You’re the Movie Star Now

If you think our self-obsessed society couldn’t get any more obsessed with our self image, then hold on tight. We’re about turn this gig up to eleven. While we rarely admit it, everyone’s favourite topic is themselves. Now, if you could imagine for a moment what celebrity culture mashed up with self-obsession might look like, then you’ve taken a sneak peak at what’s next – Everyday Movie Stars.

No, I’m not talking about low-quality, bottom-feeding, Reality TV melodrama. I’m talking about Big Budget Films From Hollywood starring you. The GIF above is from a face-swapping app coming out of China call ZAO. This app utilises deep fake technology to allow anyone to impose their face onto any video – including those with celebrities. Mind you, this is a ‘free’ (for the price of your personal data) app on a smart phone – and it’s quite impressive. Now, imagine what could be done a couple of years from now with improved AI, deep fake algorithmic improvement and even better camera technology. It isn’t hard to see where this is going. You, me and everyone else will be able to slot ourselves into any movie we please. We’ll sit down on a Friday night with our popcorn to watch ourselves in an Oscar-winning performance on Netflix with no noticeable difference. That’s next level narcissism, but I promise you it will happen within the decade.

In the first instance, we’ll probably have to go to the cinema and watch ourselves through augmented glasses and pay a premium for the privilege. With enough imagination, disruptive technology like this always represents new revenue opportunities. Technology has a way of democratising everything – and it’s about to democratise starring in high-budget Hollywood movies. But every shift in tech has losers too. It makes me wonder whether the stars of Hollywood will have to step aside as Joe and Jane Average are patched in via AI. Don’t worry Leo, I think it’s pretty safe to say most people would rather star with you, than replace you. Besides, who we are ‘in the movie’ with is just as important as how good it is.

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Smart Contact Lenses & the Future of Sport

People seem to be in perpetual fear that technology will take away all the jobs. The bit they always miss is that for every job tech takes away, it invents two. The classic examples of technology inventing new work and new industries are in sport and entertainment. Given it is Football Grand Final week here in Australia – let’s explore where football viewing is heading next.

In the future, watching football, or any sport, will be a much better experience than it is today. Firstly, we’ll have an augmented reality layer on the screen. Not only will you be able to turn on live stats of your favourite players or teams, you’ll also be able to turn them off too. Camera angles won’t dictated by the broadcaster – they’ll be chosen by the viewer via the broadcaster. There will be cameras literally everywhere. There will be super-speed high-definition recording on the goal posts, on the ground and even from the ball so you can watch it sail through the goalposts. You get to choose which replays to watch and when – it will be total director control from the comfort of your sofa. But if you want to get more involved in the game, here is where it gets really cool.

Utilising the latest technology in ‘smart reality contact lenses’, you’ll be able to get the players’ view of the game live while the game is in progress. Log in before the game and you can immerse yourself in exactly how Dusty Martin, Christiano Rinaldo or Russell Wilson experience it – watching the match from their eyes. Of course, you’ll pay for the privilege. It’ll also make sense for players to market themselves to be exciting enough for viewers to log onto, as they’ll be paid per fan log in. But if that’s not close quite enough – then don’t forget to don your football haptic suit. It’s a suit you can wear while watching the game which allows the wearer to to feel in real time the bumps and tussles the players feel on the field. The suit will raise your temperature to match the players’, give you the same palpitations as their heart beats and hear their on-field verbal communications. How is this be possible? These haptic suits can link to players’ uniforms which will be threaded with tiny electronic components to send real-time data across the web using IoT technology. The experience of sport and entertainment in the future will be so real it can almost get dangerous.

But if you think about it – this is the trajectory we’ve been on for a long time. We go from hearing about a football match on radio, to watching a replayed match on a black and white screen, to live HD with slow motion and stats to actually becoming the players. Technology always brings us closer to something far away and allows us to experiences things we otherwise wouldn’t. The opportunities for innovations like this is sport and all forms of entertainment are really limitless.

These possibilities will create jobs, revenue and companies which are yet to exist. The unbelievable part is the technologies already exist to make it happen. My only question is – what are you waiting for?

Screen Culture

TV was the first entertainment screen in our lives and belonged in the living room. And it stayed there for the best part of 30 years before it multiplied. Slowly, it made it’s way into the other rooms of the house. It was linear and unidirectional, but it was also the start of a new culture. A culture that would shape more than entertainment.

In less than 20 years since the birth of the graphical web, screens in all shapes and sizes have started to pop up all around us. They’ve made things simpler, easy to understand, and just made life better. So much so, that screens now permeate virtually every aspect of our lives.

I call it screen culture.

And it’s much more than TV, web browsers and smart phones. It’s every screen we see. All web enabled, all around us and consumers expect the screens to serve them without a hitch.

They’re in our pockets, they’re on our desk, the car dashboard is now a screen, on the back of airline seats, the airline check in counters, supermarket checkouts, shopping centre directories, in all retail spaces, in the back seat of taxi’s, bus shelters, community spaces. They exist where ever communication and commerce does. Every machine now has a screen. Every time we interact with technology, the interface is increasingly screen enabled. And we often attend to multiple screens concurrently.

The more we learn about the screen, the more it learns about us. The best screens can be manipulated, touched, caressed, controlled and even spoken to. It’s our job to humanize the screens so that they are culturally sensitive. They need to intuitively know what we want… and lead us to that solution. The interface has to be the instruction manual. Screen culture demands that we teach people “how”, while they interface. That the learning, and the solving, happen simultaneously. The screens need to serve us. We must be able to navigate the tight spaces of the small screen, if we can do this, then conversion to the big is easy.

This can only happen when we design as humans, not technologists.

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Blogs are a stadium

I was asked today about how blogs should be built and leveraged from a commercial perspective. It seems to be a regular question I’m asked. The giving element that is required in the blogosphere seems counter intuitive to the way our minds have been trained via the industrial complex. They often struggle with the fact that we just have to give, and the law of natural economics just kicks in. So I came up with this analogy which I think makes sense and explains how it should be approached philosophically.

Blogs are like a football stadium.

The game is played in the middle of the ground.

In blogs the middle of the ground happens to be where our posts are geographically placed.

This is why people come to our blog. To see the action. To learn from and be entertained by the actual game (posts)

But like all good stadiums we have related infrastructure around the edges. Our details, company, tweetstream, contacts.

If they like the game we play (our posts) they return. The crowd gets bigger, and they tell their friends to come.

Like the stadium the revenue comes from all the related elements like the concession stands, the parking and the sponsorship. The stuff that generally lives around the edges… both in stadiums and our blogs.

But we must never forget why they are here. To enjoy the game. They only ever return because the enjoy the game (the blog posts). So what we need to do is build our industry around the game, rather than charging for tickets at the gate. Charging entry just doesn’t work beause there is far too many games they can attend. (more than 200 million in fact)

So when someone asks you about how to make a blog work. Remind them of ‘stadium economics’ and that it’s the quality of the information and entertainment which earns us the right to sell them the occasional hot dog.

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