Dean Meyers is a Strategic Planning Consultant, helping clients build successful strategies, inspiring innovation, and blends experience and expertise across multiple disciplines (technology, marketing, design, art, performance and management) to listen and visually synthesize content and context to optimal potential. Dean works with projects involving innovation, user experience, education, and transmedia. He’s been an online publisher and consultant to a variety of business innovation.
Both Dean and Tom took a large overview of the past before getting to the present.
Dean used the classic opera house as an example. As a venue it was the purest form of analog entertainment, offering dance, symphony, theatre, and spoken word. In the present, the Metropolitan Opera in New York underwent a metamorphosis into supertitles, projected above the proscenium. Then the Met installed display units for every seat. But not visible all over, not even by the adjacent seat, to prevent a visual cacophony of LED units throughout the theatre. This was a transition from pre-electricity or power, to a fully digital enhancement.
Wider, faster bandwidth means more technology can add to the digital experience as we know it. Images, such as on Instagram, move to video, to 360 video to ambisonic sound. What is the Moore’s Law re bandwidth, he asks, arguing that it’s more important than computational power. The more bandwidth accessible to users, the more HD to 4K to 8K to stereoscopic multidimensional sound transmission plus subcarrier, the more experience the user can attain.
This is not limited to entertainment. In the workplace people can interact spontaneously, meetings can be held on the fly, recreating the human experience of one to one in the room. With greater bandwidth the experience becomes more natural.
Dean points out that much of the focus of his work has him called in to elicit strategic planning or process improvement. This comes through facilitating and clarifying conversation. A big part of the dilemma is determining the most effective way to pull information out to make decisions. The decision-making process is affected by environment: who else is in the room, is a piece of language visible or invisible? By this Dean says he means the mood of the room, non-verbal cues, spatial location of where people gather. Understanding how many people pay attention or not.
A veteran visual and graphics expert, Dean predicts with certainty that remote working is a shift that will increase in pace with VR. This is not the entertainment factor of VR, which is huge. Dean tests many VR and AR products; he knows the ins and outs of this arena.
He continues: As connectivity expands, the wider the bandwidth you have, the greater the ability to recreate a natural experience, the wider the workplace, the more efficient it gets. We’re not quite there yet, but Moore’s Law is going to be crammed more into the microchip, and then past the microchip and into bandwidth.