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The walls of the silos separating sectors are no more. To me, this is thanks to new media. My definition of new media is the ever-changing use and choices of media — for all ages and cultures. Technology is and will continue to be constantly evolving.
With new media, you get to choose how you communicate story. Story can be a message to your mom or friend, an ad to the world, a newsletter and, yes, even your email message. How you do what you do uses new media — and it’s very empowering.
There are no limits to what you can do. Now a short can be a live-action pilot, the first episode of a web series and/or use a filter to turn into an animation, etc.
However you see the world, you can bring your ideas to fruition.
Making the Most of New Technology
If you are a creator and love a new modality, reach out to that company and ask to partner or test their new products.
Make sure the technology you are using is useful to your outcome. Try mashing/mixing different technologies to get a new outcome. Merge items that were originally kept separated, build upon something old into something new (repurposing on a tech level). Think big and broad.
New Technology to Watch
As technology progresses, it should become more affordable and intuitive for the masses. For creatives, these technologies can impact work and career, enabling you to tell stories in a new and different way. Some of these technologies and methods include:
Artificial Intelligence: This is currently mostly used for automation — think Amazon shipping warehouses and communicating in chat boxes.
Augmented Reality: This involvessuperimposing a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world.
Brainwaves: Using embedded chips, brainwaves can turn into commands and then into actions.
Computer Vision & Machine Learning: Computer vision is happening on our phones, but there are signs that the focus will be moving to augmented reality and mixed reality. For example, machines pick up differences in customers across all of a brand’s touchpoints.
Emotion Sensing: This could be added to new products and is applied neuroscience — aka emotion tracking.
The Rolling Stone Culture Council is an invitation-only community for Influencers, Innovators and Creatives. Do I qualify?
Emotion Technology: This could be used to detect sleepy drivers or even as an emotional hearing aid for neurodivergent people. A bad use would be sharing data from different emotion sensors without informed consent.
Natural language generation technologies: The promise here includes rewriting your entire online product category in your brand voice in a relatively short time frame to help improve search engine ranking.
Faceware: Facial tech can let players animate their character’s face while playing the game.
Films: Physiological responses such as heart rate, skin conductance, body temperature, movement and noise; for example, when Motionless = peak engagement.
Holographic Capture: Synchronized input from over 100 RGB & IR cameras strategically placed, processed, converted and decimated to the appropriate quality level of intended usage.
Neural Networks: This technology can already reason and act with human creativity. In a practical application, it could allow news organizations to create stories based on facts.
Product Placement: Create and market the product before the film is made to create demand.
Real-Time CG: This is a process for representing three-dimensional data and rendering every image of an animation as it is being displayed.
The DJ Experiment: With tools like Microsoft’s gesture control tech Kinect, you can create a perimeter of motion detectors around the room and use the heat map to move in the direction of where there is a lull/boredom in the audience.
Virtual Reality/360 – VR is already being used in education, real estate, amusement, tradeshows and more, including Room Scale, which allows users to freely walk a play area, with their real-life motion reflected in the VR environment.
These are only some of the tools you can use to communicate your story to the world in new ways.
