The new entertainment culture

virtually real, virtually here...

just a quick one on the futurologist Ray Kurzweil predicting that blood cell sized computers will soon (25 years) ennable us to lead virtual realities, what he calls 'fully emergent games' - kind of the holodeck, but inside our own heads -

And if that's not enough to blow your mind, check out the rest of his thinking on his site

this comes at the same time as Nokia shows off the first concept version of its new nanotechnology phone, that can be worn as a bracelet, will be powered by the Sun and can allow you to take photos of things in the real world, and then download information about it.

gnnuurgh...

a proper example of sound and vision...

i was feeling guilty for not providing a more up-to-date example for great interactivity and integration of sound into website design. i had been trying to find a great 3D jeans website from early last year, but failed to remember which brand it had been (those were pre-delicio.us for me, how did we cope?)

serendipitously half an hour later Mr Paul Borge sent round a link to what he described as the best thing he had ever seen. ever. which happened to be an even better example, from  IKEA...

sounding off

Andrew Peggie wants us to add a sound dimension to websites, saying that this is the most neglected aspect of new media and that designers 'don't have the same awareness of how music can work as they do with the visual elements' . However, if you visit his own website it has music embedded on the first orange flash animated sunrise page, and then powerpoint icons on the remaining plain pages so it seems he is doing the same thing in reverse. 

Certainly music is crucial to all other visual media, and in producing video it is more often the sound than the visuals that indicate poor quality. Yet having sound enforced upon you on a site is one of the most intrusive and irritating experiences on the web (possibly second only to banner ads for smileys)

I think Andrew's point is valid, but only where this has been done to enhance the overall experience interactivity, and ultimately the playfullness of a site. The best example of this i ever came across is www.infinitewheel.com (and happens to use the same colourscheme, but with slightly different intentions). this site is six years old now, but still worth a visit, particularly if  you're partial to a bit of dub...

360 entertainment

Crossing the void, a one day conference on 360 entertainment (which they seemed to be using the same way i use 'the new entertainment') to 'explore the changing commissioning landscape by bringing TV and new media indies together to discuss collaborative opportunities'

No one actually told us what the void is supposed to be, and to me the whole thing seemed more about the enormous proliferating pile of content and tools and services that crowd this 360 world where online, television, mobile and ourselves meet.

Everyone I spoke to seemed to be crushing in on the same space, like the waste crushing room on the Death Star in the original Star Wars. Everywhere the talk was of television content alongside websites video and audio - streamed and podcasted - photos mobile - messaging, content, communities - geolocational music games quiz shows reality television really good television music film voting shifting uploading downloading sideshifting rollercoasting freebasing. And all seamlessly crossing platforms and rolled into one smooothely integrated format. Of course.

But (at least in the stuff that was presented as already accomplished, rather than about to happen very soon) – most was pretty web 1.5. Great content being pushed out, and some direct engagement with the key audiences to push it. Sky for example showed some great content they had pushed out over web, mobile and email for the Hogfather series. But in this (as with much else that we saw) there was virtually nothing that provided the opportunity to respond, engage, customise, cut up and share. 360 entertainment indeed, but without the further dimension of full audience collaboration which would actually bring it to life.

What was encouraging to see was that everyone was very keen to get involved in this space. The conference sold out very quickly and I had to be quite persistent to persuade them to find me a seat that had been invisible. And everyone was very engaged and excited and filled with ideas. And not just the indies from tv and multimedia but also the network commissioners, who were there in refreshing force and with budgets to spend. Matt Locke, previously of the BBC Innovation labs and now educational commissioner for Channel 4 – talked up his £6m pot for new media, and the fact that the vast majority of it will be spent outside the channel4.com portal, and in the spaces that 14-19 year olds are actually spending their time.

And it was both really encouraging and disheartening that half of the day’s speakers were talking up ARGs. And finally starting to build them outside of the niche, with ambition and proper scalability. Look out for Resistance is British, didn’t see much at all but it smells like the future and Paul Bennun from Somethin Else was easily the most convincing speaker of the day. And if we can get something similar off the ground this year, hopefully we'll be on the roster with him for the next one…

define: web 3.0

just came across this thread on Business Week discussing what web 3.0 will involve (a term that we were jokingly  bandying about last year, but that is probably inevitable to be deployed for the next gen of internet technology and usage)

apart from the obvious statements that it will be user driven, always on and always with you (through improved mobile access) the following statement from metabeam seemed to sum it up the best...

'The social/democratic character of web 2.0 will, in effect, be added to the big media colonization that represented web 1.0 to create a world where everyone's a simultaneous consumer and producer of pro-quality media. IF THEY CAN TELL A STORY.'

or maybe it just suits my vision of what it should be. Thanks to Lorna Croft for picking up and sharing ...

who needs tv?

Interesting to see two articles on the ‘new entertainment’ (my phrase, not theirs) in successive weeks of the harbinger of cutting edge entertainment The Guardian Guide (whose vocabulary of criticism always leaves me breathless with envy).

The first article was about the evolution of the new neverending series format pioneered by HBC with the likes of Lost and Heroes; that the worlds and plots of these shows are so complicated that you have to commit to them, and stick with them every week for years as they evolve over several series. There have always been long-running entertainment formats, Quantum Leap and The X Files most memorably for me, but the over-arching story could be summed up in the first minute, and then provided just the backdrop for the self-contained episodes. Whereas now the wider story is everything, and not just in terms of the ever-convoluting television plot, but now in a wider canon that seeks to provide a contextual backdrop of character social media profiles, biographies and sub-plots – the Silmarillion to television’s Lord of the Rings (and mostly equally as dull).

The following week’s story was about the latest generation of online entertainment, online shows such as Quarterlife and Kate Modern, that blends the surrounding content more succinctly with the main show to create a world that you not only consume, but also can get involved in – interacting with the characters as if they were actually your friends (as the pioneering LonelyGirl15 on YouTube actually pretended to be, much to the horror of said ‘friends’ when they found out she was a fictional construct.

However, there is still the all important next step to be taken (other than actually making them entertaining) – that allows the audience to interact with not just the characters and elements surrounding the story, but the plot itself. That allows them to cross the line between fiction and reality and become part of the story themselves.

It will happen, my guess is next year. Well, that’s the plan anyway…

getting it right

so, i was working late last week and doing some research online. i can;t remember now whether i was on you tube or something more discerning, but a video ad caught my eye. partly because it was really slickly done, and partly because it was really dark - with little animated creatures wreaking havoc in a way that made Itchy and Scratchy look like Tom and Jerry.

but i didn't react, takes more than a clever animation to get a click-through from me. i did another search on the site, and a different (but similar) video came up, which again i watched -but this one was promoting an entirely different site. By now thoroughly intrigued - particularly as there was little indication of what the brand was - i clicked through.

And found myself first of all in an even more intriguing homepage that suggested it might be some kind of game, before leading onto a delightfully random, engaging, animated, scrollable and hugely detailed world, populated by lumbering animals with square heads and containing all sorts of elements to play with, watch, explore and investigate.

and then only at the next (by now fourth) layer of content do we get any real clues as to what this is for, with links to other things that Scion has done promoting themselves through tools, events and video games. And it is only through these that you have any opportunity to find out more about the car - you actually have to physically search it out.

it is the kind of site, and indeed campaign, that we have been talking about for a long time: combining the interactive elements of Second Life into a working site, and making it fun and accessible at the same time; creating tools, events, whole sites that will enhance its audiences life, and delight them along the way; not pushing it;s branding down their throats as soon as they are hooked by the viral; properly investing in the medium, and executing at a level normally found only in broadcast.

And that's all without even talking about the whole second site and route in - www.littledeviants.com...

the storm after the storm

So, it’s two and a half weeks since the festival finished, and I have not managed to find a return to form for writing this. But to be honest, it hasn’t really calmed down, and the festival has been replaced with a frenzy of new business prospects. From online music software to the online part of a global corporate magazine, from MP3 players to IT and defence, it’s been varied and challenging.

For a while I was getting a little frustrated at the onslaught of work, especially so soon after the festival, and reflecting on how this is the nature of agency life, wondering just how much more of it  I can stand.

But then, as we knuckled down to get the last presentation finished before we had to leave for the plane, i realised that i was relishing it again. this is very appeal of it – to be involved in so many different things at once, in so many areas, learning so many things, and working with so many different people.

Also that they listen to you. Ok, not the whole time and there can be enough frustration just getting things agreed let alone up and running . But we are brought in, for our knowledge of how to get to people, and what to say to them, and how to make them engage with you, and you are trusted to both advise and deliver.

And you have to use all of the knowledge you have acquired from all of the experiences you have gained. And you have to think on your feet, and present something that is actually going to work to achieve their objectives, at the same time as being original, engaging and affordable. And actually, I do love it.

Mr Bean, evolution etc

On a KLM flight just out of Heathrow. I’m actually trying to get to Ottawa but am going via Amsterdam and Toronto in order to bring the price down as I am using up most of the team’s travel budget single-handedly at the moment. KLM do things in a very distinctive (Dutch?) way, and were playing MTV videos of Pink and Shakira before we took off, which created a good atmosphere. Now they’ve moved onto Mr Bean. And an early one at that, it must be ten or twelve years since I saw these sketches, of him trying to cheat in an exam, undressing in front of a blind man at the beach and then behaving badly in church. The humour itself still works very well, and this may be our most prolifically exported comedy properties, as it doesn’t rely on language so is so easy to port.

Anyway, it got me thinking about when I first saw these clips as a teenager, and how much the world has moved on since then. Which may well be a truism – time proceeds and things change, but (without wanting to be too egocentric) can they really have always changed at this rate? Quite possibly not. Alan Rambam from our New York office referred to it as hyper-evolution when he was over in April (that long ago already?!). Thus while it took twenty-odd years for video games to progress from two dimensions and one colour to three and several thousand, handheld games have done it in ten, and mobile phone games in five.

Which reminded me of a book that I read a couple of years ago that has stayed with me and which I often refer to when beating my Interactive Schtick, although I forget its name now. It was about human evolution, and it claimed that this is not a steady and gradual process, but proceeds in giant leaps forward (which I think most historians would probably agree with, if not biologists), and they identified five key developments that led to these accelerated periods of development:

1. the emergence of life itself
2. the development of language, allowing us to imagine and communicate events and ideas that aren’t there;
3. the development of written language, allowing us to communicate with people who aren’t there;
4. the development of the printing press, extending this to almost limitless numbers of people;
5. and the development of the internet, allowing us to store and communicate huge and sophisticated units of information instantly across the world.

And this last stage would continue to revolutionise our lives in ways that we couldn’t even conceive. Which I think is both true and incredibly exciting to be watching and even part of it, in some small way.

So, to come back to Mr Bean, I fully realised for the first time that most kids these days just aren’t spending the time watching this kind of show any more. Yes, there are tv shows that are still hugely popular, but increasingly it’s as much about the smaller nuggets of entertainment on youtube or boreme, that you have to dig out yourself, that not everyone is seeing and that are therefore that much more personal, and that can be downloaded to your ipod or shared with friends. And that you can actually respond to, get involved with, or even make yourself.

And I felt like a dinosaur, and feel even more so as I struggle to express what I mean here. Apologies for the ramblings, and for not writing more succinctly and more often…

next great thing london

i talked about the next great thing conference in new york last month. yesterday the road show came to us and seventeen of us spent the day in a slightly deeper examination of the different tools available, in an attempt to not just show people what is possible but give them the ability and confidence to start employing them on all of our clients.

the most interesting thing to come out of it was the fact that even though we work in communications, most of us were still reluctant to embrace a lot of the applications that are indispensable to youth - most notably the social networking sites and more advanced mobile tools.

without wanting to get into an ageist debate (which  somehow manages to offend absolutely everyone) you could break yesterday's audience down fairly neatly into those who only use phone / email to arrange to meet up in person, those who both chat online and meet up with these people in person, and those who have large online social networks, only some of whom they would meet up with in person.

those in the first category were almost offended at the idea that socialising could take place solely online, but in reality (as with many of these new tecky things) this isn't replacing face-to-face interaction with real people in real places, but adding to it, and at the same time extending their social groups across the globe. This was all particularly relevant given the BBC's announcement this morning that it will be focusing on online communities and user generated content for its future...

There were many more interesting things that came out of the day, and i hope to find the time to write about them soon. Sorry.