Check out these insane hologram presentations from Singapore

Today’s CEOs and marketers are waking up to the fact that their corporate communications messages need to be a full 360-degree experience which not only engages the mind but also the emotions and the senses.

This philosophy takes pre-existing “emotions-driven” branding to a whole new level.

Consumers and stakeholders still need to feel emotionally attached to their favourite brands, but in the era of advanced interactive media they will increasingly be looking for a more complete experience of the company, one which operates on many different levels and opens up their hearts and minds to new ideas and endless possibilities.

One way that companies are able to shift their audiences into a more receptive state of mind lies in the new emerging “experiential media” made possible by cutting edge technology, and sometimes even by good old fashioned low-tech methods too.

Imagine the scene: a life size, real-time “hologram” of a CEO delivering his company’s corporate core values to live audiences in fifty different cities simultaneously in their local language; or wrapping a sceptical trade audience in a 360-degree surround screen presentation in order to communicate a company’s 360-degree marketing strategy.

What the marketer is seeking to do is to change the audience’s mind set through a far deeper immersion in the medium, simulating the natural environment in a way that augments and heightens multiple senses on multiple levels of stimulation.

Such techniques use the element of surprise and timing to shift audiences off balance and into a more receptive frame of mind. When people experience these new peak sensory states, through the appropriate ‘wow factor’, they are instantly transported to new dimensions and ways of thinking and reacting to information.

Fonterra - TIF Holographic CEO (Click image for video)

In August 2010, leading New Zealand dairy products company Fronterra created a regional roadshow across Asia and the Middle East in which creative staging elements such as a huge 18m long panoramic digital “wall-paper” were blended with spherical projections and innovative use of 3D “holograms” to create surprises throughout the event.

The experience involved all members of staff from every level of the organisation and served to reinforce management-employee rapport. The company CEO appeared in “hologram” and beamed back in time to the last century in New Zealand to talk to the founder, tracing the company’s unique heritage, an act which helped the audience to feel the co-operative spirit of the company’s founders.

Such techniques often work best with an element of surprise and timing to create a “wow” factor - for example, projection mapping onto a building’s façade just as guests begin arriving for a function, or transforming a venue into a themed location which drops your audience into an entirely new and unexpected world.

With conference and event technologies firing on all cylinders these days and digital media technologies able to create virtual “worlds of the imagination” to support the corporate message, literally anything is possible.

Companies and government-linked bodies are also increasingly injecting these ideas into their permanent or semi-permanent static displays.

For example , the Housing Development Board’s “HDB Gallery” at Toa Payoh leverages techniques such as 360-degree music & video cinema, rotoscopes, interactive fun games and ‘virtual residents’ telling stories from their HDB kitchen to get its housing board messages across in a fun and information-saturated way which is a much more engaging experience than any static exhibit.

HDB Hologram (Click image for video)

Malaysia’s Iskandar Economic Region, meanwhile, introduced the vision of the various flagship zones within its development with precision projections mapping on a large scale model to “illuminate” the future of the region and simultaneously turn the vision into “reality” projected onto a suspended surround cube screen that immersed the audience in a 20m x 20m showcase, an experience in which seeing is truly believing.

The Building and Construction Authority of Singapore (BCA) used experiential media techniques to educate Singaporean architects and town planners on the difficulties faced by wheelchair bound residents faced with different kinds of pavement surfaces.

The subjects, seated in a wheelchair, were exposed to the different kinds of resistance levels from various surfaces like tarmac, paving stone, gravel, carpet and grass. The objective was to get designers and planners to see the world from a wheelchair bound person’s perspective and thus induce them to create a friendlier environment for handicapped peoples’ needs.

Delivering such a project requires the combined talents of various experts in electrical, electronic and mechanical engineering, computer programmers, graphic designers and animators to package the story, aided by an ‘experienced architect’.

These experiential technologies deliver to a new generation which has been conditioned to demand instant gratification, whether in entertainment, mobile technologies or information availability.

The rallying cry here is “don’t just tell me. I want to see it, feel it, taste it and touch it for myself! And I want it all now!”

Experiential media work particularly well in marketing situations involving self-exploration, simulated environments, education and demonstration. Our tourism, entertainment, museum and retail attractions need to be communicated to audiences in a far more engaging and immersive way than before.

The Singapore Flyer’s pre-flight gallery, called “Parallel Universe” is one such example of these ideas taking root. Using the optical properties of infrared light, visitors uses a torch-light to search and discover the exciting attractions of today against a backdrop of old Singapore.

This is orders of magnitude more memorable than a simple static exhibition panel.

Singapore’s museums have already been in the forefront of promoting these leading edge experiential ideas. Some have already done so; the Maritime Exploration Museum & Aquarium (MEMA) at Resorts World Sentosa is one such example.

MEMA takes visitors back in time to the golden ago of Chinese and Asian sailing and maritime trade, whilst digital communications technology and real-world interactive games and exhibits bring this world to life in a practical way which teaches them about the navigation or trading practices of the past.

Meanwhile, trade exhibition booths are beginning to eschew hoardings, panels and plasma screens in favour of the newest digital experiential media which provide longer shelf life and re-usability than “wood and sawdust” stands.

The next-generation interactive, experiential technologies waiting in the wings involve things such as Augmented Reality which will soon be more widely available in Singapore via mobile devices. Smart phone users are already swiping coded icons in order to access information about the product or service on offer.

The next-generation techniques will involve them being able to interact with that product or service, via their smart phone, in a way which brings added dimensions of virtual reality to the experience.

European magazines such as STERN and TV programmes are already proactively using these methods to heighten the viewer’s experience and it’s my prediction that Singapore will follow very soon on this because it’s ideally suited to our digital, interconnected, “always-on” lifestyle here.

This is the world of truly enriching digital immersion that I look forward to.  

(Click image for video)

Donald Lim, CEO, DigiMagic