Best Seat in the House: You’re Virtually There
Mixed reality and biometrics will transform the experience of and marketplace for live entertainment.
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…
