Connected Next Century - Creation

While we struggle to create the 3D tactile world of making and manipulating virtual objects to create or repair or entertain, we can through today’s AR HMD’s achieve through holography the first steps of control and creation.  Snap, and even AR Kit are showing rapid progress of allowing 2^nd generation UGC, where the user begins to create their own effects.  This is allowing Gen Y and Z to become in their homes and hangout spaces to develop new skills and ideations.  They are the new artists, not for money but for likes and social – for now.  That is a marketable skill and they will push the boundaries. 

In the near future, when an VFX 3D artist wants to create the next great protagonist, that character will not be drawn with a pen, but with virtual clay by the artists hands and voice commands.  Tony Stark and the Jarvis UI are the future that engineers and artists alike long to use as the palette of the creative universe.  The 2D creative world is limiting in both imagination and technical possibilities, but also in the efficiencies of time. Physics and textures, water and fire, will be just another object that can be applied in real time, in visual space with the look and feel of rendered final product, but the flexibility of early stage trial and error development.  As these tools are tuned and perfected, the demand and opportunity to offer to the external market will grow.  What they need are cloud-based asset management, edge and core compute, storage, and the latest HMD’s.  The mobile app will suffice for a while, but as the next idea goes viral, scale will matter.

There is a comfort knowing that there is not a foreseeable end in the theatrical experience and revenue in the coming years, but long form high value production is not the future of the industry.  With the release of the MP3, and the ability for anyone to distribute their personal music, the industry eventually changed the way artists are found.  Today fans are frequently more aware of new talent than the industry expert is.   Award ceremonies are increasingly including the Internet popular talent.  YouTube has become to go-to channel for today’s youth for learning, communicating and listening.  More and more creative and talented people will continue to tell their story and the amount of such user generated content (UGC) will eclipse the number of hours created by the established studios.  Webisodes will become more mainstream as will non-traditional businesses that embrace the original content in multi-episode formats.  The future of content is not long form, but in UGC, and the prosumer and amateurs are continually looking for better tools to polish and produce their own high-quality content. What was once the bastion of high quality post house, the studios will give way to the new creatives until the consumer will not discern production from amateur.  Social media Tools like kickstarter will continue to allow outside creative talents to push the envelope and pull the mainstream toward the user.  

Linear TV, carriage contracts, through the middle delivery, are already fading as the primary source of content.  Netflix and Prime have changed how content is created, consumed, binged, without borders or geofences.  Cable (i.e. HBO) is no longer the exclusive land of boundary challenging content.  Youtube and the coming me-too’s are hosting the next generation of content.  Distribution channels are become less relevant, and just as the term DJ was recycled from the 70’s song chooser to audio creators and producers, tomorrow VJ’s will be the creatives who can cut and splice video, VR, and visual content.  They are the new curators of experience, not EDM, but social visual experiences for the masses.