The Immersive Design Summit Diaries: KJ
Running thoughts from LA NoPro correspondent KJ Knies
Thursday, Feburary 21, 9:00pm
Here we go! Immersive Design Summit 2019. It goes without saying — but this is set to be an exciting year for IDS, with speakers from Magic Leap, Walt Disney Imagineering, Dreamscape, and so many others all converging on San Francisco to share what they’ve learned about creating amazing immersive experiences. I’m super excited, especially to hear more about the state of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality, environmental and character storytelling in relation to theme parks, and how marketing agencies are stepping up their game to bring customers into the worlds of movies and video games.
To introduce myself, my name is KJ Knies and I’m a creator and producer of immersive marketing and creative events, having worked with great companies like Giant Spoon, Epic Immersive, and After Hours. I’ll be here most focused on virtual reality, theme parks, and marketing activations and how storytelling can be used to drive all three of these mediums forward.
Personal Learnings
As both a creator and marketeer of immersive events — my goals for these sessions are two-fold: how to create technological location based entertainment that can sustain high throughput without sacrificing narrative integrity, and how to how to best push these events in order to attract the masses. Producer-minded? Definitely :)
Producer-ing aside, this weekend is of course a great chance to meet fellow creators and learn about sectors of this crazy world that may actually be hiding in plain sight. This is our chance to come face to face with some of the craziest personalities and learn what makes them tick. It’s too big of an opportunity to ignore.
Burning Questions I Have
Are immersive marketing activations just a current fad? Or do companies like Giant Spoon and Mycotoo have a plan to grow these activations to sustainable ROI?
VR has had a difficult couple of years — is location based virtual reality the answer to the current woes of VR — including digital detoxes and issues of seclusion?
With the opening of Two Bit Circus and AREA15 on the horizon, companies are betting big on immersive family entertainment centers. What will be the main programming occupying these centers and do they imagine a world where deep experiences like Sleep No More can reach the masses?
If you can’t tell — I’m absolutely psyched.
February 22, 3:27pm
These conferences, for me, are more about learning about people and their stories than it is about swapping business cards to make the next great deal. (There’s enough business wheeling and dealing happening in my inbox right now. I don’t need more of that at a conference.) So when I get the chance to talk to someone face to face and am able to look them in the eye and learn about what makes them tick — now that excites me. And everyone here at IDS 2019 seemed to share the same common goal.
As I stepped into IDS, everyone was absolutely buzzing. People were already introducing themselves, smiles were shared, and stories were already being swapped. That desire for human connection was prevalent throughout this entire morning of IDS.
So it just made sense for that desire to become even more substantiated by the opening Keynote from Ida Benedetto, author of Patterns of Transformation. Her keynote focused primarily on, like the title of her book, transformation, and what everyone at the summit hoped to learn.
She began with an essential: what exactly allows for an experience to become truly transformative? She’s speaking of course about the summit itself, but creators encounter the same thing. All creators desire this, of course, for our work to somehow transcend the page and impact lives for the better. Benedetto continued that through her research three social activities — sex parties, funerals, and wilderness treks — all share a commonality that allowed for each event to become transformative. At some level, all three of these activities presents an element of risk. Risk, then, is the true coin of transformation. As a creator, it is our job to create a support system that allows an audience to safely enter into a situation that would otherwise be too dangerous to approach. As creators, then, we present safe spaces for transformation.
She finished her talk with something I’ve truly never encountered before: an experience with my spirit animal. I have to be honest, I never actually realized a spirit animal was something real, something truly spiritual. It’s always been the bud of a joke for me. But Benedetto, in a powerful fashion, guided all 400+ participants at IDS through a group spiritual journey. She asked all of us to close our eyes and walk through our favorite place in nature. She asked us to talk to our spirit animal and ask them for guidance for what we may encounter here at IDS.
In essence, she asked us to approach a risky situation (IDS) with curated mechanics (spiritual journey) to allow us to encounter a positive outcome. Her talk was the practice of what she was preaching.
And as we opened our eyes, I knew it was gonna be one heck of a summit.
February 23, 11:15am
There were SO many great talks from IDS 2019 Day 1, but I have to share my thoughts on one in particular.
Sean Stewart, creative director and design director of the hyper-secretive AR company Magic Leap was our final speaker of the day — and he ended the day on an extremely high note. He began his talk giving us his quite unusual background as a science fiction writer — from his work on Star Wars novels to his work on magical worlds. He then talked about his novel, Cathy’s Book, and how this novel somehow appealed to the “nonreaders of the readers’ (the award he won for it actually called those non-readers “reluctant” readers, something he said with a smirk.
But what got him to this point? From the point where he wrote magical science fiction, to Star Wars fiction, to the novel 2.0, as he called it. Alternate reality games. ARGs, as the industry calls them, are stories that use the tools of everyday life to share narratives. Through these ARGs, he was able to engage with his readers (or participants, you could say) on a much more personal level. Traditionally, he argued, the audience surrounding pieces of content. Think TV. But now the content needs to surround the audience. A novel just doesn’t cut it anymore. That novel now exists as a tweet, a Facebook post, a podcast — really anything consumable. Interestingly, it’s said that JK Rowling has only written 1% of all the Harry Potter content. That’s a lot of fan fiction, sure, but it’s also a testament that people are consuming her world and her characters at a rate that is beyond her tentpole, original content. People desire to be surrounded by her world, not just consume it on its original level.
In this way, Stewart continued, the theater is on its way to encounter the same cosmic shift as movies in the 20th century. With the advent of TV, the average movie ticket purchases per household plummeted. People no longer needed to leave their couch in order to consume quality video content. But what if theater could go the same way? What if there was a way to make the home the theater, full with narrative and characters?
He then continued to lay a groundwork for what something like this could look like with three phases: spatial awareness, someone to play with, unique ways to play.
On spatial awareness, he showed off Magic Leaps unique technology that allows computer algorithms to scan an area and in seconds create a unique and accurate digital spatial map. This allows the room to now become a digital stage.
Regarding someone to play with, he showcased a few different solves. You could use recorded video, like what Magic Leap did with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but this presents the inability to interact. You have one actor reading from one script. So it’s hyperrealistic, but totally liner. It doesn’t allow for the freedom that home theater could need. So next he showed off a video game style character. Full interaction, little photorealism. But his final showcase blew the audience's mind. He showcased Micah, Magic Leap’s prototype hyperrealistic character that looks human. There’s no uncanny valley about it. I was thoroughly impressed. If they can get a character working within the headset that is able to render and a believable frame rate, I’m totally in. I feel like I just saw the future.
And finally, on ways to play, he challenged the conventions of a traditional button controller. There are too many barriers to entry, he stated. “I want something my wife would want to play. Heck, I want something that I’d want to play.” And therefore the controller, with all of its non-intuitive buttons, needs to go. Instead, Magic Leap is looking at voice, gesture, and gaze tracking as inputs. They even had a game that interacted with smart home lights, turning them on and off, depending on where you looked.
In conclusion, he believes that all the home is a stage. It’s possible to have a theatrical and artistic experience from the stage. Here, you can have an audience talk to characters, have multi-day, thoughtful experiences that allow you to dive deeper than you could in a shared space.
February 26, 2:23pm
Another morning and another day of inspiration at IDS! The excitement with this crowd is truly unreal. They say you should always associate yourself with people that are smarter than you — and everywhere I turn I’m in awe of those around me. These people are those that make the industry tick from behind the scenes, be it indie or professional developers, creators, and producers. The quality of talent in one room is absolutely unreal.
Take the great talk from Jennifer Cook, Head of Production at Dreamscape Immersive. This is a company I’ve been keeping tabs on for a while now. In March of last year, they launched their first pop up experience at the Century City Westfield in Los Angeles with their experience Alien Zoo. It was an experiment, but even then the company showed an understanding of location-based VR that few others were able to replicate with their focus on 4D effects. end-to-end theming, and storytelling.
Cook’s talk on Saturday focused primarily on their company’s best practices — which interestingly all centered around using VR as a social experience. VR has often been touted as a solitary experience. Heck, even Oculus’ own ads showcase friends getting together as groups from each of their respective bedrooms. Sure, the digital connective tissue of VR is profound, but in a world where everyone is digitally present and emotionally distant, I believe that people want the excuse to get together as friends and try something new. Dreamscape’s focus on social and group activity is actually really great, using VR as a transpirational medium to give friends unique experiences in new worlds. It’s something I’ve never thought about, but Cook’s conversation really hit this out of the park for me.
More, Dreamscape focuses their marketing efforts on the adventures, not the headsets. “We don’t advertise with headsets,” she says. Instead, they advertise stories, adventures, and characters. This makes sense to me. In an immersive work, you don’t advertise the mechanics of your game. You don’t tout the inventory management system, or even the graphics card when you’re advertising a game. Instead, you focus on the story — the adventure you’re going to take the player on. VR then just acts as a vessel for the adventures that Dreamscape sells. I think this is a hugely important distinction that many more VR companies need to adopt in the future.
Finally, when asked about competitors, she stated that this is a young industry and she wants all location-based VR companies to do well as it will only benefit the industry. This is a sentiment that I felt was shared by the summit as a whole. It’s important to note that this is a young industry. For each of us creators, we’re encountering new customers that more than likely have never been involved in any kind of immersive experience. Tommy Honton of Stash House always notes that it takes about 2–3 negative tries before a person writes off an entire class of product. In this way, immersive creators cannot engage in any sort of competition. Sure, competition will always strive to make us better. But the general sense of altruism must ring truest. We must work to make every entry point in this weird world of immersive the easiest, highest quality imaginable.
Because as we heard from the Immersive Design Summit Annual Report, graciously put together by Ricky Brigante from Pseudonym Productions, this is potentially a $4 billion industry. Likely few of us have actually seen that level of wealth, but the potential of growth is huge. I truly believe that this is an industry that has far more ahead of it than behind. We must learn from game designers, theme park producers, virtual reality filmmakers. Each of these disciplines shares a commonality and works to uplift all others. It’s Summits like these that always remind me that I am both very ignorant to the vast wealth of knowledge and I am equally hungry to learn more.
I think everyone will agree that this Summit has left us both satisfied with the new relationships we’ve garnered and a deep wish to continue to learn from those around us.
KJ Knies is a creator and producer of immersive marketing and creative events. Follow him on Twitter at @KJknies.
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