Atlanta-based filmmaker and Hartford native Rafia Ansari debuted her short film House of Terror at the Urban Film Festival in Miami on Saturday, marking the world premiere of a project that has been nearly a decade in the making.
The film screened at Silver Spot Cinemas in downtown Miami. Inspired by Nollywood, House of Terror explores the issue of baby factories in Nigeria and highlights the power of prayer. Ansari wrote, directed, acted in and produced the film.
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“I do not believe in the word can’t,” Ansari said. “It was instilled in me as a child by my great-grandmother, Ella Little Cromwell. She always said, ‘You can do anything you put your mind to.’”
Ansari began developing the project in 2017 after moving to Atlanta in 2013 to pursue a career in film. Two earlier attempts to complete the film stalled, but in 2024 she connected with Josh Broaden, a video engineer for the Wall Street Journal and a filmmaker. With Broaden as director of photography, House of Terrorwrapped production in September 2024.
Her inspiration for the project dates back to childhood. Cromwell frequently traveled to Africa and returned with artifacts and stories, which sparked Ansari’s interest. She also participated in African dance programs and cultural activities in her hometown of Hartford. A high school assignment led her to research Nigeria, where she first learned about baby factories and sex trafficking — subjects that became central to her film.
House of Terror is currently on the festival circuit. Ansari said she has additional screenplays in development and is working on her next production through her company Write on Rafia, which she founded in 2020.
The Pico 4 Enterprise Edition was unveiled at AWE Europe this week.
Pico
The post-Connect skewering of Meta continues unabated. The press was not impressed with the kind of Metaverse Meta showed us last week. It dominated the headlines for most of the week. No wonder Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he feels like he’s being punched in the stomach when he opens his phone in the morning. It’s so easy to pile on it’s hard to resist. Meta sets the record for unforced errors. Nonetheless, we are piling on a company taking an historic business risk. For these reasons, I’m now grouping my coverage of Meta’s coverage into a new section, which you’ll find at the end of the column. For now, I’m calling it “This Week in Schadenfreude.”
Stability AI Raises $101MStable Diffusion, an open source text-to-image AI program, announced a $101M seed round at Techcrunch Disrupt in San Francisco yesterday. You tell the app what you want it to create in text and it returns art, usually a mash up that passes. With this round, led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Stability AI should be able to pay its massive annual ~$50M AWS hosting fees for a couple of years. The investment values the company at $1 billion post-money. Stability AI’s open source system that has been downloaded over 200,000 times.
VITURE Raises $10M For Headworn Media Viewer The VITURE One XR Glasses are like a portable projector for your face that connects to a compatible smartphone, laptop, or game console. The HD OLED displays simulate a 120” screen. The Series A funding round was led by BAI Capital and Verity Ventures. It will help the company mass produce its VITURE One glasses.
PC game Second Life. launched in 2003, is widely acknowledged to be the first Metaverse. It has a … [+] thriving creator economy powered by Tilia. This screen shot is of a bespoke 3D 2022 Halloween greeting.
Linden Lab
Tilia Secures Strategic Investment From J.P. Morgan, Spins Out Of Linden LabOn Wednesday, Linden Lab announced the spin off of its proprietary finance engine Tilia.. Tilia’s solution, built for game, virtual world and mobile application developers handles payment processing, in-game transactions, as well as payouts to creators by converting in-world tokens to fiat currency including USD serving as the backbone of any functioning virtual economy. Oh, and JP Morgan is the world’s biggest bank. Last year Second Life generated $86M in revenue using Tilia. Now the two companies will share the revenue, which Tilia hopes to do with many other game worlds.
Shapeyard Raises $2 Million To Bring 3D Content Interoperability To The MetaverseThe 3D modeling app for iPads compares with Blender, Maya, +3ds Max which are available only on desktop. The app is currently available in alpha stage on iOS.
Rec Room launches “House of Terror” Halloween experience. Rec Room players enter “The House of Terror” through the all-new Haunt Society themed room. Haunt Society is a well-regarded directory of Haunted Houses. The experience itself is a journey through a maze which leads to an abandoned space station haunted by ghosts. ”House of Terror is both single player and multipalyer immersive experience that runs for a minimum of 15 minutes, and can be accessed by visiting Rec Room’s new “Haunt Society” room.
EIR Armbands
EIR
Valkyrie EIR armbands simulate muscle resistance in VR fitness games The company announced that it has opened preorders for Valkyrie EIR, a set of haptic armbands that provides unprecedented interactive resistance for the arm muscles. The armbands pair with EIR Training, the first VR training experience that takes full advantage of the hardware. The armbands will start shipping summer 2023.
This Week in XR is also a podcast hosted by the author of this column and Ted Schilowitz, Head of Future Technologies at Paramount Global. This week our guest is Caspar Thykier, co-founder and CEO of Zappar, an XR agency with several lines of business: Zappar.com, a no code web based AR content creation tool, and its smartphone HMD, Zapbox. We can be found here Spotify,iTunes, andYouTube.
Fake Dictionary, Dictionary definition of the word schadenfreude.
