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The out-of-home immersive entertainment frontier

The head of the Digital Screenmedia Association offers another review of "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" by Kevin Williams and Michael Mascioni.

August 28, 2014 by Paul Flanigan — Founder, The Preset Group

On my plane trip over to Australia I had enough time (14 hours) to read through "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" by Kevin Williams and Michael Mascioni.

What an interesting book.

This is one of those books that belongs on the shelves of industry insiders, those who want to see the expansion of what we think of digital-out-of-home, and those who are trying to make it happen.

The book focuses mainly on DOE, or digital out-of-home entertainment, found in "leisure facilities" — places like arcades, amusement/theme parks and other areas where visitors publicly gather to compete in gaming experiences. It seems to be a rather broad brushstroke that can include any place where someone pumps a quarter into a machine to play a game, and therefore it's more about the experience than the venue.

Going through the first part of the book, I found a lot of overlap with the out-of-home and digital signage industry. And it got more interesting from there.

Williams and Mascioni do their diligence in covering a broad spectrum of insight, from dozens of interviews with folks like Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, and Akihito Shoji, senior vice president at Taito Corp. from Japan. You might have heard of one of their games … Space Invaders.

The book moves through the struggles of the gaming industry and presents the growth opportunity, and this is where that overlap emerges. Interactive experiences that are embracing gamification have the attention of all kinds of verticals, not just leisure. What makes this book a worthy read is that those in the other verticals can gather a lot of insight for their own projects from the examples and insight in this book.

Williams and Mascioni outline the trends, and the themes are constant: immersive experiences that combine the physical with digital, including virtual reality, augmented reality and gesture-based experiences. What is interesting is how far these are going, and the interest that these technologies have garnered from so many.

That's not to say that these types of experiences are here. No, these are what's coming, and that's what makes the book interesting. We're seeing a convergence of disciplines that provide benefit to any unique sector out there. Even though they have a very very small section at the end called "Crystal Ball Gazing," this book is anything but. It's a straightforward, objective, and detailed observation of the growth of experiential technology and its benefits to both the user and the provider.

Is this worth putting on your bookshelf? I think so. At 179 pages it will be a book that you'll dog-ear to makes notes for your own future projects.

If you are a DSA member, you can get the book at a discount. Click here to learn more.

Do you have an industry book you'd like me to review? Contact me here.

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