Tag: Event Recap

Event Recap: The Art of VR – June 2017

Posted on by Scott Elchison

Last month, the Lab attended The Art of VR event presented by the VR Society. The two-day event hosted at Sotheby’s NYC brought together leaders in the VR industry to discuss the future of the space from creative, production, media, and advertising perspectives. The day was split between panel discussions ranging from realistic human avatars to the future of media and many different demos illustrating the wide range of VR applications today.

VR’s Growing Pains

It is no surprise that the VR space is still in its infancy. While there has been rapid adoption of the Samsung Gear VR – almost 5 million headsets have been purchased – and mobile VR, overall, the VR space is stilling lacking content and users. As we observed in our 2016 Outlook report:

“While early adopters and hardcore gamers are starting to buy virtual reality gear with the launch of Samsung Gear VR and the upcoming Oculus Rift, Playstation VR, and HTC Vive, creation of content that will spur real adoption is only beginning. It’s a chicken-or-egg problem: Why buy a headset if there’s little content and why invest in content if so few can see it?”

The Indie VR panel only reinforced this point. The industry is starting to gain traction, however, the final format for VR is still unknown. Panelists suggested that there needs to be weirder experimental content to test out what VR can truly be.  

Realistic Human Avatars

One of the most interesting concepts that is starting to solidify are realistic human avatars within VR. Companies like Loom.ai, Wolf3D, Macinnes Scott, and Facebook’s Oculus team are all, already working on the technology. However, it begs the question – who is actually going to use them?           

If we look back, videos games have been offering a level of personalize/stylization for years. Players are able to customize facial features, skin tone, height, clothing, gender and more. Fast forward to October of 2014 and the launch of customizable avatar platform Bitmoji took personalized avatars even further. Now people are able to create human-like social avatars to be shared on different social messaging platforms. Bitmoji was so successful that Snap Inc acquired Bitmoji’s parent company BitStrips for $100M. Looking to the future, Macinnes Scott is looking to create hyper realistic avatars for celebrities and allow such avatars to be licensed out for mind-blowing VR content creation.

Takeaways for Brands

Three major takeaways from this event for brands that is curious about exploring VR:

1). At its current stage, VR excels at storytelling, so don’t expect to sell large volume of products in VR but rather focus on driving brand loyalty and awareness instead.
2). Be mindful in choosing the type of VR content to integrate with — they needs to be able to align with brand products in a natural way.
3). The analytic tools are here today to measure the success of a VR campaign, but brands will need to use their own judgements as to which ones they want to use.

The Lab team have been shouting from the rooftops that the best use case for VR is storytelling. VR is the perfect realm to tell stories and engage with a user in a way that has never been possible before. From a brand perspective, we envision brands integrating into VR experiences where their products fit organically .VR is exciting because the experiences are built within gaming engines that make integrating branded 3D objects simple. Brands can have their product built directly into a game’s environment and allows game publishers to bring this additional layer of realism to their game (as well as generate some extra revenue). Overall it is a win-win scenario for both VR content creators and brands.

Well-placed product ingratiation within a suitable VR experience doesn’t mean anything to a brand unless real tangible insights can be produced. That is where VR analytics companies like CognitiveVR come into play. They allow brands to track a multitude of rich interactions within a VR experience including; how a user moves within the game, gaze (where a person is “looking”), number of branded object interactions and time spent. There is no consensus on what metrics will be the most useful to measure campaign success, which brands will have to decide for themselves on a case-by-case basis. However, the tools are available today to provide real tangible insights for brands.

 

Everything Marketers Should Know From Apple’s iPhone 6s Event

Posted on by Lab Team

Regular as clockwork, Apple’s annual iPhone launch event took place this afternoon in San Francisco, where the company unveiled some major upgrades to almost its entire product line. Here are the highlights from today’s event that all marketers and brands should be aware of.

• Apple Watch Gets More Apps and Fashionable Watch Bands
Apple demoed various new Watch apps such as Facebook Messenger, GoPro, and AirStrip, and collaborated with Hermes on new models with exclusive bands.

• iPad Pro Gives Brands More Screen Space To Impress
The brand new iPad Pro that boasts a stunning 12.9-inch screen, giving brands more space and processing power to impress their audience on mobile devices.

• iPhone 6s Presents New Features For Brands To Engage
With 4K video recording, animated Live Photo, 3D Touch, and more, Apple debuts the next-gen smartphone that brands need to adept to.

• The Future Of TV Is Apps
With “tvOS”, Apple brings App Store, gaming capability, and Siri to Apple TV, providing brands with a gateway to infiltrate the living room space.

The new iOS 9 will be made available to all users on September 16, with updated iPhones available starting September 26. The Apple TV and iPad Pro will hit stores later this fall, in October and November, respectively. As always, the Lab will offer our hands-on take on these next-generation devices, so remember to check back for more.

iPhone 6s Presents New Features For Brands To Engage Mobile Users

Posted on by Lab Team

Announced at Apple’s annual press event on Wednesday, the new iPhones, predictably named iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, may look similar to their precursors at the first glance. Upon a closer look, however, the newest additions to Apple’s smartphone lineup reveal some neat new features that brands can make good use of. In addition, the new phones also come with the “always-on Siri,” which allows users to activate Siri with just their voice by saying “Hey Siri,” as well as improvements to the processors, cameras, wireless, and Touch ID.

Besides a new 12 megapixel camera that supports 4K video recording, the new iPhones will also add “Live Photos” to its imaging arsenal, a new photo format that essentially functions as HD animated gifs with audio. Apple has released the developer API for Live Photo and alluded to Facebook’s integration of this new format, which could brings a richer layer to brands’ visual content across platforms.

The new iPhones also boasts a crucial new feature named 3D Touch. Developed upon the Force Touch technology, this new system-wide feature enables new touch gestures such as Peek and Pop that allows users to dip in and out of apps without opening them full-screen. While this offers brands a new way to provide handy shortcuts to their app users, it also presents a challenge for brands to truly engage with the mobile consumers as they jump in between apps seamlessly. This expands on the recent trend of app content appearing outside of the app itself, a double-edged sword which rewards the most useful apps with higher visibility, while punishing apps which can’t provide content that is useful in multiple contexts.

Apple also announced their own iPhone Upgrade Program, a financing product which allows users who purchase a phone at the Apple Store to get a new, unlocked iPhone every year starting at $32/month. Along with carriers unbundling their own financial offerings, this has the potential to increase the rate of upgrades, and further shift control of the customer relationship from the wireless carriers to Apple.

The Future Of TV Is Apps, According to Apple

Posted on by Lab Team

During Wednesday’s press event, Apple finally debuted a new Apple TV set-top box that aims to transform the way people watches TV. Equipped with a brand-new iOS 9-based operating system dubbed “tvOS,” the new Apple TV comes with App Store and Siri-enabled universal search across content platforms. Apple also debuted a new touchpad remote that doubles as a video game controller, further pushing Apple TV into the gaming market. The addition of App Store offers brands a gateway to infiltrate the living room space via branded TV app. Apple demoed several brands already developing their TV apps, including fashion e-retailer Gilt, Twitter’s livestreaming app Periscope, accommodation-booking app Airbnb, as well as media content providers like MLB.

Stay tuned for the Lab’s in-depth Fast Forward feature on the brand implications of the new Apple TV platform.

iPad Pro Gives Brands More Screen Space To Impress

Posted on by Lab Team

The much-anticipated new iPad confirmed the pre-announcement speculations, as Apple unveiled the brand new iPad Pro that boasts a stunning 12.9-inch multi-touch screen, capable of running two full-size apps in profile mode side by side. This will no doubt give brands more space to impress their audience on tablets with stunning graphics and more information.

iPad Pro boasts a new A9X processor, making it faster than 80% of the portable PCs sold in the past year, according to Apple. It also supports a new detachable smart keyboard a la Microsoft’s Surface and Apple’s first stylus named Apple Pencil for more nuanced interactions. Nearly as powerful as a regular laptop, iPad Pro signals the next stage of mobile devices’ takeover of consumer screen time. If your brand hasn’t adapted to mobile yet, you need to start developing a mobile strategy right now.

Apple Watch Gets More Apps and Fashionable Watch Bands

Posted on by Lab Team

Apple kicked off Wednesday’s event with a showcase of its newest product, the Apple Watch. With the new watchOS 2 (first announced at WWDC event back in June) coming next week with Watch-native apps, Apple demoed various new Watch apps such as Facebook Messenger, GoPro, and healthcare app AirStrip to showcase the versatility that its first wearable product gains through third-party apps.

Moreover, Apple continues to converge tech with fashion as it collaborated with Hermes on new models with exclusive bands and watch faces, as well as releasing new colorways for the Apple Watch Sport. The company is also reportedly prepping its first exclusive content in the form of fashion network ‘Made 2 Measure’.

Event Recap: Digital Intimacy Panel And A Look At The Fashion+Design Accelerator

Posted on by Lab Team

Last week, Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn Fashion+Design Accelerator held a panel on the latest in wearables and digital intimacy. It focused on the changing landscape in both fashion and technology, and the fact that soon, the two will be indistinguishable.

The panel included some of the fashion tech industry’s most prominent futurists, including founders of Makerbot, Wearable Experiments, and others, discussing the need for proactive thinking and experimentation as technology becomes more intimate than ever. For Paul Amitai of digital fashion imprint Eyebeam, wearables go beyond data: “The material will become the technology itself.” In response, Billie Whitehouse, founder of Wearable Experiments brought up “ingestibles,” implying that we will become the technology.

Privacy was another important theme of the evening. “What happens when everything is transparent?” Makerbot founder Bre Pettis wondered. “The loss of privacy just hasn’t hit at scale.” Pettis thought privacy long gone, but not necessarily in a bad way: if transparency can temper abuses of power, maybe it’s worthwhile. Evan Lazarus of Paxie, a child-tracking wearable, tried to recontextualize privacy, while Whitehouse spoke of a need for a bubble of private data — such as biometric data — that couldn’t be utilized in public or commercial spheres. The Internet of Things needs to be an extension of human empathy, rather than simply computer intelligence.

The event was part of an exhibition called “Cloud Couture,” featuring companies that are pushing the boundaries of sustainable and technological design. Examples included 3D-printed dresses, a shirt that vibrates in response to the bass frequencies of EDM music, environmentally-friendly waterless dye, a sweater that changes color based on emotional feedback.

Event Recap: December 2014 NY Tech Meetup

Posted on by Lab Team

The December 2014 NY Tech Meetup was a great sendoff to a banner year in New York’s hotshot startup scene. Key points were a presentation by New York State Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot about the state’s first website update since 1998, and a typically high-spirited cryptocurrency marketplace pitch. The city’s largest tech meetup is as inclusive, cluttered, and enthusiastic as it’s ever been—there were even lightsabers at the door, courtesy of Rackspace’s Object Rocket.

The startup pitches ran across nearly every buzzy sector: interactive video (Wirewax, which launched a shoppable episode of Cougar Town for TBS last season), social finance (Openfolio), Bitcoin (Celery, which also sells DogeCoin, in case that’s your cryptocurrency of choice), employee learnings (Showd.me), and more. A particularly interesting pitch came from Kinvolved — an attendance management system (“sort of like Tinder, but for kids,” quipped the presenter) for schools to ensure that kids are safely in school, with a built-in reminder technology.

On the content side, Bespoke is a browser that was described as “a holistic ideation workflow for creatives.” In human words, this means it’s a browser with built-in tools for sharing, gathering, and editing content. The content can be organized into books for easy collaboration. Think You is trying to pioneer a “wearable social network,” but will probably have obstacles as long as its QR-dependent programming fails to scan during live demos. Trying to pioneer revenue model for musicians was appLOUD, an Instagram-meets-Indiegogo app that syncs live video with links to tip an artist, or buy their music.

It’s not always a hit parade at the NY Tech Meetup, but that’s part of the fun — at an event featuring everyone from a New York official to a 3 day-old startup, the enthusiasm will carry us over into 2015.

(Image via)

Event Recap: November 2014 NY Tech Meetup

Posted on by Lab Team

The November NY Tech Meetup featured easy college apps, interactive fiction, and of course, programming dorks. We love NY Tech Meetup not just for its technology-focused demos — though the noticeable absence of VC stress is constantly refreshing — but also for its diverse set of voices and presenters. Co-hosted by tech luminary Anil Dash, this month’s meetup hosted a slew of interesting product and technology demos:

Parcel is taking New York by storm, since it simplifies a common problem: many delivery services require signatures at the door, but the recipient is often at work, so there’s no good way to get a package. For $5, you can ship your package to Parcel’s warehouse, where they text you for an after-hours delivery window, and hand-deliver the package.

Waywire curates channels via passionate luminaries through its consumer and enterprise platforms. It remains to be seen if curation can hold its own against automated recommendation engines, but for now, Waywire has a few big names alongside it — TED, Vulture, and TimeOut have all used the service to create video channels.

Other products of note included:

  • Simple Machine’s new game The Outcast presented an interesting solution to interactive fiction — Google Docs.
  • Admitted.ly simplified the daunting college admission process via a social network.
  • Squarespace ran a victory lap for its successful publishing platform.
  • Offerpop explored engagement marketing via an interesting combination of hashtags, rewards, and mailing lists.

(Image via)

Event Recap: ESL One New York DotA 2 Championship

Posted on by Richard Yao

With Amazon’s billion-dollar acquisition of video gameplay-streaming platform Twitch, competitive video gaming, often called “eSports”, has matured into a multi-billion industry. And today, we experienced this phenomenon firsthand at ESL One New York, ESL’s second major Dota 2 tournament this year, held at Madison Square Garden Theater .

For some, it might be hard to imagine that people would actually pay over $60 just to watch other people play video games. But as Twitch’s success has proven, there’s definitely a market today for speculating digital gameplay. Video game tournaments have been around long before streaming services like Twitch brought it into mainstream spotlight, but all that added attention certainly doesn’t hurt. In fact, around a thousand enthusiastic game-lovers filled up the spacious venue.

As brands follow where the audience goes, eSports might just become the next frontier for marketers to explore. With help from a plethora of sponsors such as T-Mobile, Pizza Hut, Mad Catz, reed pop, and of course, Twitch, today’s event is professionally organized and legitimately marketable.