Book published!

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Excited to announce that I\’ve joined the ranks of published authors, and some illustrious colleagues – I\’m Chapter 19, \”Immersive Media and Branding: How Being a Brand Will Change and Expand in the Age of True Immersion\” in the just-published-today Handbook of Research on the Global Impacts and Roles of Immersive Media.

My chapter explores the impact immersive technologies—augmented reality and virtual reality—will have on consumer branding and business in the near and longer term future. Weaving multiple use cases and examples throughout, I discuss the next phase of experiential marketing: how immersive branding will develop as spatial computing becomes more mainstream, and how brands can start thinking about how they can leverage the technology.

I also examine the rise of virtual influencers, how they will affect social media marketing—and how artificial intelligence will ultimately enable true one-to-one interaction with customers through virtual avatars. Finally, I outline and discuss the risks, rules and recommendations for how to successfully proceed as a brand curious about how to best harness the technologies.

This was a great experience, and I want to thank Jacquelyn (Jacki) Morie for the opportunity to be included, and for being an editor par excellence.

Link to purchase here: https://www.igi-global.com/book/handbook-research-global-impacts-roles/236585

Digital humans

Digital avatars, ultimately fueled by AI…it\’s a thing, and I talk about how brands will be using this tech in my book chapter being published this January.

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Deepak Chopra aims to bring a digital version of himself to a critical mass of 1 billion smart phones.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/05/deepak-chopra-is-coming-to-phones-as-an-ai-chatbot.html

Slightly uncanny valley

Wow. So. Uncanny valley…one {really bad} selfie and the Pinscreen app maps my face to a 3d avatar from their library (nb: all the female avatars are ridiculously uber sexed up – no, that\’s not my body).

It follows what my face is doing as well –  with \”AR\” mode my face was mapped to my boyfriend\’s body, with the real room in the background. Amazing how quickly this is all developing; that\’s 3 examples in the last few weeks of technology that can quickly, and sometimes – on the fly, create 3d avatars from existing faces and instantaneously apply realistic, real time motion.

PS you\’d think with all this technology, they\’d at least also have a \”beauty filter\” button.

PPS: If anyone\’s interested in Pinscreen\’s fascinating paGAN technology for photorealistic 3D avatar synthesis from a single picture, this is their video \”Deep Learning-Based Photoreal Avatars\” that they presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 in Tokyo.

[wpvideo wu4HhfVZ]

Our truthy future

\"Truthiness\"I\’m listening to a podcast where they are talking about using interviews with Holocaust survivors as future unalienable \”proof\” to deniers that it actually happened…what I can\’t stop thinking is, with rapidly advancing video editing (and deepfakes) anything we see won\’t be any proof at all.

Which begs the question…how will anyone know *anything* they see, or hear is real? We are already in the age of \”truthiness\”, to steal a Stephen Colbert term that hit the nail on the oh-so-perfect-head; if social media is already manipulating us, and we as consumers only believe things that already \”make sense\” to us, the impact will be serious; people will only trust what they already believe – and disregard what doesn\’t jive with their gut.

There are people / companies working on being able to identify a deepfake, once they get so good that the engineered fake is imperceptible from the original. I\’m not so sure the general public will much care; much like how easily fake news is accepted at face value, despite solid evidence to the contrary – and science deniers (flat earthers!) who disregard even the most basic tenets science – we seem to have indeed moved to a post-truth society.

And the ability for entities to manipulate public opinion will be even greater.  In college I took a class in Propaganda and Film with Roger Manvell (fascinating man btw), who ran propaganda for the UK in WW2; we learned about techniques that were used to influence public opinion…social media these past few years has upped the stakes; will future education include training in critical thinking, to be able to identify manipulative content and strategies? I somehow doubt it.

We live in interesting times.

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