It seems a simple enough trick, almost like an illusionist’s act (writes Peter Coleman).
Call up a member of the audience, clap on a plastic headset and get them to concentrate on a floating cube, not unlike the screensaver on my new TV, and make it move away by thinking ‘push’ and fade to black with ‘disappear’.
My cynic’s brain wondered whether I had been set up; did the mysterious ‘Jesse’ from the audience look a little too like someone on the YouTube version of the demonstration I browsed when I got home?
But no, this is for real, and a remarkable metaphor for the bleeding-edge concepts which had been presented during the day at the XMediaLabs-developed programme of Fairfax Media’s DigitalDirections event.
The ultimate user interface, Emotiv’s wireless neuroheadset picks up electric signals produced by the brain via 14 sensors, and channels the data to a computer programme. Games and virtual reality are natural markets, but the technology is being applied to worthwhile causes such as steering the wheelchair of a severely-disabled person… for whom a wink can be as good as a right turn.
Fronting the demonstration at this month’s Sydney conference was a remarkable young woman: Tan Le (33) has racked up an impressive list honours for her contributions to youth, women, human rights and citizenship – including WEF Young Global Leader – since she was Young Australian of the Year in 1998.
Now as president of San Francisco-based Emotiv, she’s the thought leader leading the idea that we can all just think what we want to do.
Consider for a moment, what opportunities that could create in the mobile publishing revolution.
Bring a dozen ‘thought-leaders’ together in one room and a buzz of ideas is inevitable, and that’s exactly what DigitalDirections achieved.
Gigi Wang, chair emeritus of the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab in San Francisco had run a checklist of leading-edge ideas past a briefing with senior Fairfax Digital executives the previous day… and presented the ones with which they weren’t familiar at the conference.
Some, like the importance of video for engaging people, and the need to get onto more platforms to take more advertising revenue – check out Groupon and the ‘San Francisco Chronicle’ partnership with TownHug – were already becoming mainstream.
Others – such as predictive analytics and segmenting customers by using location history – were in their infancy: Companies such as Sense Networks were using location history to analyse your behaviour, pattern match and segment you, she said.
Sense used location data for a bank to establish whether loan applicants were adventurous, steady or ‘bar hoppers’. There’s even location-based love, with Flirtmaps pandering to the needs to people who want to meet someone close by, now!
A more technical application is vision computing, with Shazam-like video and image-based technologies applied to health screening and research.
And there’s the idea that life (and commerce) is all a game… and we’re all much more happy to play along (and pay along) with that than we think.
Wang says games build commitment, and game theory can be applied to e-commerce. Rajat Paharia, founder of San Francisco-based Bunchball, told how: “People love earning rewards points. Any kind of participation can be driven, and it builds lasting relationships,” he says.
“Gamification satisfies the human desires of people hungry for achievement.”
The concept is being applied to a wide variety of markets – the Imho media player, for example, gives users the opportunity to earn virtual currency for downloads by watching advertisements and sharing them with friends.
US television network NBC uses a number of gamification sites to support its shows. At ‘Club Psyche’, viewers are given rewards they haven’t asked for, but Paharia says, “once they’ve won points they don’t want to lose them.
“When registration asks for data, it becomes an exchange or transaction.”
And there’s the virtual goods market, which Wang says will reach US$2.1 billion this year with sites such as Farmville and Bejeweled.
Bunchball’s Paharia says the concept of paying for virtual goods isn’t as radical as it sounds: “After all, we all buy premium brands which make us feel different,” he says. “So much of what we are buying is abstract, so much is in the signal.
“When you buy someone a rose to say you love them, the cost is important; you’re saying I love you this much…” But he says good core content is essential – “it’s no good using gaming if there’s no meat.”
Media and communications monopolies, and the ‘old’ and ‘new media’ were much-discussed.
Author Tim Wu, whose book ‘MasterSwitch’ discusses the rise and fall of information empires, put the ‘absurdity’ of Bell and Telegraph’s technology developments – the phone rings to tell you that you have a telegram – in context via a Skype link from New York.
“Think what would have happened if AT&T had controlled the internet,” he questioned. “The path of evolution is enormously influenced by ability to withstand a challenge by the incumbent.”
The book (and its author) discuss the potential for good, and the dangers of empires: “I see a big battle in the next ten years to control the internet,” he says.
Asked by Fairfax Digital editor-in-chief Mike van Niekerk about the ‘dance’ between old and new media, he said having an ally in Apple had put old media in a better position than five years ago: “They may not be happy, but Apple is the best thing that has happened to them”.
According to Robert Tercek, big companies are frightened of empowered customers, and he sees another battle ahead as video-on-demand sites such as Netflix close in on cable, “which will seek to throttle it”.
“And they do know what you’re watching,” he says.
Tercek, founder of LA-based General Creativity, nominated five trends:
• the audience as data, with a focus on user DNA;
• social TV viewing, with users checking into a programme in a game-like experience;
• the remix culture, with major corporate attitudes changing – Tercek cited the example of Disney offering a contract to one remix site which might in other times have been shut down;
• crowd-sourced creative – getting fans to create commercials for a prize resulted in hundreds of variations at virtually no cost;
• virtual cable operators such as iVi follow a precedent set by music download pirates and may be shot down… or not.
Kevin Anderson, who describes himself as a ‘journalism entrepreneur’ says an issue for ‘old media’ is the transition from information scarcity into overload, and that’s why Rupert Murdoch – “who built his empire on scarcity – “hasn’t been terribly successful with digital businesses so far”.
Anderson details challenges for journalism, one of which – the battle for attention – was painfully obvious around the room, where delegates are generating a torrent of Tweets and sharing time with their laptops and tablets.
Content users are turning to soft forms such as celebrity news “because it is easy to understand”, and while Google was still important, “there have to be other ways to make content relevant”.
It’s a problem familiar to Joshua Hatch, online manager with US nonprofit organisation the Sunlight Foundation, who shared the frustrations of running a site dedicated to freeing mostly government information in the cause of democracy.
“Data needs to be freed, so it can interact,” he says, “not locked in formats such as PDF and Microsoft Word.”
Video also needed to be ‘unbundled’, and Anthony Rose looked for a seamless route for users who wanted to watch television on their computers and mobiles.
He’d moved from Sydney to a role establishing the BBC’s iPlayer technology: “I wanted personalised TV, but there were obstacles,” he says. “But it’s not over yet.”
One breakthrough was to get iPlayer on Wii… “then Sony rang,” Rose says.
Mobile apps are “different propositions,” he says, advocating the concept of an ‘app mall’.
With viewers as slick as the BBC’s not universal, Rose told how his wife had wanted to watch ITV period drama ‘Downton Abbey’ on their internet system. “I told her she’d have to watch it on the TV in her room,” he says.
With their lower entry cost, online and mobile opportunities are open to all, but this month’s XMediaLab event demonstrated that – with the technology – the ideas keep coming.
Pictured: Tan Le with a prototype of the Emotiv headset
