HPE's The Machine coming to Star Trek Beyond, and other updates

A few promotional updates from Star Trek Beyond today, including new trailers and a motion poster. But before that, the big news of the day is the first tie-in advertising campaign related the film. UPDATE: Plus a look at some props too.

It sounds like Hewlett Packard Enterprise have got themselves a pretty huge product placement deal with Paramount to embed their new computing technology, ambiguously called The Machine, into the heart of Star Trek Beyond, and the marketing surrounding it, starting today with the first advert tied into the film.

That advert sees a group of cadets taken (to space-Iceland) to learn about The Machine, and how it changed the face of computing for centuries following its introduction. A grand claim, but the technology does sound genuinely impressive, as this summary from Ars Technica explains (an interesting article if you're curious about the real technology):

The Machine is a hyper-dense collection of computing hardware that could be used in anything from a data center to a mobile device. It has terabytes of storage and a much smaller power draw than today’s computing devices—all because of memristor-based memory and optical interconnects.

Here's the overview the Starfleet cadets got:



The advert is just the start, technologies inspired by The Machine will feature in the film itself, as HPE's press release explains:

Over the course of several months, team members from Hewlett Packard Enterprise – from researchers and engineers to industrial designers and UX specialists – collaborated with the creative minds behind Star Trek Beyond to develop three conceptual technologies for the film, all based on HPE’s biggest and most ambitious research project – The Machine.

In fact, according to Creativity Online, HPE actually came up with ten ideas, which the film makers then picked the most appropriate three from, which are the quarantine, the diagnostic wrap, and the book. HPE's Marissa Freeman explained what a couple of those actually are:

Without giving away the plot, Ms. Freeman said one technology that will appear in the movie is called the Quarantine, which is basically the data center of the future. "It is a fusion of hardware and software that enables all of the possibilities of data science and the IoT," she said.

Another technology that will appear in the movie is called the Diagnostic Wrap, a data-harnessing tool, Ms. Freeman said. "It is the future vision of the internet of things -- how enterprises of all kinds will be able to benefit form a hyperintelligent IoT. All of these concept technologies are based on what The Machine will enable."

In addition to these future technologies, HPE's logo mark, "the Element" (the green rectangle seen above) will also be "embedded throughout the film".

UPDATE: A HPE employee has sent me some photos from the HPE Discover event, which is going on this week. As part of the Star Trek tie-in they have a couple of props from the film on display, giving us a really good look at the new escape pod, plus the captain's chair:

Meanwhile, Paramount have released a motion poster version of the fan event The Motion Picture homage poster:



And two new TV spots have also hit the web. No new shots in either of them, but there are a couple of new lines of dialogue:





Star Trek Beyond will be arriving in cinemas around the world from the end of July. To keep track of all the latest information on the film, visit my Star Trek Beyond guide page, and see the relevant pages on Trek Collective Archives to find all the trailers, posters, and promotional stills too. If you're curious about previous Star Trek related adverts, have a look back through my adverts tag too (although sadly many of the youtube videos have vanished).