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On behalf of The Colorado Creative Industries (CCI) and Alt Ethos, we invite you to our virtual presentation “Global Creative Connection through Immersive Virtual Worlds” hosted in our new Pathos Metaverse, a 3D avatar platform, this Friday October 1st, 2021 at 2:00 PM MST
Alt Ethos Presentation: Come explore the future of art, technology, and global connectivity through virtual worlds from top creators and thought leaders in the immersive industry. The pandemic shot us into the future of digital engagement and immersive worlds. As some creatives quickly grasped the change to become known internationally, others were left confused. This talk will walk you through the history, present, and future of virtual worlds and how they will impact the global community, our professional lives, and our collective digital future. Speakers:
Julian Reyes, MC
Eric Dallimore, Moderator Panelists
Carlos Austin
Ethan Bach
Evo (Evonne) Heyning
Celeste Lear
Q&A from audience submitted in writing
Carlos Austin, Real-Time “In World (VR)” Live Multi-cam video switching and still photographer at Austin Photograph
Carlos is passionate about the arts with an emphasis on photography/video “in-world” TV production and emerging drone technology. An XR evangelist as this technology begins to mature. Helping create Broadcast television standards for capturing live events in virtual social platforms. Real-time switching live shows with a multi-camera setup. There are so many opportunities to communicate and educate the world through XR. 3rd Generation photographer and storyteller.
Ethan Bach, CEO Alt Ethos
Ethan Bach is the founding CEO of Alt Ethos: experiential design agency and Founder and Board Member of DATA (Denver Arts + Technology Advancement). Westword calls Ethan, “An entrepreneur with an eye on the future’s future.” Bach holds an MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Alt Ethos is an award-winning design company and has been recognized in CodaWorx Magazine; the Young Industry Professionals, and by the Mayor of Fort Collins.
Evo (Evonne) Heyning, Metaverse Media. Creative Executive Producer
Evo Heyning is an award-winning producer, technologist, founder and creator focused on the future of participatory media. Evo focuses on collaborative teams that work across fields, sectors, and platforms to create meaningful global endeavors. Evo has created virtual beings, worlds, and campaigns for 20 years. Evo produced major live streaming concerts and campaigns for the White House including the launch of the Affordable Care Act and virtual worlds for diplomacy, civic engagement, and nonprofit development.
Celeste Lear, Immersive Event Producer & Designer, XR Entertainment Specialist, Music & Sound Director, Host, VR Consultant
DJ Celeste is an entertainment & event industry professional with 15+ years of concert, festival & conference production experience. Immersive technology expert skilled in designing & executing cutting-edge events both physically, virtually, AND in Virtual Reality. First in a new wave of DJs who design their own stages & perform as avatars in VR Festivals and Nightclubs. Executive music direction, production & clearance for International, multi-media installation projects for UN & UNESCO, including a large-scale video mapping experience in Paris.
About Pathos Metaverse
Pathos Metaverse is a browser-based virtual world by Alt Ethos. For this panel, all of the speakers will be avatars in the Pathos Metaverse. Through live-action virtual cinematography, CCI participants will stream the event in real-time. Selected avatar audience members will also be in attendance and watching the entire production in the Pathos Metaverse.
Pathos Metaverse is an easy-to-use, dynamic, and engaging immersive platform. Pathos Metaverse provides exciting meeting places, dynamic events, branded virtual worlds, and future-thinking hybrid-virtual-world solutions, pushing the boundaries of interactivity.
Here at Alt Ethos we thrive on finding creative and innovative ways to solve problems and help our community. The COVID-19 world crisis is no different. “We watched everything unfold as businesses were closed and friends and colleagues lost their jobs,” Ethan Bach says. “We wanted to help.”
We are using our powerful computer to run protein simulations of the COVID-19 virus to help understand how they function, providing new opportunities to develop a cure. Using the distributed computing project Folding@home, our computers now join thousands of other computers around the world to create a supercomputer. You can read the latest Westworld Article on this project here: Denver Design Company Alt Ethos Aids COVID-19 Research.
Stay up to date with the Folding@home progress on our social media: Facebook, Instagram, & LinkedIn.
Creating a high engagement museum exhibit with the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery
Background
The Fort Collins Museum of Discovery was looking to activate an old exhibit space into an engaging experience, so they turned to Alt Ethos to create a lighting instrument. The previous exhibit displayed a looped video about the music scene in Fort Collins with a set of couches for visitors to sit to watch the video. The exhibit was passive; they wanted an environment that captured visitors’ attention and pushed deeper engagement.
Fort Collins Museum of Discovery
Objectives
1.Create a unique instrument playable by multiple people at the same time.
2. Turn the space into an active experience that engages people of all ages.
Solution
Step 1: User Experience Research
The team began the journey with user experience research to better understand the community that enjoys the museum and the relationship between the vision of the organization, personas of the users, dynamics of the space, and interactions that connect people to the space and vision.
Step 2: Design
Paul and Ethan take a meeting to learn about the museum’s needs.
The design phase highlighted that the tucked away location of the piece was a unique opportunity to engage “sweater holder” parents as well that don’t often interact with the exhibits choosing instead to watch their children and sit off to the side.
The ideal interaction time was approximated around five minutes to ensure adequate flow throughout the other exhibits. The team moved forward with wireless sensing technology located overhead in the room to maximize the life of the exhibit by basing the interaction dynamics off of the position of audience members in the space.
Step 3: Development and Testing
A child dances among the lights, activating new sounds in the space.
The development and testing of the exhibit occurred in a series of sprints. The major benefit of the sprints was iterative testing of the sound curation because in generative sound environments it can be easy to be swept into a cacophony of sound.
Tuning the parameters to limit key aspects of the sound design along with smoothing sensor data was a major breakthrough in the design that pushed the aesthetic of the installation.
Step 4: Implementation and Delivery
Alt Ethos installed the installation over the course of two weeks ensuring that any major physical changes to the environment took place on the Mondays when the museum was closed.
An essential factor in a smooth delivery was remote access to the computers allowing for the team to make changes and improve the software while not onsite. This allowed for a faster delivery time and for changes to take effect rapidly during the installation phase.
Step 5: Evaluation
What formerly was a passive exhibit is now an active space for all ages.
The use of wireless sensing technology also meant that as soon as a person enters the space, they became part of the musical composition. After the implementation and delivery, this dynamic was identified as a key variable in converting passive adults to active participants in the museum experience.
Doing so created an environment ripe for more connections to the space that involved the whole family thus driving more memberships, donations, and buy in from the adults in the local community.
Pitching new and experimental engagements with your audience to your boss or client is no easy task, especially when your organization is unfamiliar with experiential design. In the experience economy, inspiring your audience with disruptive media can amplify your impact in monumental ways but too often ideas fail to come to fruition. So how can we advocate for creating engaging environments more effectively to our boss?
Understand your boss’ perspective For starters, striving to become more aware of the aspects of the business, specific strategies and endeavors, and opportunities for growth that your boss values is a step in the right direction. Likely, you are already intimately involved in many of these efforts but it can help immensely to put yourself in their shoes to see the organization from their eyes as best you can.
Say your boss is trying to create a campaign for a specific holiday to boost revenues. Then coming up with an experience that ties the celebration of that day to your product like Molson’s The Beer Fridge celebrating Canadian Federation Day is a great place to start.
Find a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (that’s tied to the quality of experience) Be prepared to connect the benefits of an improved experience to your goals as an organization. Where are you headed and what are your key performance indicators on the path to getting there? Great experiences come from big hairy audacious goals that require creative thinking and unconventional methods to create a memorable experience.
…And Solve It Map out the goal and how creating a memorable experience for your audience will get you there. Make sure to consult any experts within your organization that have an intimate stake in this goal to garner further understanding.
Working with a well-defined goal hand in hand alongside creative and marketing resources expedites the process to collaboratively developing a concept incorporating marketing strategies, innovative technology, and beautifully fabricated objects that accomplish said goal.
Ask questions to clarify with the experience designers any places where you aren’t clear. We’re here to help you to illustrate the experience inside and out with grace.
Experiential Marketing can have profound impacts on the bottom line for big and small companies alike. For instance in the six months immediately following Redbull’s World Record Stratos Freefall, sales rose 7% to $1.6 billion in the U.S., according to research firm IRI.
Plan how to measure the results Defining strategies to measure impact provides assurance that through studying the effects of the experience, you’ll ensure this is a sound investment of your organization’s money, time, and energy. When creating an interactive environment, there is a massive opportunity to connect the sensors that allow audiences to control various forms of light and sound to record and report their measurements as quantitative and actionable insights.
For Old Navy’s 20th Birthday their #Selfiebration wall generated 640 million twitter impressions, 13,669 contest entries, and 17,498 uses of the tag #Selfiebration.
Connect the experience to your digital presence In the information age, a majority of organizations are utilizing websites, social media, and other digital technologies to connect with their audiences online. Stepping outside the comfort zone of online marketing strategies into designing an experiential physical environment opens a whole new realm of possibilities to intertwine the two realms. In this case it’s important to illustrate the connection between the existing endeavors online and how this environment will galvanize more sharing on social media, more searches on google and more marketing qualified leads, subscribers, etc.
Refinery29 brought their imaginative spirit into the real world through 29Rooms an experience that connected 29 of their digital partners with audiences and created a plethora of highly shareable content that circulated throughout the web.
Visuals, Visuals, Visuals So now we have a great idea and a plan to measure its effectiveness. With all this legwork your almost prepared for a great pitch, but there’s one more key concept we’ve discovered along our travels. Developing visual materials of the idea is essential to stimulating the imagination of your boss. We commonly curate pinterest boards to assist with ideation but there is also a well of information from searching both Creative Applications and Vice’s Creators.
-by Paul Elsberg
Check out Alt Ethos’ Projectsfor examples of how experiential exhibitions, temporary or permanent, can excite a range of audiences.
Our team has recently been able to join in some of the most prestigious and enlightening events which have opened our eyes to new ways of thinking and helped to create a stronger connection with the creative tech community.
Founded in 1996, the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) is a transdisciplinary center for research, creation, production, training and dissemination dedicated to developing and conserving digital culture. North America’s first Living Lab, the SAT specializes in immersive environments, the use of high-speed networks and experience design.
With the aim to create tangible, all-encompassing audiovisual experiences, the Satosphere is the first permanent immersive theatre devoted to artistic development. The dome, which puts the audience at the center of the works, forms a 360-degree spherical projection screen that can accommodate up to 350 spectators.
This year focused on explorations of total body immersion inside of digital spaces, experiencing technology on direct sensory levels. A few examples: Atau Tanaka, Professor of Media Computing at Goldsmiths University gave a talk on The Body as Musical Instrument, illuminating his method of translating gestural interaction to audio signals. For those curious, Atau’s performance at TEDxPantheonSorbonne may be found here.
Currents New Media Festival
On June 10th our team traveled to Santa Fe to experience Currents New Media 2017. Currents brings multidisciplinary artists from across the planet to exhibit VR/AR/MR creations blending experimental and psychological expression through immersive, interactive technology.
Currents began as a project in 2002 intended to bring together video and New Media artists who at the time had few places to exhibit. Since then the festival has grown in the number of artists and mediums – Now featuring Virtual Reality, projection mapping, robotics, sensor integration and beyond.
For 15 consecutive years Mariannah Amster and Frank Ragano have curated this event under their nonprofit Parallel Studios. Such an event is only possible with a diverse network of multitalented artists from across the globe, creating a radical melting pot of new concepts.
GlobalMindED
On June 23rd, Matt Maes – CIO participated in the GlobalMindED Tech Track “Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality: Opportunities in Education” alongside Julien Lynge of Arch Virtual and the DaVinci Institute and Sandi Mays of the Zayo Group.
The GlobalMindED movement is about access, equity and opportunity for First Generation to College and underserved populations, those who work with them and those who want to hire a diverse talent pipeline. At our annual conference, we convene thought leaders from all backgrounds and industries to support educational innovators who are setting a new standard for inclusive leadership.
The opening reception began at 9:00am led by Futurist and Executive Director of the DaVinci Institute, Thomas Frey who explained the cataclysmic economic shift which will be brought on by driverless vehicles. Automobile accident rates will plummet. The need for driver’s insurance will become obsolete. Intersections will operate only as a junction rather than a stopping point as cars move harmoniously past each other.
The second panel, Personalized Learning: Students at the Center was led by Dr Bena Kallick, program director of Eduplanet 21 featuring Superintendent Jeff Dillon of Wilder School District, Teacher Jody Ordoñez of Vista High School and Principal Dr. Bertie Simmons of E.L. Furr High School. This discussion revealed the merits of student led programs and the technologies which make this new methodology possible. The new generation of learners are increasingly curious and are growing to depend less and less on the role of an authoritative leader to pass on knowledge. Our technology has grown hand in hand with us to the point where lesson plans may be gained from sources such as Wolfram Alpha, Khan Academy, Youtube and so on.
The Tech Track began to fill up at 11:10am as many from the previous panel in Court C remained and others filed inside. Lynge, Mays and Maes (not related) then hosted a discussion rich in topics ranging from basic to interestingly advanced. We first began with introductions and each of our most recent projects and moved into intriguing topics such as the social dynamics of VR, whether AR or VR is more effective in the classroom and VR conferencing.
Eyeo Festival
Most recently Paul Elsberg – CSE attended the Eyeo Festival held from June 26th-29th.
Since its inception in 2011, the team behind the Eyeo Festival has been inspired by the notion that this decade presents an exceptionally exciting time to be interested in art, interaction, and information. The way we experience all three is changing. The way all three interact and overlap is quickly evolving. Easier access to powerful tools and technologies continues to increase. What data is, where it comes from, and how we utilize it, looks different than ever before.
On Thursday, July 27th 5:30pm – 7:30pm at the Commons on Champa’s Innovation Lounge Elsberg will be leading second installment of Denver Arts + Technology Advancement Hacksters – Hackster.io Fusion 360 Demo and Eyeo Festival In Review – Presented by Hackster.io, Autodesk and Alt Ethos! We will be going over how to approach using Autodesk Fusion 360’s modeling capabilities to design object enclosures. We will also be covering insights from the international Eyeo Festival, a conference featuring professional creative technologists at the forefront of the industry. You may RSVP for the event here:
We are very pleased to bring back lots of amazing insights from Eyeo Festival, an international conference for professionals at the epicenter of creative technology. You can check out the speakers and more information at the festival websitehttp://eyeofestival.com/.
Matt Maes is a Denver animator focused on immersive and interactive technology. He is Chief Influence Officer ofAlt Ethos, Ltd and is also an executive member of the nonprofit organization Denver Arts and Technology Advancement (D.A.T.A.)
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