Predicting Transmedia and Augmented Reality Futures

I was invited to present to a small public group last month on Media Futures up in the Northern Territory here in Australia – this followed an ABC only presentation. I generally don’t do the Futurist thing, I feel uneasy, stepping into tarot, astrology or doom sayer territory, where many factors such as user behaviour, new devices or new format/marketing development are on unpredictable shifting sands. So I prefer to call my approach to future ‘no brainer’ism’. There are some things that are so obvious, in terms of where we are heading, that simple trends analyses will give us some clarity in around a 2-5 year timeframe.

I will let my long 2 hour (130 slide!) presentation speak for itself below but the premise felt pretty unremarkable from my perspective. I am worryingly developing a rather ‘elder-like’ “nothing-new-under-the-sun” attitude. Also some predictions are just too obvious. Making the jumps from smartphones to wearable computing to bionic connectivity to singularity is not what I am talking about here, but a much more near term ‘what will most of us be doing in a few years time’ – but several at the presentation apparently still had their minds blown!? I think that ailment is treatable.

The spine of the rather winding narrative arc was some simple trend extrapolation across four of the key themes and asking questions about their trajectories:

• Social Share & Online Connection – What is the end result of ‘society’ existing mostly online?
• On-Demand TV & Everything Else – What does it mean if appointment to view goes away, do we need to learn if everything is on tap, will a million digital campfires light up the landscape?
• Mobile & Locationalism – We carry the world with us. But what happens when the digital world is layered over the real world?
•  Transmedia & Content Everywhere – There are no device boundaries. When content is truly free to move across every device, will all our, stories our life memories follow us across our personal media channels?

So on with the show. Predicting Present Futures – a title really based on Marshall McLuhan’s observation

“I don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish”

Gary Hayes, Futurist and New Media Evangelist – The media and storytelling landscape is constantly changing but in the last six years we have never seen such monumental change. Gary takes us on a journey from the old days of new media through to the very near future using current examples of the work in ABCs Multi Platform TV team through to other cutting edge examples of Augmented Reality, Transmedia, Social Media Storytelling and Games.
Gary Hayes, an award winning multi platform producer, is currently executive producer at ABC Multi Platform TV and also directs transmedia training unit StoryLabs.us. Throughout his extensive career he has worked across the UK music and multimedia industry including the development of the internet, interactive TV and cross platforms for the BBC. He is a regular keynote speaker, consultant producer in social & transmedia to the TV, Film and Arts industries. He has also been an International Interactive Emmy juror for the past three years. His media innovation blog personalizemedia. com has been in top 10 Media & Marketing for over 2 years and he runs 11 other sites linked from garyphayes.com.

Date: Sat 16 June
Time: 10am – 12pm
Venue: Browns Mart Theatre 12 Smith St, Darwin