Nigel Vaz on the Top Tech Themes of SXSW 2016

President Obama’s arrival in Austin, Texas to deliver an opening-day keynote at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) says a lot about the status the event has achieved in its 23-year history. It also marks the degree to which technology, marketing and social good have converged.

Obama’s core message, that together we “start coming up with new platforms, new ideas across disciplines and skill sets to solve some of the big problems we’re facing today” was to be seen across SXSW, for sure, but is also increasingly evident in the debates we are having around VR/AR messaging, data and the Internet of Things (IoT).

VR/AR

There was no breakout app this year – Meerkat (2014), Foursquare (2009) and Twitter (2007) all exploded out of SXSW – but there was plenty of buzz around virtual and augmented reality, as the festival ran its first VR/AR conference track.

Some speakers were keen to stress evolutionary differences between VR, which “replaces” your physical environment, and AR, which “adds” to the world you see around you. AR tech, for which eyeglass transparency is a vital factor, is only truly available at enterprise level where current and near-future uses include instructional overlays for advanced engineering, medical procedures and specialist education.

VR, which has become consumer-ready in 2016, should not be disparaged by comparison. Speakers at SXSW from The North Face, Hasbro, Lufthansa and others demonstrated a solid understanding that the value of VR lies in experience rather than mere transaction enabler. The North Face, for instance, doesn’t use VR to have you try on clothes virtually; instead it wants VR to inspire you to push yourself, explore and give a sense of what sports are like by participating alongside athletes in the virtual space.

SapientNitro’s view is that VR and AR will rapidly advance on crossover tracks, with each being adopted by consumers and industries according to best use-case. At SXSW, author and founder editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, expressed it well when he said what has been the internet of information will now become the internet of experiences, driven primarily by these altered reality technologies.

Messaging

Messaging is another channel technology that is seeing evolving beyond its original purpose into something altogether more valuable. In a couple of SXSW sessions it was noted that across the world, messaging apps are evolving into the next central communications, media and commerce hubs. Conversational UI provides a convenient way for people to access and interact with services: no app fatigue, the ability to always respond, voice conversation and not just typed text. While WeChat is the best-known example, with 900 million users and 10 million businesses that users can add as buddies and message to transfer money, book travel or a host of other interactions, we are going to see more of these types of services adopted by other social messaging platforms.

Data/IoT

Those for whom ‘big data’ is an expletive will be alarmed by one SXSW session's claim that we are using only 5 per cent of the data that we will use in the future. Consider VR and the IoT, particularly the domestic hub, in terms of the movement, behaviours and health metrics they can gather, and we can see the potential for sharing and knowing more about ourselves than at any time in history. There are positives to this, as well as ethical dimensions to consider.

The benefit of being able to assess your health in real-time and tap into artificial intelligence to identify and remedy any problem is easily apparent; so too is the mutual advantage of becoming a ‘data donor’ to help crowdsource health data and change the way we understand health and treatment of diseases.

To take the idea of donated data to a higher level still, researchers at HDL Laboratories have used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to transmit the brain activity patterns of six experienced commercial and military pilots into novice subjects as they learned to pilot an airplane in a simulator. While it sounds Matrix-like, the discovery could have real-world applications for how we share data to accelerate learning – for specialised training, languages and enhanced creativity.

In a session on advertising and the IoT era’, there was an express desire that ‘moments’ should be identified by devices as places for brands to become relevant to consumers. By offering encouragement and rewards in a time of active engagement and achievement by an individual, brands earn permission to interact and be relevant. Rather than the IoT becoming an “advertising cesspool”, moments become the planning framework. Why advertise in Men’s Health, when you can be there when she has just finished running?

This ‘humanification’ of technology and marketing was a thread running through SXSW, reflective of a growing commitment to harness both in order to create and deliver experiences that offer people real service and value.