Transcriber: Emma G Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
(Music and applause)
I always wanted to be Indiana Jones.
Can anyone relate with me here?
How about Gandalf the Wizard?
Or Captain Nemo?
Or an astronaut? Really, any astronaut would do.
(Laughter)
I think we all crave adventure.
We want to escape our desks, our couches, our 9 to 5 lives,
we want to do something a little bit exciting,
a little bit new,
maybe a little bit dangerous,
and certainly something fun.
I think that adventure often looks like this.
There are even some kind of more curated,
protected versions of adventure
that look like this.
But I'm here to tell you today
that adventure does not look like this.
(Laughter)
Now, don't get me wrong.
I love movies. I love video games.
These are incredible things.
But until the day when they can plug into
the back of my head and I can't distinguish
digital content from actual reality,
until that day, these things don't hold candle to the real thing.
I'm fortunate in my day job,
I get to design and build adventures
and exhibits for a living.
We were in a client meeting recently,
we were brainstorming all the new neat ways
that we can make an exhibit interactive
and immersive and hi-tech, you know,
all those buzz words that circulate in these meetings.
After about an hour of nudging and poking this client
and going over all of the options,
their conclusion was the best we can do,
the pinnacle of interactive entertainment in this exhibit is
touchscreens.
They wanted dozens of touchscreens
sprinkled all around the room,
each one displaying digital content
in various attractive ways.
Is this really the best that we can do?
Now, again, I'm not opposed at all to digital content.
I love it, I use it everyday.
But I think it's become the default.
I want to argue today that we don't actually need
these glowing rectangles to tell our stories.
Once upon a time,
you probably remember when education and entertainment
were actually location based, right?
You had to actually physically be present to take part in these things.
Now you can create content in a little room.
unlike this one,
and click, click, that content appears
on screens all around the world, just like that.
And this can be a wonderful thing.
I think TED is really a prime example
of how this can be used for good, right?
Ideas worth spreading.
But let me take a moment, right here in this hall
to show you why the screens leave something out.
Let me take a moment to share a profound truth with you
in a moment of blindness.
(
This is real.
You can't see.
Those of you at home where you're watching this on a screen
and you're wondering, what's going on? My screen went dark.
What am I missing?
Well, here in the hall, we just had a light flashes in the face
and the lights went out and now we can't see.
The point is we can do things in real time, in real space,
that you can't do on a screen.
We can put the lights back on.
Espionage is an hour long, walk through adventure
that my company designed and operates
down in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
In one part of the adventure,
your groups of spies is in this set
and you've got to defuse a bomb.
This is a classic spy thing to do, right?
Time is running out. You're racing against the clock.
You realize you are not going to make it in time.
And the only way to save your skin
is to hustle out of that room
into the adjoining blast-proof bunker.
This bomb shelter, that can save you.
We've got it timed so that those blast doors
are closing right as the bomb takes down,
three, two, one, boom!
And you're plunged in darkness for a moment as we just were.
The emergency lights kick off after a moment and
you're in this bunker and you realize
there are electrical panels on the wall.
What we have to do is do a little puzzle
we've got to mute fuses around
we have to basically restore power
to get things back up and running.
But that's a ruse, that's a distraction
from the fact, that this room in which you stand
is actually built on a turntable.
It's a spinning room
and it can turn slower that the threshold of perception.
So we take 3.5 minutes to rotate those people
a 180 degrees until those blast doors,
those heavy doors you walked in,
well, they are facing another room.
It's a duplicate of the room you were just in
except this one is destroyed.
The walls are black, there's stuff falling from the ceiling,
there's this smoke in the air
and there's a crater in the ground
where the bomb was.
So for a moment, people believed that bomb has gone off.
(Laughter)
Now, Espionage, this was up and running
long before the Boston Marathon bombing.
And that real-life tragic event
doesn't seem to have had any impact on people's perceptions
of this make-believe event.
What we've got really here is a classic stage illusion, right?
But to people who were in the room at the time
and they're unaware of the fact
that it is they who have rotated,
it seems real.
We have a camera in those doors.
There's a security camera looking at those blast doors
that I can see from my office.
(Laughter)
And I love to watch it.
I love to just see those doors slide open
and try to get in two inches or three inches.
That's someones's jaw falling when they see the distraction,
you know, they' re 'sold'.
And of course they're 'sold', because we can control
every aspect of our environment with these adventures.
Whether you are exploring an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh tomb
or maybe you are dodging laser beams in a spy mission
making your way through
or maybe you are restoring power to the Nautilus submarine
and you are getting the gears running here in Nemo's ship.
Whatever it is, it's actually immersive.
It's actually taking place in a 3D physical environment all around you.
The company's name 5 Wits, it's not because there are five of us
as people seems to think,
but because they are five senses
when you can feel, when you can taste,
when you can smell the experience you are part of
in addition to seeing and hearing it.
And now it has the chance of being real
of actually being immersive to you.
Nowadays, I think it's just about impossible
to impress anybody with a glowing rectangle, right?
A movie, for example, it can startle you,
it can surprise you
but they really can no longer amaze us.
In the developed world we've seen it all.
The special effects get better and better every year,
they get more and more - what's the word we use to describe it?
Realistic, right?
Closer and closer to reality
it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish
what am I seeing in this scene that isn't real?
Let's look at another example.
I love video games.
Back when I was a kid, they were fairly simple.
Anybody remember this?
This is the old Atari controller,
we've got one joystick, we've got one button,
hours of awesomeness.
(Laughter)
That progressed, right?
To my favorite, the Nintendo entertainment system.
We've got a little joy pad there on the left,
now we have two buttons. We have an A and a B.
Four buttons, six buttons.
PlayStation controller.
This is a modern, X Box controller
I count one, two, three joystick type devices,
one, two, three, four buttons for my right thumb,
there's a start in the back, buttons that select...
Oh, wait, there's two buttons on top for my index finger
there's two buttons underneath for my middle...
There's a dozen buttons on this thing, why?
What is going on here?
Well, they're trying to give the player
more and more options at once, right?
The ultimate or the current ultimate, I should say, example
Microsoft Connect, right?
Even more full gestural control,
more options, more control.
Basically they're trying to get closer and closer
to a real physical experience in real time and real space.
I'm playing a game, I've got to make a decision.
I've got a choice A and B, not enough choices.
I need a dozen buttons, I need to dance around the room.
Well, it's still not enough.
At the moment, there is no holodeck.
There are a lot of talks coming after me
maybe somebody is doing it. (Laughter)
But at the moment, video games
are constrained by the very medium
that makes them widely inexpensively distributable.
But really, as much as I love them,
I'm just sitting on the couch twiddling my thumbs!
We can do better than this.
Do you know what the ultimate first person experience is?
It's life. It's reality.
Back in the real world, as much as this is a hunger for adventure
there is a hunger for authentic convincing real experiences.
And yes, it is absolutely harder
to develop those real physical experiences
than it is to hire a multimedia company
to crack out some more content.
But I think that this is relevant,
not just for game designers.
I think this is relevant for retailers,
this is relevant for educators, for trainers, for service providers.
You've probably all seen this,
in one form or another, right?
The pyramid of learning.
This expresses the idea
and there are many different versions of it,
that your mastery of anything useful, anything enjoyable,
it progresses to the degree with which you actively participate.
You retain a little of what you read and hear,
more of what you see, still more of what you say
and it combines in the ultimate, right?
Physically actually doing the real thing
and ultimately teaching it to others.
My encouragement to you today is
when you have your guest physically present,
they've come to you, they come to your venue for a reason.
They have a screen on their desk,
they have a screen on their living room wall,
they probably have a screen in their pocket.
Don't settle for a glowing rectangle in your venue.
Are there opportunities for real touch?
For smell, maybe even for taste?
When you design your buying experience,
your training experience or your service experience?
We've collected a lot of data
from people who've been through our immersive adventures.
We were trying to figure out what's working, what's not working.
If I can summarize that, as plainly as I can for you,
there is no significant correlation between the amount of technology
the amount of money, frankly,
the cost that goes into creating an element
with people's enjoyment of that element.
And that's surprising to me.
What then do they like? What do they care about?
Well, they love the spectacular,
they love large scale, all consuming immersive visuals,
bigger, deeper than the screen.
They love being the hero,
especially in atypical situations.
You know, they like, to dodge those laser beams
and defuse that bomb and crack that safe,
because that is what spies do.
And they like being challenged
at the right level.
Remember the Othello board game slogan?
"A minute to learn, a lifetime to master."
That sums it up perfectly.
Something you can teach in a sentence or less,
but which actual expertise at takes a lot skill, a lot of practice.
And one last thing I want to show you.
In a room with a highly esteemed director
from a highly esteemed educational and cultural institution lately,
and the director drew this on the whiteboard.
He said, here is a continuum.
"We want our next museum exhibit
to be right about here on this spectrum."
(Laughter)
Who decided -- yes, you get the joke --
who decided that education and entertainment were mutually exclusive?
Who decided they were polar opposites?
Doesn't it look like more like this?
It is possible to be out here.
If you want to keep what you're doing fun
and effective, keep it immersive, keep it real.
And your next project whatever it might be,
my encouragement to you is in whatever industry you work,
don't assume digital, don't assume a screen.
If the parameters of the situation lead you to that conclusion, great.
But first, really imagine what could I actually do
here physically, immersively?
There is a big world outside our glowing rectangles.
Thank you.
(Applause)