stashh

Stashh is the first NFT marketplace for private NFTs and is built on Secret Network, which is the same network as Sienna Network is built on. The new partnership enables users to use the SIENNA token to buy and sell private NFTs on Stashh and keep the content completely private.

Private NFTs comes with a number of benefits for creators and buyers. While creators can monetize and protect their IP, users have a trustless control over how they buy, use and sell their NFTs. It is up to the owner to decide whether its ownership should be revealed or not. This is a great security and protection of the IP asset.

Not only can you use SIENNA to privately buy and sell private NFTs on Stashh — the partnership also aims at future features and deeper collaboration. Curious what that might be? Maybe some special NFT collections or the launch of something…. secret? 🤫

Stay tuned for more — very soon! 🚀

SiennaSwap will launch October 7th 1pm UTC 🚀🚀🚀

Early birds will earn high yields from liquidity farming

SiennaSwap

SiennaSwap is dropping – and in the best possible way. After the extraordinary raise of $11.2 million in private and public sales earlier this year and the inevitable delay in launching software, this is probably the development update everyone who contributes to the Sienna Network has been waiting for.

Wen launch? 🚀 Wen lunch? 🌯

Move your eyes a few inches down now ⏬

SiennaSwap will launch October 7th 1pm UTC!! 🚀

What will happen in the days up until launch?

  • A final testnet version was uploaded on Monday, September 27th
  • Preparing support for the IBC mainnet upgrade in October
  • Marketing push
  • Front end penetration testing

Sienna’s Automated Market Maker, SiennaSwap, is a privacy-first, cross-chain decentralized exchange where users can swap private tokens in complete privacy.

Sienna Swap runs on Secret Network, which is the first blockchain with privacy-preserving smart-contracts with high scalability and low fees. Transactions are executed almost instantly, and with privacy combined, front-running is effectively mitigated.

While being 100% private, Sienna also provides low transaction fees due to the inherent blockchain scalability Sienna utilises.

Users can swap any private SNIP-20 token at Sienna. If they do not have private tokens yet, they can use the bridge to exchange their tokens for the private equivalent. They can always be convered back again.

This will enable users to trade through SiennaSwap and much more besides.

Other things that happened last week:

  • More work on SiennaLend (everyone internally is hyped about the way it looks 🔥)
  • More work on SiennaSwap 2.0 front end (launch of the new design is expected to be a few weeks after SiennaSwap
  • Awaiting Coingecko adding circulating supply / market cap data. Should happen soon as they have received an API source to use.

Get ready! It’s happening! Remember the early birds will earn high yields from liquidity farming.

Sienna launches wrapped token on Binance Smart Chain

Sienna Network, a decentralized privacy-first Decentralized Finance platform built on Secret Network has launched its wrapped BSC-token on Binance Smart Chain with the token address at the end of this post.

Sienna

This is another step, following the similar launch of the ERC-20 wrapped SIENNA token earlier this year, for the foundation’s strategy to be fully available across multiple chains followed by additional bridges – such as to Polkadot and Terra at a later time.

Earlier this year, Sienna Network raised $11.2 million in private and public sales and has recently been featured prominently in Tier One Media such as Forbes, The Times, TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance! as well as major crypto outlets and podcasts.

This makes SIENNA available to users in the fast-growing Binance Smart Chain ecosystem, and will be followed by listings on BSC-focused exchanges

The goal is for the coin to be available across multiple blockchain ecosystems, widening the access to Sienna’s privacy preserving products built on Secret Network that is launching soon.

You can bridge the coin from Secret Network to the same on Binance Smart Chain and back on https://bridge.scrt.network 🌉

👉 SIENNA (BSC) Token Address: 0x130f6e4d338bfd8304f5342d759abe5c6bd7ba9b

The foundation is a cross-chain, privacy-first decentralized finance protocol built on Secret Network, that enables trustless financial instruments, such as trading and lending with complete privacy for multiple blockchain ecosystems.

What blockchain is it built on?
It is built on Secret Network the first blockchain with privacy-preserving smart contracts, or “secret contracts” that have encrypted inputs, outputs, and state.

Read more about Secret Network at https://scrt.network

More on Social Media and beyond

🖥 Website: https://sienna.network/

💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/jZk8ggm7XP

💬 Telegram: https://t.me/GoSiennaNetwork

🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/sienna_network

👥 Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SiennaNetwork/

📰 Blog: https://medium.com/sienna-network

The Honeybee solves maths tests without a sting

University of Sheffield study discovers that the honeybee can solve a type of maths test using non-numerical cues

honeybee

The honeybee can solve a type of maths test without any need for numbers – a discovery that could be used to develop smarter artificial intelligence – according to new research from the University of Sheffield.

In the study, by researchers in the University’s Department of Computer Science and their international collaborators, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, honeybees were found to be using continuous, non-numerical cues to solve a maths problem. 

The insight into how honeybees solve numerical problems could be used to design more sophisticated machines based on the brains of animals, which have evolved to find the simplest, most efficient way to carry out certain tasks.

The methods used in the study could also provide a new, alternative blueprint for testing numerical cognition in animals. Most previous studies attempt to control for at least one non-numerical cue, whereas the Sheffield study is the first to propose a new method that carefully assesses non-numerical continuous cues. 

Determining how different brains, especially those with a miniature brain, solve numerical tasks also provides a valuable insight into the evolutionary roots of cognition.

The ability to use numbers is a powerful cognitive capacity of humans, but replicating their full sophistication via AI is not possible with current approaches. With animals often being very good at finding efficient and sometimes unexpected solutions to problems, it is worth finding out which of their shortcuts could be useful for developing autonomous machines 

Through a task that is commonly used to test numerical cognition in bees and a variety of other animals, the Sheffield team discovered that honeybees can discriminate between placards displaying different numbers of elements without their brains having to process numerical data.

Honeybees were individually trained to identify placards showing different numbers of shapes. Some bees learned to find a sugary reward at the placards that had the most shapes on display while others learned to find the sugary treat at the placards showing the fewest number of shapes.

Once the bees learned this rule, they were able to quickly identify the placard with the highest or lowest number of shapes on them in order to find the sugary treat.

Since these visual cues are computationally simpler to process by a bee’s brain, it is a more efficient way for bees to use them in solving the task, instead of solving a complex cognitive task of numerosity.

To determine if the honeybee used non-numerical clues, they were then tested with two pairs of placards that all contained the same number of shapes but differed in edge length, convex hull and spatial frequency. None of the placards had a sugary treat and if the bees used numerosity they should have flown to each placard equally in search of a reward.

The study found that bees trained to find the placards with the highest number of shapes still flew to signs with the highest level of continuous variables and bees that were trained to find the placards with the lowest number shapes still flew to the signs with the lowest level of continuous variables, and ignored numbers. This suggests the honeybees responded to continuous cues on the shapes and not the number of elements.

Dr HaDi MaBouDi, the lead author on the paper who is based at the University of Sheffield, said: “The results of our study show that animals are incredibly clever and can solve tasks in effective and unexpected ways. This will be very practical in the future of artificial intelligence for designing smart machines based on animals that have evolved for some particular tasks.”

To further test the hypothesis, the bees were shown placards with visual cues that were opposite to the number of shapes on the placards. For example, placards that had three shapes on display but had a lower spatial frequency than the placards with two shapes.

To determine how efficient this non-numeric strategy was for the honeybee, the researchers also created a model based on known details of the honeybee brain. This bee brain model was able to solve several other similar numeric-based tasks without any need for number processing – similar to the real honeybees. 

The research paper, Non-numerical strategies used by bees to solve numerical cognition tasks, is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. To view the paper, visit: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.2711