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Posted by Libby Miller, Henry Cooke on , last updated

The R&D Futures project develops our ability to pick up on trends in audience habits and their media and technology landscapes. We try to extrapolate how these trends might play out over the next few years and how R&D and the Â鶹ԼÅÄ might respond.

One of the ways we do this is by gathering links to things that we think look like signals of change and periodically bundling them together for analysis. This is our bundle for September 2021!

The project is run by Libby and Henry and a rotating crew of colleagues from across R&D and the wider Â鶹ԼÅÄ. If you're interested in collaborating with us, get in touch!

Virtual production's barriers to entry are falling | Photo by Fiona Rivera.

All social networks are the same now

This article notes how the features of the big social media networks (from Twitter to LinkedIn to Reddit to TikTok) have converged and are very similar. Most of them now have text, images, video, livestreaming "Stories" and more. The author posits that

"Instead of apps trying to dominate specific features — a platform for video, a platform for expiring content, a platform for connecting social networking, a platform for livestreaming, a platform for resumes — we’ve already entered a new era of online networks where they all will essentially offer the same services and instead, focus increasingly on specific demographics."

Have we reached saturation in social media in terms of users and "sticky" interactions? Does this make a space for smaller, more niche networks? Is it even a threat to the social media giants?

It also reminds me of how young people are always looking for the next fashion/culture/platform to make their own. How long till MySpace is cool again?

Production in a post green-screen world

With the low barrier to entry of game engines and market saturation of seamless LED walls and camera tracking systems, it’s becoming increasingly more time and cost effective to use real-time rendered virtual environments that are captured in-camera, versus the traditional green screen and post-FX workflows.

This has interesting connotations when you consider this as a convergence of TV and gaming technologies, particularly the skillsets and technologies involved - most virtual production volumes are based around Unreal, which is also a game engine. It also means it’s much cheaper to create convincing virtual worlds, complete with realistic real-time lighting, then it ever was before.

One of the downsides of moving away from green screen is that it’s much harder to make alterations in post. The actors are often captured with scene-specific lighting, and are composited through the lens. It’s worth considering how this might impact object-based media and distributed compute.

Putting your life on airplane mode

This is a little cluster of signals around dissociation and methods of escape from online.

The absolute ubiquity of devices and the draw of going online above all other pursuits means that people are tired of being seen, perceived and judged by others, feeling like they are being surveilled and being in public all the time, whether that’s being on social media or on work zooms. describes dissociation as one reaction to being too seen: when you can’t get away from stressful situations people - - start to feel detached from their bodies. In this case the article argues that people are starting to want to dissociate.

In related news: provides a quick, convenient and easily-recoverable route to dissociation. It chemically induces lack of interest in phones/internet. Back in 2019 its use was growing in use in tech circles, and use . Some characterise it as having the effect of “putting your life on airplane mode”.

Deeper, more human metrics

Different sectors are struggling with the simplicity of existing metrics in a much more complex world. Without saying it explicitly, all are seeking deeper more human metrics, for example using terms like intimacy. Companies are realising that people have values and that they need to insert values into the way they operate. All at a time when .

This links to our previous signal, Ethics at work, where people are choosing - when they can - to work for organisations that match their values, and also to the growing use of (Environmental, social, and governance-focused indices) as metrics for valuing companies.

There are some indications that the bottom line is becoming not just profit, but the triple bottom line of “”.

Here’s a .

Using machine learning to tackle climate change

This advocates AI as a means of transforming and helping decarbonise the power grid by providing intelligent systems and optimising outcomes. It is also suggests that it is a solution to address challenges such as severe and extreme weather, unpredictability in supply and demand, with the onus on energy suppliers.

However, some argue that using AI and machine learning as means to mitigate climate change risks adding to the problem, by generating even more greenhouse emissions. Examples include batteries waste from electric cars, electric waste from , to name a few. The real focus should be on changing human behaviour rather than trying to of the problem. We have a responsibly to scrutinise such trends as well as the wider issues around consumer behaviour and energy use.

Society-wide language of depression

This argues that cognitive distortion - when people think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways and is characteristic of depression - can happen society-wide. They show that a large set of these markers for depression show a sharp uptick in recent decades and particularly since 2007 in English, German and Spanish, which they correlate with the economic crash and the rise of social media. I connected this back to Mark Fisher’s discussion of the death of the future in Ghosts of My Life (). More pertinent now is the recalculation of life without a future due to climate collapse, for example in this .

Metaverse

Although coined a long time ago by Neil Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash the term Metaverse is something hard to miss in the recent media coverage. Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Facebook should be considered a metaverse company has resulted in a plethora of articles commenting on his mission and reflections by others on games and applications that are starting to bridge the gaps between the physical and virtual worlds.

As defined by “The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet.”

The idea is that all these different real and virtual spaces merge into one continuum where people will be able to work, socialise, collaborate and interact with one another without any delineation, just as they do in the physical world. Further, a consumer would be able to move seamlessly between virtuality and reality thus interacting with other real or virtual people in both worlds. The Metaverse concept is currently most prevalent in gaming; think massive multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft, where an online world comprised of other gamers exists regardless of whether you yourself are online. The prevalence of the Metaverse in gaming might be one way in which it spills over into our everyday life. For example, after finishing work for the day, be it in real or virtual space, people who want to game with friends might no longer need to log onto another platform but instead find their friends in another corner of the Metaverse. The same technology has been used to host multi-room collaborative video/audio meetings, an area of experimentation that has grown in the past year and could mimic real world experiences. The Metaverse may have a significant effect on future Internet use. The creation of this virtual space would be a new and exciting development, possibly serving as the next new platform for media content creation; think along the lines of a virtual Travis Scott performing a concert in popular online game Fortnite. If the Metaverse continues to develop from its current, nascent stage, its influence could be far-reaching

There is a fundamental question about how many people will have the means to experience, create content for and built the metaverse, will it be something for the overserved? However, what the metaverse does is that is paints a picture of how we as humans might live in the future, providing a system thinking approach to future gazing that could be of great benefit and allows the Â鶹ԼÅÄ to reflect what it will become however, that’s a big hypothesis to bet on.

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