APRIL | TECH
Technology is an event enabler
Access All Areas, the NTIA and We Are The
Fair’s White Paper, The Political Economy
of Informal Events, 2030, sheds light on
technology’s on-going enhancement of events
44
Y
oung people today do show
some signs of social media
fatigue, and of wanting
face-to-face interactions. Yet there
is no guarantee that more personal
use of screens in the future will
automatically be accompanied by
more fondness for live informal
events. Take computer games,
for instance. That activity, which
regularly involves tens of millions
of young people, will still stage live,
in-the-flesh gamer events of different
sorts, but is also likely to move into
‘events’ that, one way or another, are
based on Virtual Reality.
Yet in fact the relationship between
IT and informal events, like that
between IT and many other social
phenomena (for example, transport),
only very rarely turns out to be a
simple substitution of the virtual for
the real. It’s subtler than that. IT will
reach more people in new ways to tell
them about informal events. It will
make security around events easier,
and the entertainment itself more
varied and surprising. And, as with
today’s exhibitions, IT will play a big
role in helping organisers of informal
events up after they are over, helping
people get more out of them.
Already social media help
popularise events before they
occur. Then can expect more use of
software-enabled wristbands, and –
within certain limits – of airportstyle
baggage checks, biometrics
The
Political
Economy
Of
Informal
Events,
2030
wearable devices that have
functionality beyond music.
Last, the advent of the
voice-operated interfaces as
the popular default means
of controlling ‘smart speakers’ and,
most relevantly for events, mobile
phones may pose difficulties for
concert-goers. These are problems
and opportunities for the future.
Right now, however, it is striking
that basic IT provision at informal
events still needs to be got right. At
the moment, as Chart 19 shows, Wi-Fi,
different ways of paying for things
and phone charging are among the
changes that those going to music
festival bars would most like to see.
The point about using IT to
simplify payments at informal events
is obvious enough. In China, face
recognition has been in use since
2017 to speed customer exits from
KFC and 7-Eleven outlets, while
Alibaba has developed a tablet-based
camera and face recognition system
to give retail SMEs the chance to
offer their customers faster payment.
Whatever ambivalence Britain has
about Chinese IT today, we’re likely to
see more of it around in the informal
events of 2030. At the same time,
though, event organisers will need
to develop both responsible defences
against cyber-attack, and ways of
reassuring those who go to events
that their data and their privacy are
safe.
Written and edited by
James Woudhuysen
(including face recognition) and
drone surveillance. Hopefully, too,
the advent of fifth-generation mobile
networks, or 5G, will allow incidents
to be reported to the authorities, and
alerts to signalled to audiences, more
effectively.
In stage performance, the use
of screens, lighting and lasers will
obviously be the subject of continuing
innovation. What, however, might
turn out to be more significant to
live acts as we move toward 2030 is
a recent IT advance in Japan. There,
Chiba university has now made a
long-awaited hardware breakthrough
that enables the projection of high-
quality 3D holography as video, where
computing powers with more than
10 frames per second and one trillion
pixels per frame are required. We can
expect animated holography to be a
significant part of dozens of informal
events by 2030.
track people’s individual
movements from stage to stage – so
that promoters can send them timed,
personalised lists of all the acts they
saw. More inventive IT-based methods
of audience follow-up will no doubt
emerge before long.
With audiences, IT will both
complicate and perhaps enhance
acoustics. More old people at events
will bring more hearing-aids. At
the same time, people may well be
wearing more ‘earables’ ear-based