The Serendipity, FOMO And Joy Of South-By

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music, film, culture and technology conference that started in Austin in 1987, attracts over 100,000 people every (non-pandemic) year. It is so massive, with dozens of panels every day, music and comedy performances and screenings every night, that no two SXSW experiences are the same. If you have FOMO watching the social media posts fly past during SXSW (it’s called South-by its denizens), it is actually worse if you are here. The panel you skipped to grab a bite with an old friend could turn out to be the best talk of the show. You rely on serendipity and momentary judgements to guide you through a treasure trove of content and people and accept FOMO as inevitable.

I was on the jury for the sixteen world premiere XR Experiences competing for the Grand Prize. I saw the winner, Consensus Gentium on my smart phone a couple of days before leaving for the show. The twenty minute film tells a story native to our most intimate device, the smartphone, which could open up a whole new genre of entertainment.

Only a few badgeholders get to see many XR experiences. The math of through-put and utilization means the best exhibitors can only provide five turns per hour per seat. In three days, most can provide around 150 experiences to badgeholders for the thousands of people who walk through there every day. Every festival had this problem.There is nothing SXSW can do about it.

There was a lot of networking action going on in the hallway outside the exhibition hall. This is where I ran into Paul Raphaël of the well-known Felix & Paul studio, which has been making award-winning commercial and artistic immersive XR experiences like Space Explorers: The ISS Experience, Traveling while Black and Gymnasia. Paul handed me a Magic Leap 2 and gave me a confidential look at an experience that started at Magic Leap in 2019, when together with the Henson company, they pitched a fairytale written by Simon Racioppa and narrated by Neil Gaiman. Delayed by problems at Magic Leap, and interrupted by the pandemic, this may be the Montreal studio’s best work. Wish I could say more, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy as they are just now looking for distribution. That’s South-by serendipity.

The Shiba Inu Metaverse is the most highly anticipated project on Shibarium, the layer 2 technology from Shiba Inu, which saw its official beta launch last week. At the festival the developers debuted a brief look at what the Unreal Engine 5-powered virtual world looks like. One demo was an open world. The other was a group meditation session in the WAGMI (“We’re All Going to Make It.”) Temple, the first of 11 hubs in the SHIB metaverse.

ASU’s New Graduate Program for Immersive Narrative, led by SXSW Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Nonny de la Pena hosted a party to celebrate its inaugural MA, class of 2023. One of these graduate students, Cameron Kostonopolus, won a Special Jury Prize in the competition.

Leia, a spin off of HP, used the expo at SXSW to present its new 3D lightfield tablet, the Lume Pad Tablet. Images literally jump off the page, and seem to float a foot in front of the 10.8” screen. The stereo cameras on the front of the pad provide eye tracking, and also enable stereography, using a suite of Leia branded apps such as Leia Cam, Leia Player, Leia Tube, Leia Stream, Leia Pix, the Lume Tablet can convert both 2D images and video into 3D. This remarkable device has won a CES innovation award every year since the Lume Pad was introduced in 2021.

Jerome Monceaux, founder and CEO of Pasis-based Enchanted Tools introduced me to a prototype of his new robot, Miroki. The humanoid robot – powered by AI (natch) – has a cute cartoon face, functional robot arms and fingers, and is mounted atop a BB8-like omnidirectional ball. Miroki will be ready in 2025 at a target price of $30K.

I got to experience an encore of Miro Shot’s immersive concert produced by Ristband, it’s spin off company that creates live events that take place simultaneously in VR and physical reality, where we can use Mixed Reality to interact with the Metaverse and the music at the same time. This year’s show used the new HTC Vive Elite HMD, which is just now being released. What they’ve done really pushes the limits – and this is just the beginning – I kind of missed the janky old Samsung Gear headsets they used last year. It was a bit of a mess, but much more rock n roll.

Since no two South-by’s are the same, Ted Schilowitz and I traded stories about the festival yesterday on our podcast, and interviewed Karen Palmer, producer and director of “Consensus Gentium” a smartphone movie that won first place for XR Experiences at SXSW, Cameron Kostinopulous, whose VR experience “Body of Mine” won the special XR jury prize, and Roman Rappak, whose Miro Shot performed a sold out mixed reality concert in Austin.There was so much to talk about we even recorded a supplemental episode.