They’re not behind screens — they’re ahead of mixed reality experiences.
The idea that concert goers who watch live entertainment through tiny grainy mobile screens seems crazy is missing the foreshadowing of something potentially amazing.
I recently read a post lamenting at how the author was at a concert, where he was watching how the audience, and how many of them younger than the writer I assume, were constantly flicking between their social channels, sharing photos of the show, seeing what others were commenting, seeing whether people had liked their comments.
“Pretty depressing” he wrote.
I disagree. It’s so easy to suggest that people don’t live in the moment, and watching the concert through a tiny screen instead of looking up at the real thing seems crazy — but look at it in another way.
Actually, watching the real thing is missing out on something which could be so much more.
These new viewers are adding to their experience — they’re accessing a dozen different camera angles, a thousand voices and feelings from the hundreds of people in the crowd. They’re absorbing and experiencing the concert in a multidimensional way that that ‘tiny screen’ is only a tiny part of — and in just a matter of years to come, they’ll be able to access this sensorial cornicopia in ways which are far greater than a static surface.
Augmented visual overlays, transhuman interfaces, the ability to jump from their own standing perspective to someone else’s immediately, and see and hear what another sees and hears by borrowing their senses in real-time.
What used to be people chanting loudly in the crowd shifts to not only visceral feedback for the artist playing, but also a wealth of data from the crowd — the heart rate of the audience, the upper decks at the back who can’t quite hear, the people watching online from across the world — so the performer can react not just to who shouts loudest, but to something which offers a far greater connection to the audience.
The tiny screen is just what technology can offer today — but the experience which the viewer is hacking together, the manual hopping between their own unaggregated feeds, the conversation with others about the experience, the curation of their own perception of the event — its a foreshadow of what the technology will allow us to do effortlessly tomorrow. And our view on these audiences “missing the real event by not looking up” is a world-view born from where “watching the performer on stage with your own eyes” was the only option — and its a short-sighted one.
Today, if you have poor vision, you go to the opticians. No-one would call you out on using technology to get a different picture of what you can see without glasses. You’re improving your own ‘reality’ by using a tool. The phone — another device which no-one would challenge you using today, allows you to speak easily with someone 100,000 miles away. To only allow yourself to speak with people who you can physically reach now seems ridiculous.
So, why would we prevent ourselves from accessing an augmented version of a performance? Why would we scoff at someone who finds a way of adding new dimensions and ways of experiencing something, when in reality sitting on row N might be a much poorer experience than dropping into the mixed-reality world?
The tiny screens people in stadiums watch concerts through today will soon be gone. Don’t see them as losing out on real experiences. See them as the first step in to creating different and new forms of experience for both audience and performer.
