By David Jenkin

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are the technologies that everyone is talking about, and will be for some time to come. It was the subject of focus in Chang’s discussion and a VR headset was on offer for audience members to try it out for themselves, but those technologies are not the extent of the hyper-visual era to which Chang refers. Rather, they form part of a broader shift to an increasingly visually-orientated and interconnected society.

At the beginning of his address, Chang warned that he would be taking everyone through the looking glass, beginning with how the world has become more visually orientated and the various platforms that have facilitated that, before hurtling through cyber space into a vision of the world to come.

Chang referred to the words of software engineer and executive chairperson of Alphabet, Eric Schmidt, saying that we now generate as much information every two days as we did between the beginning of time and 2003. He followed that with a statistic from Cisco Systems, that by 2019, 80% of traffic on the net will be comprised of video. He pointed out that video is becoming far more prolific on social media and has a proven advantage in reaching audiences.

“If you use the word ‘video’ in your email subject line, it boosts open rates by 90%, and click-through rates by 65%, and it reduces people unsubscribing by about 26%,” said Chang. “For content, video really is best. Consumers are 39% more likely to share the content if it's delivered by video – 36% more likely to comment on something, and if you want the holy grail of likes, that goes up to about 56%.”

For online retail, he stressed the impact of video on improving conversion rates. He spoke about the change in the advertising model, where before if there was money left over it would be used for digital, whereas now a campaign should begin with mobile and work backwards. “The new challenge is not just creating a 15-second TV commercial, it’s how do you stop someone’s thumbs from swiping your content away in three seconds?”

Cameras on phones have changed industries and killed companies, but they have also changed human behaviour, he said. “If your meal wasn’t captured on social media, did we actually eat it?” he joked.

“But I think the real turning point happened last year when the word of the year was not a word, it was an emoji.” He spoke about the explosion of diverse emojis which brands have now started leveraging, with everyone from Starbucks to Durex running some kind of emoji campaign. Innovative new developments on this front include the development of the emoticode by a company called Popsugar, where a URL is embedded in an emoticon.

He presented some examples of how various industries are already leveraging the hyper-visual age, from the hospitality industry using Instagram for making bookings by simply liking a picture, or fashion and retail offering shoppers a ‘magic’ mirror using augmented reality which illustrates different styling options, to art galleries in a VR space, or Ebay creating a VR online store. VR is also proving to be hugely valuable for medical professions, the automotive industry, and even activism.

He emphasised the importance of the gaming industry in driving these technological developments and the hyper-visual era at large, and how the gaming world needs to be watched closely in order to have an idea of where we are headed. Chang identified that destination as the ‘metaverse’, an immersive and fully interactive virtual space that mixed realities (a fusion of VR and AR) is beginning to unlock. Immersive cinema is a subject he touched on too, where a world of opportunities exist for a new kind of story-telling using mixed realities.

The working world, especially for creative professions such as design, is going to be radically different. For those with children, a whole new range of never before imagined career paths will be opening up, such as intelligent systems designers, avatar programmers and fusionists, he said.

“And on that note, I will leave you in cyber space,” he concluded.

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