The Mixed Reality Perfect Storm

“Mixed Reality is the merging of real world and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects can co-exist and interact in real-time. - Wikipedia

“I think we are really approaching a perfect storm, a mixed reality perfect storm, because we are seeing several things happening. The first one is a long history of games based on TV and films, the foundations are already there. Another force creating this storm is virtual worlds, particularly the exponential growth of customisable ones and more importantly external integration into them including live performance. The third force is audience behaviour. They are involved in far more simultaneous activity particularly between broadband web and TV. The fourth element to this perfect storm is actually what is happening to TV and film, especially live reality TV becoming more game like and film becoming fantasy based. All of these forces together are creating a really potent mix” – Gary Hayes 17 May 2007

While I am in ‘share talk’ mode here is a brief sixteen minute capture of a presentation I gave to a hundred or so Aussie media folk on 17 May recorded live at the at the AGL Theatre, Museum of Sydney (MoS). It took a while to put up as I ran a LAMP residential in Tasmania in between and a bunch of SL work. There were also great talks by colleagues Tony Walsh and Guy Gadney. (orig sea scene photo by Andrew P Brooks)

MP3 recording time 15:46 (7.7MB) Click to listen

Enhanced Podcast – M4v with 30 slides. (8.5MB) Click to download

THE MIXED REALITY PERFECT STORM

A short 16m introduction from Gary Hayes who looks at the four forces that are coming together to create perfect conditions for this hybrid form of entertainment. He looks back 10 years at early inhabited TV 3D world experiments when he was an innovation producer at the BBC and then forward to the latest cross-over services where TV properties become virtual and where the virtual world appears inside traditional forms. He looks at virtual worlds such as there.com, second life, PS3 Home, Habbo Hotel, Neopets etc: and how properties such as Big Brother, Laguna Beach, The Hills, Pimp My Ride and a range of consumer brands that are creating engaging and immersive hybrid entertainment.