Iceberg melts. Water floods arena. Audience engulfed in water. Bono avatar looms large over audience.

This mind-bending Augmented Reality spectacle awaits anyone with tickets to U2’s Experience + Innocence tour this Autumn.

These creative storytelling techniques are not the preserve of the stadium rock elite. New ways of delivering screen content are changing how we tell stories and communicate ideas within business events.

Why now is the right time to reassess how screens are being used at your events

Audiences

Our everyday relationship with screens has entirely changed. We engage with content across multiple screens, of widely different dimensions, often simultaneously. Where once we simply watched, now we touch and swipe.
So, when it comes to events, audiences have higher expectations for visual content and want to engage with screens in new ways.

Content

As businesses produce more multi-dimensional digital content, such as mixed reality product demonstrations or interactive sales presentations, live experiences are having to find new ways to use screens. At the same time, presenters are increasingly aware of the new possibilities that screens provide to tell their story.

Technology

Underpinning everything are rapid changes in technology, making new ways of using screens possible and dramatically bringing down costs. High resolution LED screens can be built to almost any shape, size or location and software innovations are making dynamic content available to a wider range of events.

Three ways to re-imagine your screens

1. Super-wide screens and beyond

The confines of the 16:9 format are long gone. Super-wide LED screens allow us to envelop audiences and change how we design content. Simply put, the screen is a canvass on which you can seamlessly arrange any combination of media: presentation graphics / audience response data / live camera / streams from beyond the event.

Whilst the default is often super-wide, it can be incredibly powerful to combine multiple screens and introduce other formats. The same content can run across multiple screens or be segmented to specific ones. This approach can be as engaging for an audience of 100 or 10,000 and can easily integrate PowerPoint or Keynote content.

The Power of Dynamic Graphics
Many visually stunning wide-screen events incorporate PowerPoint or Keynote content. But greater creative opportunities are to be found by using real-time graphics packages such as Ventuz. These allow you to create presentation content more akin to the graphics we’re familiar with on election night broadcasts or Sky Sports’ analysis.

Animated 3D graphics
TV quality visual effects

Live data
Feed live content into a presentation

Real-time rendering
Ability to change content at any point

Non-linear content
Presentations that can follow multiple paths


2. Projection mapping

Initially the preserve of the civic arts spectacle or movie launch, projection mapping has proven to be a powerful way to engage business audiences.

Projection mapping allows you to place content onto any surface, extending your content beyond a projection screen or doing away entirely with a screen and bringing a whole space to life.

The creative possibilities to transform a venue and transport your audience to a new place are immense. Projection mapping onto 3D stage sets is also a powerful way to deliver presentation content, different surfaces used for specific messages, to highlight stats or display video.


3. Augmented reality

Most people have some experience of AR, whether it’s arranging furniture using Ikea’s Place app or playing Pokemon Go. As with these examples, AR within event presentations melds the real world and computer-generated imagery.

The onstage presenter can be placed into a different composite world when viewed on screen. This opens up fascinating opportunities. If, for example, you have a large product that can’t physically be present at the event, the presenter can interact with it live on screen.


If you’d like to explore exciting new ways of using screens to engage your audience then do get in touch.

Coming next …

Screens Re-imagined – part 2 – Beyond the main-stage: new ways to use screens to create powerful personalised experiences