Of all the themes that came from BIMA and Digital Catapult’s first Emerging Technology Showcase, the one that was perhaps most profound was the issue of humanity: of emerging tech’s capacity to serve and improve it. Of our quest to recreate elements of it. And of the potential impact on our lives and businesses.
Digital Catapult, BIMA’s partner at this launch event, is a government backed innovation institute that exists to drive the adoption of emerging technology in the UK. At its heart, as the company’s Partnerships Lead, Max Cleary explained, is the experience economy, a shift from product focus to original, personalised and adaptive experiences, available anytime, anywhere.
Adah Parris, who increasingly describes herself as a tech philosopher rather than a futurist, developed the theme, exploring how technology’s potential to change and influence humanity is a much more far reaching consideration than it’s potential to affect the bottom line.
Adah asked how emerging tech will affect our understanding of what is to be human, and how it will influence our relationships with each other.
In response, HoloMe’s Janosch Amstutz showed the potential of augmented reality to step beyond basic avatars and the uncanny valley to place real people in your world. He spoke about the way business, especially retail, is now adopting new AR tech at a hectic pace, and teased a world where we will soon be wondering how we ever lived without AR.
Taylan Kamis of DeepZen explored the latest developments in human-like synthetic speech and language processing. He demonstrated new synthesized voiceover techniques which are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from human speech – and showed its immediate potential for speeding up the ad and animated movie production process.
The presentations were followed by an insightful panel Q&A, and you can revisit the event here (with apologies for the picture quality):
This event was just the first collaboration between BIMA and Digital Catapult. Further events will cross the UK and focus on specific elements of the technology – from Ai and AR, to VR, blockchain and IoT.
We’ll let you know more about those soon.