5 minute read
The era of distributed entertainment started from music streaming, and in 2016, its growth was 60.4% in the world. 50% of the global revenue, $15.7 billion, in 2016 accounted for digital music. Technologies like VR and AR brought the industry far away from its starting point and carried user-experience to entirely new level of emotional engagement, fun, joy, and accessibility. The advanced époque of distributed entertainment is yet to come.
Gen Z:
From Consumerism
to Fun Experience
Rising popularity of VR and AR in gaming and theme parks are defined by new preferences of Gen Z. Generation born between 1995-2012 represents 2 billion people and become important with their gaining purchasing power. Kara Alter, Head of Brand at Shimmur, claims that those new people are the dictator of the media trends. They seek a deep connection with their favorite characters, highly emotional engagement, and quality content by making the audience the epicenter of the plot. Netflix, online streaming platform, spotted Gen Zs’ interest in social media celebrities and introduced reality show Chasing Cameron with Cameron Dallas, a famous YouTuber and Vines’ actor. The appearance of social media stars in movies is just a first step to make Generation Z the center of the consumer world.
Habits of Millennials already made cities high-tech, more sustainable and technologically friendly with hybrid cars, drones, remote work, and autonomous vehicles. Gen Z is expected to add an entirely new glimpse of novelties to the existent urban infrastructure and design. Being a first “digital native generation” explains their online habits with 10 hours 19 minutes of tech use per day. Generation Z is highly passionate about VR – 40% tried it at least once and 70% of US youngsters find it interesting. Being experience-seekers rather than material consumerists constructs the future of unique entertainment and makes VR amusement parks the desired way to spend leisure time. VR and exceptional user-engagement are the future of distributed entertainment that embrace the benefits of technology and the era of digitalization. Welcome to the future of VR, positive ambiance, shared experience, and available entertainment within limited city space.
Changing the Way
Gamers Play
Games are becoming more complex and use actors of TV shows as characters’ prototypes. Sony Play Station 4’s game Death Stranding featuring Norman Reedus from Walking Dead and Mads Mikkelsen from Hannibal is a sign of upcoming revolution of distributed entertainment whereas the user can “become” their favorite heroes and experience a strong emotional connection. According to Pieter van den Heuvel, head of product development esports and trends at market intelligence group Newzoo, adding VR-special effects makes playing experience more thrilling and explorative.
VR-arcades become tempting alternatives to the gaming future. VR World located in New York City provides more than 50 different games and caters a variety of needs from shooting monsters to flying and watching futuristic movies. The VR gaming industry is on demand, and the future of distributed entertainment is predefined by it. According to SuperData Research, it reached $286.7 million in 2017 and expected to increase up to $2.3 billion by 2020.
AR is an alternative way to make users engaged – Pokémon Go, Ingress, Harry Potter – Wizards Unite! are recent implications of using physical world as the actual gaming reality. Andrew Tricket, the CFO of Merge, claims that “AR is going to be bigger, for a lot of reasons” – it has active engagement with the physical world and does not require heavy hardware by allowing carrying a game in the pocket. AR segment will go beyond simple gaming apps and introduce AR puzzles, books, and AR amusement parks. Disney introduced a projector-camera toolbox to develop interactive spaces and 3D objects in AR. Magic Bench customers to interact with their favorite characters. It truly revolutionizes the user experience by bringing favorite Disney heroes to reality and gives a possibility to play with them.
Exciting Époque
of Amusement Parks
Both AR and VR unveil the curtain of a new era of distributed entertainment and theme parks. VR park, recently opened in Dubai mall, is a bright example of next generation of amusement parks and an exclusive combo of AR, VR and attractions. It offers everything from multiplayer educational movies to horror and adrenaline-rush roller-coaster rides – these user-engaging experiences satisfy a diversity of tastes and preferences from small children to adults.
Adores VR Park Tokyo attracts millions of visitors yearly. The audience varies from gamers and geeks to families and group trips. Similar parks start appearing worldwide – Canada, Japan, China, and the USA. Their user-friendly environment and space-saving features enable their location in city infrastructure such as malls. AR and VR bring distributed entertainment to an entirely new level of user-engagement with fun and adrenaline highly accessible to people of all nations and ages. Possibility to dive into the virtual world tailored to personal interests and desires becomes irreplaceable components of novel distributed entertainment culture and city infrastructure.
(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({‘gtm.start’:
new Date().getTime(),event:’gtm.js’});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!=’dataLayer’?’&l=’+l:”;j.async=true;j.src=
‘//www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=’+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,’script’,’dataLayer’,’GTM-K6KDNN’);
