Pervasive Entertainment Times

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If you’re a little disappointed at the limited feature set of Google’s Project Glass, there’s a new pair of glasses that might bring all your augmented reality dreams to life. A company called Meta is building a fully hackable headset, complete with visual overlays and gesture detection. Even more exciting, the company has just announced that Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing technology, is joining the team as Chief Scientist.

Meta blew past their Kickstarter goal of $100,000 in five days. Developer kits quickly sold out in the $550 and $650 pledge tier, which is less than half the price of the $1500 Project Glass Explorer Edition. The Meta developer kit includes see-through augmented reality glasses, a depth camera and a software developer’s kit, which includes sample applications and documentation. Meta works with Unity3D, the same graphics rendering engine supported by Oculus Rift, allowing users to pick up and manipulate their own 3D digital objects."

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It’s not hard to imagine more Glass applications, such as applications that display information about the customer a salesperson is talking to, or a task list that stays open in the periphery of your vision, constantly reminding you of what you need to be working on. But the big question is whether any of these applications will actually make you more productive at your job in a way that existing applications can’t. That’s what Workday is still trying to figure out. “The challenge is in adding real value,” Korngiebel says.

For the Glass experiments, Workday is drawing on its experience developing its iPad and mobile apps. The iPad app began as an experiment in designing a touch-based alternative to the traditional organizational chart. What the team came up with was the “organizational swirl.” After much testing and iteration, the swirl became the central interface for its tablet and touchscreen smartphone apps. What the company found is that although many white collar workers and executives have tablets and wanted to use Workday while away from their desks, the mobile apps were most useful for workers that never spent much time at desks to begin with."

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Why doesn’t console game tech define a new medium?

There should be novel ways to experience stories, falling somewhere between inert watching and active playing or co-creating. I have no idea what they would be, but the solutions would let people do more than solve puzzles, kill things, and talk to each other about it, maybe going beyond choosing plot lines and somehow actually interact with in-game characters and events. Could players communicate with characters via voice and movement? How about providing different ways to structure and experience stories (blowing up the linear narrative flow defined by motion pictures). Perhaps a new medium would integrate content across other platforms accessible on the console and extend stories to real-world Internet search, texting, etc. (a la alternate reality gaming). It could define participation that paved the way for wearable tech, so players could truly feel inside stories."

Quote "“Television is not a device anymore,” Mary-José Monpetit, lecturer and pioneering work on social, wireless and multi-screen television at the MIT Media Lab, said. “It’s content.”

“If we talk about using the content to create a community then we are using television content to create a community.”

Ms. Monpetit noted that there is a disconnect in the experience viewers have on a television and the experience they have online. While there is a connection forming between television watching and the online world there is still no way of making it a seamless experience.

So instead of creating a traditional interactive television experience, one of her students at MIT created an app to track Super PACs during the last US Presidential election.

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Social TV will also be available “on demand”. It won’t matter if you’re watching live or days later – you will be able to see content and what your friends and other influencers were saying as an ongoing thread between and during episodes.

And you’ll be able to sign up to follow celebrities and see what they’re saying so co-viewing with friends or people you aspire to be friendly with will be part of the experience.

Transmedia storytelling will be a part of the social TV experience. Multi-platform storytelling will be commonplace, as will fan content co-creation based on the TV watching experience. You’ll be able to enjoy programmes as standalones, or branch off to go deeper into specific storylines created by the producers… or fans.

Quote "This clearly reflects a quality “lean back” experience, but there are other numbers that show how much this content engages and inspires its audience. Do a search for “the lizzie bennet diaries” on Google now and it returns over 3.5 million pages of LBD content; this includes pages from the story itself, articles written about it, social media memes created, and fan frothing of the highest caliber.  The first LBD episode with over 1,000,000 views has spurred over 2,100 fan comments, while the exciting episode 60, has received over 500,000 views (100,000 of which were received in the first 24 hours) and over 7,000 comments. Keyword research shows that people are searching for “the lizzie bennet diaries” over 12,100 times every month (which compares to other modern retellings such as “pride and prejudice and zombies” with 9,900 or the Bollywood “bride and prejudice” with 22,000 searches).

quote "Essentially, until very recently, video links shared via Twitter and Facebook or even email have been challenged by the need for a client-side app (to count streams for the advertiser, etc), resulting in very low viewing rates as consumers either have to hunt for and download the app or become frustrated while the device switches from streaming the ad to streaming the actual content.  Now that the technology exists to stitch the ad and the content together "on the fly" combined with an industry recognition of matching the pre-roll to the size of the content (ie no 30-second pre-rolls for 30-second videos), networks are starting to see their ad stream viewing rates climb and their resulting effective CPMs climb (they only get paid for completed ad views).  With ad targeting servers from companies like FreeWheel and VideoPlaza targeting consumers in real-time with more and more personalized information, we should expect to see CPMs meet and exceed those of the analog broadcasting world...soon.

Quote " Immerse People In The Narrative

The Walking Dead, the famous comic and now TV show, used a polling Web app (AMC’s Story Sync, if you like marketing-speak) to ask viewers questions and show related content as an episode was being broadcast on TV. While the app was simply timed to each scene, it was an experiment in multi-screen storytelling that invited audience participation, not just audience attention. Polling has a gimmicky feel to it, but that probably came about as a result of Hollywood pressure and doesn’t reflect the value of the concept in general.

Quote "It doesn’t exist, and it probably won’t. Augmented Reality is a horizontal technology, which means that the nigh-limitless applications make it a challenging endeavor to develop the Evernote-YouTube-Wordpress-Instagram of Augmented Reality. We did however see the AR Angry Birds, and even if it isn’t official it’s still a pretty clear indication that a successful AR game could lead the way for massive adoption. There are already some good examples out there, like the new JengAR game that inserts the 3-D content into the environment itself rather than needing a printed image."

Quote "To that end, the team developed an iPad app that uses motion tracking technology to "map" a user interface onto different parts of an object. The example we saw was a simple radio with a a pair of dials and a speaker, and when the iPad's camera was pointed at it, a circular interface along with a menu system popped up that cannily tracked the radio. From there, Huen mapped various songs onto different positions of the knob, allowing him to control his playlist by moving it -- a simple, manual interface for selecting music. He was even able to activate a second speaker by drawing a line to it, then "cutting" the line to shut it off. We're not sure when, or if, this kind of tech will ever make it into your house, but the demo we saw (see the pair of videos after the break) seemed impressively ready to go.

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Around 45% of viewers use social media to keep up with the latest show news, while 44% use it to stay informed about air dates and times and 37% use it to access exclusive show information (36% use it to access video and plot clues).

Perhaps surprisingly, functional motives are stronger for teens and young adults with viewers 13 to 17 most likely to use social media to search for show schedules.

Christian Kurz, VP of research insights and reporting for Viacom said: “Globally social media is becoming today’s version of a TV guide for viewers – it is really how they prefer to get their information about the shows they watch”.

Communal factors are the second most common reason for engaging in TV-related social media use. Viewers use social media to share taste (34%), connect with the show (28%) and connect with other fans (28%).

Around 24% of viewers use social media to play games, win rewards and engage in polls and quizzes to do with TV shows. Over 30% said they played TV show-related games on a  weekly basis."

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Some­thing that really stood out was the sheer vol­ume of con­tent. Syfy Sync was send­ing a LOT of updates — often as fre­quently as every 30 sec­onds. I won­der if some view­ers will find this over­whelm­ing and dis­tract­ing. I actu­ally liked it, because there’s so much going on in terms of the show’s con­tent and nar­ra­tive that it helped give me extra insight into what was going on.

A few updates were kind of silly and what I would call “a stretch” — like the one that encour­aged view­ers to “Get Social” and dis­cuss some ran­dom thing “in the social panel.” I think TV fans are pretty good at fig­ur­ing out what they want to dis­cuss and when they want to dis­cuss it all by them­selves, thanky­ou­very­much."

Quote "Right now Facebook is trying to get more of your opinions codified in its graph, and Sections with ratings are a big step in the right direction. As I wrote, Sections and now ratings could be a data goldmine for Facebook’s Graph Search, as they encourage people to forge connections with apps and media they care about. Graph Search relies on those connections to generate and sort search results for queries like “Movies my friends Like”. Facebook would know to show your friends’ five-star rated movies above lower rated flicks they’ve Liked.

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“If you’re using two screens, you have to take your eyes off the football game or reality show you’re watching and go to your second screen when you want to complain about a penalty or celebrate with your friends when your favorite contestant wins the game,” Steve Turner, founder and president of SimulTV, said in a statement. “That means you are either watching or interacting, but not doing both.”

There’s something to what he’s saying.

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THE QUESTIONS REMAIN

Still many questions remain, including: who are the likely winners and losers in the second screen market? Shay Fan a member of the marketing team at Miso, a social TV platform, says, “Success will come when someone figures out the magic formula for ‘stickiness’ – something that will make users want to stay and interact with content. With so much competing for our attention, it will be a difficult, crowded industry.”

Toeman adds, “I think all the traditional players will remain winners for quite some time to come, it's their game to lose really. This is a big challenging space, and I think success will come from the companies who best understand what consumers actually want to do with their time and how they enjoy watching TV. Those who are trying to shape or shift behaviours will have an uphill battle, as well as those who pay too much attention to hype, and not enough to reality.”

Quote "Weiler: I feel as if I’m storytelling agnostic. It is not platform specific. I see it as storytelling. I’m trying to find some type of an emotional core for the work. Can I help the viewer / player to feel something? Can I help them to connect with the characters and story? I’ll often develop projects that mix analog and digital elements. Projects that spill beyond the screen and into the real world and back. The inspiration for the projects can come from anywhere. Similar to when I write for film and TV, the inspiration can come from a place, a feeling, a character, a situation or something that I see or feel in the real world. Lately, I’ve be inspired by things that I feel are challenging or at the onset seem impossible."

Quote" Defiance is a transmedia effort from Trion Worlds and TV network SyFy. The show of the same name broke records at the network, netting 2.7 million viewers for its debut episode. The premiere was SyFy's most-watched scripted series debut for adults in seven years.

When you ask Canadians how they spend their free time at home, many say they now use the Internet more than watching TV – although researchers suspect most understate how much TV they watch and overestimate their online time.

According to statistics from 2012 compiled by the Television Bureau of Canada, the average 18– to 24-year-old said they watched 14 hours of TV weekly and spent 31 hours online.