Category: Tech

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Phones in the Park…

This is the second of two recent articles I wrote for The Bezark Company to be published in Blooloop. The published version is here: https://blooloop.com/theme-park/opinion/phones-in-theme-parks/

Theme parks are built as transportive worlds that bring us together and lead us on adventures with our families and friends. As technology and devices proliferate in every aspect of our lives, it’s increasingly noticeable that groups of people, in a place where they are meant to be together, manage to spend much of that time apart. Phones are out, earbuds are in, watches are flicked and tapped as we check in on the world we’re momentarily trying to escape. As experience designers we want guests to forget about the outside world and really immerse themselves in a crafted world, whether a theme park, museum, pop up, or something in between. Not everyone buys in, of course, but the hope is that the staunchest objector to reality suspension will crack a smile here and there. The portals to reality are in the palms of our hands and it encroaches upon the designer’s well thought out intentions. 

Tech develops rapidly. In the same way that home theater systems have sufficiently mimicked the movie theater experience, increasingly complex and immersive experiences are available at home. As virtual reality emerged it required expensive, heavy hardware and complicated installation. As the tech evolved, costs came down, hardware got lighter, and setup became easier. As VR was enjoying a brief moment in theme parks it was also becoming attainable to the home user and, as it turns out, it’s a better home experience. In the never ending search for new ways to tell stories and enthrall guests, it’s tempting to enlist the latest gadget to draw them in. Our guests aren’t asking us to bolt the latest tech fad to our existing attractions. Look at what the guests are already using and meet them there.  

The present day dilemma is the tiny computer, and its accessories, that we all carry in our pockets. At the first sign of indifference the phone is unlocked and the guest is lost in an endless scroll of…whatever. Along with the phone come earbuds further sealing guests off from the rich world around them. Many attempts to incorporate these devices are being made, with varying results. In fact, it’s almost impossible to spend a day in certain parks without the phone to guide you but it can be much more than a fun management system. 

A great place to start is the queue. Whether it’s a traditional maze of chain and stanchions or a pre-show waiting zone, when the guests are asked to wait, the phones come out. (even after we spent all that money on that incredible pre-show media loop). Every queue could offer a custom experience that can be accessed via phone. While asking guests to use a specialized app adds friction, there are options for rich, interactive experiences that don’t involve building software for specific platforms. This makes updating and upgrading easier for the operations team and seamless for the guest. These added experiences must be easy to access and easy to engage with while expanding the world and adding to the story. 

Let’s give the eyeballs a rest and really immerse the guests as they move through the world. There’s at least one person in every group who has their earbuds in during their entire visit. Audio based experiences are highly compelling and underused. Build in soundscapes that can only be heard by those who choose to hear it. Tell new stories. Tell old stories. Enrich the world that’s been built. Audio is a powerful tool for delivering narratives and with location based triggers there are opportunities for some creative wayfinding.

Tie these mini experiences into the rest of the park and there’s a more compelling reason for the guest to engage. The stories don’t have to connect to each other but those that do deepen the relationship between our built worlds and the guest. Beyond the story opportunities we may entice folks to engage with virtual gifts, discounts on food and merchandise, connection to a larger game/story, opportunities to partake in exclusive events… Guests are going to use their devices no matter what so let’s give them a reason to interact with the world we’ve built instead of only using them to fill the void before the loading zone. 

Attempts are being made. Augmented reality overlays and selfie filters are fun snacks but there must be more. Disney created the DataPad to enhance the guest’s experience and help them feel more integrated into day to day life on Batuu when they opened Galaxy’s Edge. There we are able to interact with the physical surroundings and perform quests that add context and backstory to the attractions making them feel richer and more alive. It is a great example of how to use a guest’s device to further engage them and expand their experience. It lives on, buried in the Play Disney app, though virtually unchanged from opening day. Meow Wolf also attempts to engage with their own app though it’s not required to enjoy the experience, it broadens and connects the worlds. The unspoken promise of something like these companion apps is that they will evolve and grow over time, which is important not only for returning guests but to keep the world active and alive.   

This all walks a fine line. While we don’t want to encourage people to be buried in their phones all day, it is our present reality. Future consumer tech is on its way and there will be more devices to further separate guests from their experience. There’s a possibility that we’ll all be wearing some version of augmented reality glasses in 5 to 10 years. The screens will be on our faces and the temptation to dip back into the endless pit of the online world will be extreme. We need to lay the foundation now for what guests can expect alongside the twisted steel and fiberglass and there needs to be real effort behind it. Treat this weird virtual space as another show or attraction and make a commitment to support and evolve it to measure real results. Now is the time to craft stories and games that exist between the two minutes of thrill that people are seeking. Fill the liminal spaces of your park, museum, theater, with a story layer that keeps guests engaged and, yes, probably spending more money.

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Computers are Eating My Job!

This is the first of two recent articles I wrote for The Bezark Company to be published in Blooloop. The published version is here: https://blooloop.com/technology/opinion/generative-ai-potential/

There’s a scramble within the creative community to understand the rapid rise of machine-generated content and what it means for the people who make a living crafting stories and building worlds. Most people call it Artificial Intelligence (AI) – it’s not. Rather, the words, drawings, photographs, songs that are being pumped out are the results of large language models (LLMs), and the creative world has been caught off guard with their sudden emergence, quick advancement, and seemingly boundless generative abilities. 

The themed entertainment industry consists of some of the most creative folks in the world, and this new development has, understandably, unnerved many of them. Every new technology that enters the mainstream brings with it a certain amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The machines know nothing and understand nothing but produce convincing and sometimes impressive material based on our input. They are pumping out images, music, video, and 3D models with the most minimal of text prompts. This endlessly generated art seems to be getting better every week and there’s real concern that the value of human creativity is going to plummet. 

In 2017, a handful of Google engineers released the Transformer architecture to the world. Seven years later, all of the latest text, image, audio, and video generating machines are built upon Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) utilizing large language models to whip up content in seconds. Twenty years before the advent of Transformer-based machine learning, IBM’s Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov. A computer had beat the best chess player in the world. The chess world reeled, assuming there was no point in humans playing any further. Don’t worry – people still play chess and now use these powerful machines to help develop new strategies. In 2016, Deep Mind’s AlphaGo beat top player Lee Sedol in a series of Go matches. Go is a complicated game with an impossible number of possible moves. The Go world reeled at the human’s defeat. Don’t worry – people still play Go, and the machine-learning algorithms have taught us new strategies and even resurrected old strategies that were thought to be outdated. 

It feels inevitable that machine-generated art and ideas are going to flood the world, but if we can learn anything from the Chess and Go communities it’s that these machines are just tools. Like the printing press and desktop computer before them, they are assistive and empowering. Remember, the machines are not thinking. They know nothing, but they are fast and can aid in ideation and prototyping in ways we haven’t seen before. Just as they have with each technological advancement, the landscape of work and career will change not only in the creative fields but across all industries as the possible applications for machine learning are wide reaching. Creatives should not fear the generative capabilities of machines but harness them. They help us fail fast so we can succeed sooner.

While it’s great for headlines and flashy news bits, generative art is the least interesting thing that will come out of all of this. There’s growing concern that the focus on LLM-based technologies is pulling resources from real advancement. There have already been major announcements and breakthroughs for protein folding, material discovery, molecular dynamics, medical imaging, understanding whale language, etc. The ability to feed incredibly large datasets into these algorithms is a boon to the scientific community and should prove beneficial in the not-too-distant future. 

None of this comes without challenges. Jobs are going to shift as we adapt to these new tools. Energy consumption while training and running these models is a huge concern. We may very well be in the midst of another hype cycle and these advancements that feel like huge leaps may hit a yet unforeseen barrier that stalls progress for another 10 years. Techno-optimists see solutions coming to the energy problem. More efficient hardware and increased low-to-no impact energy generation might make this technology more sustainable. Whatever happens, companies should be proactive in educating employees about these available tools and how to use them effectively, securely, and responsibly. 

Yes, the big players creating these LLMs have a lot to say about Artificial General Intelligence and the inevitability of the machines doing almost everything, but they need to pump up that inevitability to satisfy investors and markets. Ignore their bluster. This may be the beginning of another tectonic shift in human/computer interfacing, but we will all do well to focus on what’s available now and how to use these generative tools as another brush, instrument, or pencil, in our trusty and worn backpacks.

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Collaboration

It’s been quiet in my creative world…but not uneventful. Over the last couple of months I’ve had the pleasure of working with Cynthia Minet on her upcoming installation, “Migrations.” Cynthia is an accomplished artist and her creations are constructed from post-consumer plastics and LED lighting. Migrations depicts six Roseate Spoonbills in varying stages of flight. With this sculpture Cynthia hoped to push the lighting a little further than she had in previous work.

There were two goals.

  1. Have greater control over the color and brightness of each LED
  2. Add movement to the sculpture by animating the LEDs

P9813 LEDs

After some initial conversation a third goal popped up. If we’re going to be programming these LEDs could we also add some motion activated audio to immerse the viewer in the world of the spoonbill?

After some testing we settled on the P9813 LED pixels. The plastic casing around the actual LED helps diffuse the light. The fact that the strands run at 5v was an added bonus. 

To program the lights and the motion based audio I knew we were going to use something in the Arduino family. The spoonbills do not have a ton of room inside of them so we opted for a Trinket to run the lighting and a Trinket Pro to run the audio system. Ideally everything would run off of one board but that just wasn’t feasible here. This also cut down on the cost for each sculpture. 

The next few posts will get into the details of the wiring, programming, testing, and installation of the lighting and audio systems. 

If you’re around this weekend (Oct 21 and 22) you can see the sculpture in its current state at the Brewery Art Walk. Art Walk runs from 11a-6p both days.&nbsp

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AR…MR…XR

It’s been a busy spring for Augmented Reality and the last week really topped it off. The 8th annual Augmented World Expo was 3 days of vendors, developers and enthusiastic end-users coming together to talk about, demo and try on the latest AR gear. If there is to be one thing I came away with from the expo it’s that we haven’t yet agreed what to call this thing. Augmented, Mixed or eXtended Reality. Each was used almost interchangeably. It won’t matter what we call if but it sure would help the messaging if we stuck to a naming convention.

The Promise

Trying on Daqri Glasses
Looking Through DAQRI’s Glasses

We all want the same thing. We want a device (or set of devices) that we can look through which will overlay information and interactive elements onto the real world. This information will be easy to access and quickly available. Creating objects and information for AR will be simple, requiring little to no programming. The hardware will be priced in the same range as a smart phone and weigh less. It will be personalized to us and allow access to our virtual assistant of choice.

The Near Future

AR Timeline So FarThis coming year is going to feel a bit like 2016 did for VR. We’re on the cusp of some interesting hardware hitting the market at attainable prices. The big, big players are making moves…Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook are all in varying stages of their AR strategies.

Google announced Google Lens at I/O in May and, assuming it works as well as it demoed, looks to be a key piece of their AR strategy. It plays to their strengths in machine learning and information management. Their continued development of Tango will make AR creation and experiences more accessible. I’d like to see Tango built into the Pixel 2 (hint, hint Google) and any other devices they make from here on out. With a likely hardware announcement in the fall, what more will come this year? Time will tell…

Microsoft released its Windows Creators Update for Windows 10. This update includes tools for the creation of Mixed Reality content. Microsoft is trying to make it as easy as possible to build content for AR (and VR) with tools provided in the OS. An interesting side note, Lorraine Bardeen (General Manager, Windows and HoloLens Experiences) used the term mixed reality exclusively in her talk at AWE. Microsoft has since announced hardware from partners Dell and Asus. We’ll see what else turns up this year…time will tell…

Facebook made it clear that AR is a priority at F8. They promise to provide a platform to create AR experiences with relative ease. It’s still unclear what exactly Facebook’s AR Studio will mean for all of us. Time will tell…

Apple announced, just yesterday, their ARKit at WWDC as a platform for bringing solid AR content to iOS. We’ll see what’s truly possible and hopefully see some hints for what’s to come as developers get their hands on it. Time will tell…

Magic Leap…(this space intentionally left blank)

The Reality

Daqri HelmetThe hardware is clunky, uncomfortable, and heavy. The experiences are neat but less than amazing. It’s ok, it’s early days. There are definite use cases for AR as it exists right now. Head mounted displays are great for industrial design, construction and manufacturing. Environments where having information available while keeping your hands free. The hardware is rugged and includes safety features necessary for those sectors.

Entertainment companies can start thinking about AR for project planning and previz. AR and VR are great ways to show a client what your project is really going to look like. ODG (Osterhaut Design Group) has a pair of glasses coming this fall for under the $1000 mark. This will make head mounted AR hardware accessible to small and medium design studios.

For everyone else, my hope is that we can break through the “3D graphics in our world” demos and applications and really start exploring what AR is and what it can be. Let’s settle on Extended Reality as the common term. Our reality should be extended in all possible ways. Not just looking through our phones at cute animations. We posses a ton of data about the world around us and this data should be accessible to everyone in a variety of forms. Whether we hold the phone up to look through the camera, use a head mounted display or wear smart clothing that tug at us when we’re near areas of interest. Existing displays in public spaces should detect our presence and provide information that’s important to us (and yes, there will probably be ads too).

We’re at the beginning of whatever this becomes. With the right mix of vision, open standards and acceptance we can enhance our everyday lives, be more productive and spend less time looking down at a glowing rectangle. We must be patient and work through the hype cycles and the low points to get to the good stuff. I’m looking forward to it…

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The Drone Show

While the future of flying cars we were promised is still a way off (if not postponed indefinitely) all manner of counter-rotational flying devices are readily available in all manner of sizes and we’re finding all manner of uses for them. The common nomenclature for these machines is drones. That label comes with so much baggage I hesitate to use it all. The military uses drones, big, deadly drones…we the people use UAVs, quad…hex…octorotors, flying machines. Thanks to the rapid miniaturization of various sensors and microprocessors due to the impossibly fast growth of the smartphone market these versatile flying contraptions are readily available and relatively easy to operate.

As a cheap, stable, easy to fly platform UAVs quickly found themselves carrying cameras to places that are traditionally difficult and much more expensive to get to. This has been a tremendous asset to the agriculture, construction, energy and transportation industries (to name a few). Film and TV also made quick use of the flying camera but can the UAV get out from behind the camera and become the subject?

Just recently a group of artists, technicians and engineers set a world record for flying 100 automated multirotors with the addition of sequenced LEDs set to a live orchestra.

Having been part of a project to use UAVs in a live show last year I can assure you this was no small feat. I would have preferred this video held on some shots of the machines longer but the gist is there. These things can mesmerize and delight us. They can be a show but we can also push them further. The inherent agility built into these machines isn’t being pushed hard enough. The variety in shape, size and function needs to be incorporated into a choreographed, character driven show. Given the right parameters you can coerce quite a bit of character out of these battery powered bits of metal, carbon fiber and plastic. I encourage you to take a look at Raffaello D’Andrea’s latest TED Talk (and compare it to his talk from 2 years ago).

I believe D’Andrea and the team at Verity (and undoubtedly others) are pushing the edges of what these things can be and what they can do. Yes, it’s a new toy but it’s a new toy with much unfulfilled potential.

Those don’t look safe. At first glance a machine with 4 (at least) rapidly spinning blades flying freely around you seems like a terrible idea. It’s bad enough if you injure yourself but put these things in front of a paying audience and you’ll make more than a few lawyers nervous (or twitchy with anticipation). There is, of course, risk in everything. If you did indeed watch the above TED Talk and the one from 2 years ago you’ll notice a big difference. There’s no safety net this time. Confidence in the technology has grown with the technology itself as it inevitably does. With the right systems in place the risk of an accident has been greatly reduced.

There is a delicate dance that has to be done to expand the use of these machines in a live entertainment venue. Legal and safety concerns are still large hurdles in most places but they are not insurmountable. The real challenge is to do something interesting with all of this airborne gadgetry. To use these machines to enrapture an audience and hopefully get them to forget that they’re looking at a machine at all. All of the tools are available and waiting for us to pick them up to craft an experience that will be worth experiencing. But of course, that’s always the biggest challenge.

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Greenlight VR Report: Consumers Are Surprisingly Unaware of Virtual Reality

This article relates a bit to my VR post from last week:

After our latest US consumer research in October 2015, we wanted to find out if the trends we were seeing in the survey data held for a larger, more international pool. In December, we surveyed over 1,000 respondents throughout the United Kingdom about their awareness of virtual reality, interest in purchasing headsets and trying applications, and their concerns.

Greenlight VR Report: Consumers Are Surprisingly Unaware of Virtual Reality

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VR Evolving

This past Saturday, the 16th, I attended the Los Angeles VR and Immersive Technologies Meetup here at the Brewery. The Creative Technology Center hosted Roy Taylor from AMD and Phillipe Lewicki from HTML Fusion. Both presentations were interesting but I’m not going to get into the specifics of each one here. As I sat and listened to some of the points made I had a few thoughts about the state of virtual reality rolling around in my head.

Stop Waiting for the Big Thing

There’s been tremendous progress in the VR world these last few years and no one denies that. Unfortunately the progress has led to great excitement and great excitement of any technology leads to over inflated expectations. Gamers, Hollywood, educators and almost everyone else are trying to figure out where the big thing for VR is going to come from and how to be a part of it. Content creators are eager for this new platform to take off and deliver on the promises being made. My fear is that the big thing is a ways down the road and the returns on any investment in VR are not going to be all that impressive for a while. If VR doesn’t deliver, enthusiasm will wane and the big investors will look elsewhere for the next new toy that promises the next big thing.

I hope we can all slow down a little bit. Take a breath. Focus on some really interesting and very niche applications for VR. The general public isn’t ready to strap a viewer on their head for more than 5 minutes and they certainly aren’t ready to invest in one for their home. We have a long way to go in teaching the not-so-early adopters what this is, how it works and why they might want it. During one of the talks it was mentioned that Google’s Cardboard is too simple and not enough of an interactive VR experience to move us forward. The truth is Cardboard has significantly lowered the barriers to entry. Nearly anyone can cheaply (assuming they already own a smart phone) and easily have a VR experience. Cardboard is teaching the general populous what this experience is and getting us used to holding a viewer up to our face to peer into a different world (however slight those differences may be). Cardboard is absolutely limited in the experience it can provide but I believe it is an invaluable tool in making VR comfortable and “acceptable” to a great many people.

Focus on the Small

Until the more sophisticated hardware proliferates there’s a limited audience for any content. By focusing more narrowly we can create some really interesting experiences that will help lay the foundation and develop a few basic rules for this new experience. If we want VR to stick this time (and we do) there needs to be a ton of experimentation so we can get to a place where truly great and unique content can be created. We are in that experimental phase and if we try to rush through it VR will be littered with re-purposed movies and reformatted video games offering nothing truly unique or inspiring. The money to develop content or hardware will dry up and we’ll wait another decade for the next daring entrepreneur to resurrect a world of technology that has limped along.