5 Next-Gen Technologies

That Already Are Changing

Meetings
Here's how wearables, 3D projection mapping, second-screen technology,
virtual reality, and artificial intelligence are transforming the industry.

by Convene Editors
May 31, 2016 Leave a Comment
Feeling overwhelmed by technology is a common sentiment expressed by
meeting-professional respondents to Convene surveys, who say that they
struggle with the fast pace of change, the latest tech tools and up-to-the-
minute applications, and the shiniest new things. What should they pay
attention to?
1. Artificial Intelligence
Its generally not a good idea for a hotel concierge to stand on top of a counter
while interacting with guests but an exception can be made for Connie, a
chunky, two-foot-tall robot. Since March, Connie has been answering
questions about the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner, in McLean, Virginia, as
well as about where to eat and what to do in the Washington, D.C., area.

Named after Conrad Hilton, the founder of the Hilton hotel chain, the robot
was created by IBM and WayBlazer, a tech startup chaired by Terry Jones, the
founder of Travelocity and Kayak. Connie is powered by IBM Watson the
cognitive computing platform that famously beat its human opponents at
Jeopardy! and programmed with information about the hotel and
surrounding restaurants and attractions.

Guests can ask Connie for advice in the same way they might ask a human
concierge, because Watson is very, very good at whats called natural
language search, Jones said. You dont have to put in a set of keywords like
you do in Google. And unlike traditional computing platforms, Watson draws
insights from unstructured data, including articles, blogs, and user-generated
reviews, so it can offer feedback culled from experience, not just listings.
Weve had an explosion of information [on the Web], particularly in user-
generated content theres just acres and acres of it, Jones said. Plowing
through and evaluating all of it can be exhausting for people, but not for
Connie, which thanks to Watson relies on a vast amount of information
to make personalized recommendations.

The cool part of it is obviously the robot is insanely cool but this
technology can be deployed in a phone, in a smart TV, on the hotels website,
almost anywhere, Jones said. Connie is a way to get people to say, Wow,
look what this technology can do.

In addition to the McLean Hilton, the technology is being used globally by The
Leading Hotels of the World, a membership organization with more than 375
hotels. DMOs including the Austin Convention & Visitors Bureau also have
begun using Watson-enabled technology to help leisure and business travelers
cut through the online clutter.

The mobile device gets smarter and smarter, Jones said. It knows what time
it is, and pretty soon its going to know the altitude and the temperature. It
knows a lot about you and it knows where you are, and therefore, it can pretty
powerfully help when assisted by this technology in providing you with
good recommendations.

Specifically, at hotels, Jones said, where we think this is going is real-time

recommendations based on what you know about a person from the data that
you already have in their frequent guest files. And at meetings, the technology
could be embedded in a mobile app not only to answer questions like Wheres
my next session? but also to recommend personalized learning tracks.

And AI could smooth out lifes little inconveniences by taking care of mundane
tasks like snagging an open table for dinner in a city crowded with other
meeting attendees. Im a public speaker, Jones said. Whenever Im at a
convention and think maybe Id like to go out to dinner, by the time I get
around to [making a reservation], everythings booked. Id like to have a
machine say, The only thing left is 6 p.m. at the sushi joint.

Barbara Palmer
2. Virtual Reality
After too many false starts to count, it seems that mass-consumption virtual
reality has finally arrived. Twenty-three years after a VR headset for the Sega
Genesis gaming console debuted at CES in 1993 (only to disappear), 21 years
after the short-lived Fox TV show VR.5 and the ridiculous Keanu Reeves
cyberpunk movie Johnny Mnemonic, and 13 years after the launch of
Second Life, products like Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, and Samsung Gear
VR are making immersive technology affordable and accessible.

Everyone is jumping on the computer-simulated, fully interactive bandwagon,

including the destination-marketing and hospitality industries. Destinations
have been early, obvious adopters, offering VR tours of attractions and venues
for meeting planners and tourists alike. Ditto hotel companies such as
Marriott International, whose Marriott Teleporter offers an immersive 4D
virtual-reality travel experience. If ever there was a technology made for
travel, its virtual reality, said Marc Battaglia, creative director for Marriott,
speaking at the Collision technology conference in New Orleans in April. It
completely immerses you in an experience.
What about meeting organizers themselves? Some are testing the virtual
waters, but the technologys potential to provide attendees with more than a
novel experience is still largely untapped. Even the Virtual Reality Los Angeles
(VRLA) show which started as a Meetup event for about 150 people two
years ago, and in August will host about 6,000 people at the Los Angeles
Convention Center for the VRLA Summer Expo has yet to offer a VR
experience for attendees, said Cosmo Scharf, co-founder of VRLA as well as a
startup called Visionary VR. The funny thing is, when I was first starting the
VR Meetup, people were like, Oh, is it in VR? Scharf said with a laugh.
Were like, No, in real life.

While the majority of VRLA Summer Expo exhibitors are entertainment

focused producers of video games and 360-degree video content Scharf
said other types of companies exhibit as well. Not surprisingly, he sees VR
having broad applications beyond the gaming industry including among
meeting organizers themselves to improve their planning process, which is
now largely two-dimensional. If we were able to essentially pre-visualize an
entire event before actually doing it, that would be tremendously useful, he
said, because wed be able to design the show [in virtual reality] and then
move the different booths around and get multiple perspectives on it, so you
could fly out from a birds-eye perspective or make it go down to human scale.
We could walk around the whole event. We could add in thousands of people
and visualize and measure the flow of people throughout the day.

For exhibitors, theres the growing potential to offer product demos in VR. For
remote attendees, there might be an increasingly robust online experience.
And for in-person attendees at conferences in specific industries and
professions not just the tech sector the potential to create one-of-a-kind
learning experiences is promising. For example, Montreal-based MinorityVR
is collaborating with the medical industry to develop VR content that helps
surgeons sharpen their skills for complex medical procedures.

Im just thinking about the trajectory of where it might go, Scharf said.
Right now, [a meeting] is pretty much all in person. Then were going to have
livestreaming 360 video cameras at the event, so you could put on your
headset and check out that cameras perspective. Then after that we might
have something where theres a totally digital replica of the actual event in
VR.
But as with any emerging technology, you have to ask not just how but why.
Not everything should be VR, Battaglia told the audience at Collision. There
has to be a rationale, there has to be a purpose behind it. What can you
develop [in VR] that you otherwise would never have access to?

Christopher Durso

3. Wearables
Picture this: As an attendee wanders through your trade show, a notification
appears on her Apple Watch that walking toward her is someone who shares
her interest in, say, clinical nuclear cardiology. They greet each other,
exchange cards, and within a few weeks have scheduled a meeting.

This hypothetical situation is just one of the promises that wearables smart
devices worn on the body hold for meetings: the chance to connect
attendees with the people or businesses that might benefit them the most.
[Wearables] can keep a record of who you met and how long you talked with
them, said Corbin Ball, CSP, CMP, DES, an event-technology analyst and
frequent speaker. One good contact at an event can sometimes pay for the
entire event.

Although the technology to connect likeminded people is still evolving,

Meeting U. President Jim Spellos, CMP, agrees it will be one of the primary
uses of wearables at meetings. Customization is where [wearables] are going,
where I can put into my event app the meetings I want to have, the booths I
want to see, the people I want to meet, Spellos said. Then the wearable can
alert me, So-and-so is 50 feet away. Those kinds of tools are not in the distant
future.

More common at events right now are wearable beacons like the one Ball was
given at the Exhibit & Event Marketers Associations (E2MA) 2016 Red
Diamond Congress in Orlando in April, which was used to track crowd
movement via heat mapping. It was the size of two quarters, Ball said.
Although planners might need to spend $3-plus for each wearable beacon for
their attendees, the devices offer a trove of functions and information
automated check-ins, wayfinding, location-dependent polling, real-time heat
maps, and even push notifications activated by a meter or less of proximity to,
say, an exhibitor booth.

Ball warns that such tracking only works if its widely accepted and its only
accepted if it also benefits the wearer. Finding out where the rooms are
overflowing, or about crowd flow I personally think that if thats the only
thing [wearables] are offering, thats not enough for people, Ball said. They
cant be perceived as a spamming device or tracking device. There has to be
value for attendees.

While people might be comfortable with their Fitbits and Apple Watches, they
may harbor somewhat surreal memories of Google Glass. It came out way
before people were ready, Spellos said of the head-mounted display that
offered hands-free data but also spurred privacy concerns. What we see as the
future isnt always ready to be adopted instantaneously by people in all walks
of life. But I can see the value of those kinds of glasses to the virtual attendee.

What Google Glass hinted at how augmented reality could enhance face-to-
face experiences is now coming to fruition in devices such as Oculus Rift,
virtual-reality headgear meant for gaming that debuted last month.
Destination BC already uses a virtual-reality device to conduct virtual site
inspections. You can take people to completely different places, Ball said.
[VR] can bring in a whole new level of hybrid meetings or virtual meetings.

So, too, can bracelets that measure body temperature to gauge crowd
excitement earbuds that speak directions, and smart badges that assess
whether the wearer is male or female. Creepy? Maybe to some people, which is
why Ball thinks attendees should always be given the chance to opt out.
Privacy is a personal decision, he said. People have a right to determine
what they want to give out about themselves.

Spellos thinks the meetings industry lags behind in wearables adoption, but
understands why. Everyone takes a wait-and-see approach about the cost of
implementation without an absolute certainty of success, he said. Its risk
management. The danger of playing on the slopeside of the curve for
technology is that some of the things you try are going to fail. But Id say thats
what makes your organization not a legacy organization, but one that is
pushing that curve. Because if youre not out there taking risks, then youre
probably having the same meeting that you were having in 1995. The problem
is, all of this disruption is not going to stop. Its not going to pause for three
years and wait for everybody else to catch up.

Corin Hirsch
4. 3D Projection Mapping
Pentair Aquatic Solutions wanted to make a splash on the show floor at the
2015 International Pool|Spa|Patio Expo (PSP) in Las Vegas last November.
The pool-technology company was offering a sneak peek at IllumaVision, an
underwater video- and image-projection system designed to produce cutting-
edge optics meaning the rollout would itself need some cutting-edge optics.

Blue Flame Thinking, Pentairs ad agency, partnered with 3D Projection

Agency and Digital Media Etc. (DME) on a solution. What they couldnt
figure out is how to showcase this in a really big enough or unique way thats
going to give them the PR value that theyre looking for, said Paul Whitney,
DMEs founder and chief operating officer. The idea we came up with was a
3D-projection booth.

Youve probably seen 3D projection mapping in action at a conference or trade

show before. The technology creates a template of every distinct geometric
shape within a specific area from walls, ceilings, and pillars, to entire
buildings then seamlessly projects imagery onto it. 3D projection is often
used for product launches and gala dinners as eye candy that turns almost
any venue into a dynamic landscape.

But DME suggested that Pentair go deeper. And darker. They created a
completely enclosed black room in the exhibit hall at PSP 2015, and turned the
traditionally outside-in perspective of 3D projection inside-out. We built a 3D
immersive projection booth, Whitney said, where the back wall becomes the
back yard and we could project the swimming pool on the floor of this booth.
It makes you feel like youre standing in the back yard of somebodys house.

PSP attendees who stepped off the bright show floor and into Pentairs dark
room found themselves silhouetted against the sharp-etched profile of a large
stone house, looking down into a shimmering pool. There they watched what
was essentially a product video for IllumaVision, which displays photos and
other images on the bottom of a pool. It was like a hall of mirrors a high-
tech projection system being used to demonstrate a high-tech projection
system.

The result was something more than eye candy. It was wow factor as content.
Youre able to utilize this technology in ways that people have not used it
before, Whitney said, and the most important way is really to use it as an
educational tool, so people understand and learn about your brand in a
positive way, and talk about it [both] there and thereafter.

Indeed, for Whitney and his partners at 3D Projection Agency, the measure of
success is the number of people who feel compelled to record something like
Pentairs IllumaVision exhibit and share it on social media. It has unlimited
legs, said John Vicino, director of business development for 3D Projection.
You can spend, say, $100,000 for a full-page color ad in your Sunday
newspaper, and thats basically garbage by Monday morning. Tuesday its
outdated. But these are alive. The legs keep going, the branding keeps going.

Christopher Durso

5. Second-Screen Technology
At the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) 2015 Annual Technical
Conference and Exhibition in Houston last September, tech companies
presented groundbreaking ideas in the oil, gas, and energy sectors during an
interactive exhibit competition. Attendees provided real-time feedback on
both the presentations and the ideas themselves, while SPE simultaneously
tracked audience engagement.

At the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) 2015 Annual

Meeting & Expo in Chicago in November, attendees communicated with
speakers via instantaneous polling on their devices, synchronized to their
presentations. Nearly half of users voted on at least one question posed during
the annual meeting higher participation than ASLA had seen at previous
meetings.

Those levels of engagement at both events were enabled by Freemans FXP |

touch second-screen platform. Weve seen probably 80-percent to 90-percent
engagement when we offer it during a session, said Wilson Tang,
FreemanXPs vice president of digital experience.

In addition to real-time polling and Q&A applications, second-screen

technology enhances attendees experiences by streaming slides to their
devices and enabling them to participate in chat streams that integrate with
social media. And the ways in which the technology benefits both attendees
and organizers keep evolving. In fact, Freeman acquired events-based second-
screen technology developer Klowd.com this past January to enable the
company to keep doing more with the technology, according to Richard
Maranville, Freemans executive vice president and chief digital officer.

PSAV also offers a second-screen platform, which has been widely embraced
by one of its medical-association clients in particular, said Brent Rogers,
PSAVs vice president of digital services. The association uses the technology
at its four meetings a year from its largest annual meeting of 20,000
attendees to smaller events that focus on recertification, where its used for
practice exams. The second-screen application is useful for that, Rogers said,
because they present images that the doctors use to help make a diagnosis.
The images from the main screen at the front of the room the first screen
are streamed to individual iPads assigned to physician attendees, so they can
see them up close, and pinch and zoom as needed to answer questions.

Second-screen technologys benefits extend beyond the event itself, because

attendees can save everything theyve worked on during their sessions and
email it to themselves. When you leave the conference, its all waiting for you
in your inbox, Rogers said. Youve got the slides, youve got your notes,
youve got your test results all right there, and you can continue your
education well beyond the meeting space. Similarly, Freeman sends an email
to FXP | touch users with their own personal website [which has] all of the
content they consumed during the show, Maranville said.
As for organizers, once the event concludes, they have a rich analytics set to
analyze attendee engagement, said Ken Holsinger, Freemans vice president of
digital solutions. Added Maranville: A lot of companies are talking about
data. This provides data to judge how the session went, how the presenter did,
and theres a lot of under-the-covers data that we can use as well, thats tied to
engagement and can help make a better presentation and better event.

Michelle Russell