Best Seat in the House: You’re Virtually There

Michael Garfield
7 min readApr 11, 2023

Mixed reality and biometrics will transform the experience of and marketplace for live entertainment.

Images created by Michael Garfield with Stable Diffusion 2.0

Originally published in 2009 at HPlusMagazine. Some of this I got profoundly wrong, but I still feel more validated in my hunches every day…

– It’s 2006, and I am now accustomed to the jumbo screens to either side of the main stage at any given major music festival. I still remember having no choice but to elbow my way to the front if I wanted a better view, and it’s still a fresh feeling: gratitude for being able to leave my binoculars at home and enjoy the view from the lawn.

– It’s 2007, and I am a consultant for social music network iggli.com, a start-up hoping to build online communities around a “celestial jukebox” (i.e., software that will stream any music to any internet-enabled device, effectively and immediately rendering music ownership battles obsolete). Another of their fun toys is a streaming matrix of concert photography fed live from member’s cell phones while they are at the shows…search by artist, location, or date, and everyone’s angles ticker-tapes past as fast as they can be uploaded.

– It’s 2008, and I meet the representatives of Gen Audio, an audio firm promoting their game-changing new sound mixing technology. Their software AstoundSound allows engineers to place…

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Michael Garfield
Michael Garfield

Written by Michael Garfield

Here to help you navigate the accelerating weirdness! Biologist turned philosopher, host of #FutureFossils & #ComplexityPodcast, ex @sfiscience ex @longnow.