Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Consulting Specifying Engineer podcast. I'm your host, Anna Steingruber and today we are talking to Karak Janssen about entertainment venue technology.
Most entertainment venues are in the middle of a radical shift driven not only by advances in technology, but also in changes on how audiences are interacting with them. Today we're going to dive into the rapidly evolving world of venue technology and focus on how innovations are transforming the way that we experience events.
From things like immersive audio, visual systems to smart crowd management, the future of venue technology promises enhanced experiences for audiences and operational efficiencies for the organizers. To talk about this topic today, we are talking to Craig Jansen. Craig is a lead accredited professional who helps leaders navigate audience engagement and technology shifts at theater space and technology designer for high attendance venues. Craig has led thousands of group discovery and design meetings, touching well over $10 billion in construction for spaces where people gather to share experiences. He leads the acoustics, theater and technology teams for Salas o' Brien and serves as a managing principal. That is an impressive introduction. Thank you so much for talking to us today, Greg.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Pleased to be here.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: All right, with that introduction out of the way, we're going to go ahead and dive into some of these topics. So can you tell me what you see as the big trends in venue technology and where things are going?
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Let me take a step back a little bit on it. I think there's a long debate and does technology drive culture and behavior or does culture and behavior drive technology?
So we're firmly in the seat that technology drives behavior. And so when what we look at, that's happened over the last, gosh, 20 years plus, we're moving from a time when everyone would do presentation, in other words, you know, sit in passive or lean back in your seat experience to where we are now, which is you're enveloped and you're engaged. And so all of those are related to technology.
The presentation technologies we see in venues have stepped up the game a lot, but they haven't fundamentally changed in probably 40 years. In other words, the sound systems are better and more articulate and louder or more powerful, but fundamentally they are still doing one thing, which is amplifying something from a stage or from a sports field or whatever source that you, you're feeding.
The same is true for the most part for lighting and to a lesser degree to video. So the big things that have shifted in technology have been primarily video.
And that's the capacity to envelop an audience with, with media. And it started, gosh, 15 years or so ago, people started projecting images onto a wall. Then they started turning that into moving live imagery. And then more recently, the big buzz, of course, is MSG Sphere, which is completely enveloping. I was there for the opening show. Just an amazing experience.
There are other projects that are coming online in the next few months. One is near SOFI Stadium. Another one is in Dallas, which is where I'm sitting right now, actually called cosm, which is a sports bar with a. A dome, a video dome.
And the capacity to change the experience for those places is profound. So I'd say those are the biggest shifts that we've seen. And then there's probably 100 minor shifts, but I'll pause with that.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Great. And so how is technology, like video or other trends that you were just talking about, enhancing audience engagement and experience in these venues?
[00:03:46] Speaker B: The presentation, which is a data centric type setting, is can I hear it, Can I see it? Can I understand it?
Envelopment moves to what we're seeing a lot more now, where your, your source of information is coming from a variety of locations above you, behind you, in front of you.
The next level beyond that is how do I engage with the people around me, firstly, and secondly with the performer. And so if you put two extremes. For example, if you, you sit and you watch your TV at home and watch a sports game, you can yell at the tv, you can throw things at it, it really doesn't matter. Nothing's changing on the program.
Try to do the same thing in a improv comedy club and yell at the performer and see what happens. That would be ultimate interaction. Usually the performers will win.
So what we're seeing is the ability to allow that engagement to occur.
Allied to that is a massive shift in allowing people to personalize the experience.
Some of that's as simple as just having your phone identify your favorites for what you want to order.
And it can be much more complicated than that in that the scary thing that's facing everyone for the future is facial recognition.
And aside on that, I was in Beijing a little earlier this year and I came back through Dallas, through the airport, and I walked up to show my passport and I didn't even have it open. And they said, you're fine, Mr. Jensen, go on through.
And it was all facial recognition. That reality is coming in front of us, which means that when we go to these venues, over time, the venue will know everything about us.
And we can be giving up that information willingly in order to maximize our experience.
Of course, linked to the next level, which Is chatgpt create an earthquake of people starting to say, what the heck is AI With AI in going forward is going to allow not just a personalization, but an experience that adjusts according to your behavior.
And I'm getting a little esoteric. We can come back to that if need be. I'll pause with that.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: Great. What kinds of challenges do already existing venues face when they're integrating these new technologies? And how can those challenges be overcome?
[00:06:21] Speaker B: That's a great question.
The problem with existing venues is they have an infrastructure that, for example, if you are rigging a very heavy piece of equipment over the stage, the structure either can take it or it can't.
And it's not easy to fix that later on.
So what we're seeing happening is with renovations of spaces, particularly when it's a beautiful building, a 1920s movie palace that's transferred, being converted to a concert venue, for example, is this is. People are celebrating. Designers are celebrating the architecture using a lot of electronic technology, specifically lighting, but also video.
So in our office, we have a sample that we imported from China of some product that is less than an eighth of a millimeter thick, and you can unroll it, and it's a video screen that you can unroll, which means now we can put stuff around corners and we can, we can build into an existing space. But nonetheless, you're still tied to what the existing building allows you to do.
And the better users of those buildings celebrate the building a lot more.
In other words, they say, we know what this building is going to do. Well, let's do that really, really well. For example, rather than trying to make a building that doesn't have a lot of structural capacity, they don't put shows in there that require a lot of structural capacity.
And they implement technologies then from lighting and video to WI fi to a number of other tools to make that more engaging for the people that come to those facilities.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: And so, kind of moving in, looking more towards the future, how do you foresee virtual or augmented reality impacting live events?
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Well, I think my short answer is probably not that much.
In a virtual reality, just for making sure we've got terms correct, virtual reality is when I've got goggles on that I can't see outside. I can only see what I see in the goggles and the glasses. That is patently not successful in a performance venue of any type of sports arts. It really doesn't matter.
AR is a little bit different because you can do AR through goggles such as magic Leap or HoloLens.
And, and you can be wearing them. They're pretty goofy though, and they require a lot of computing capacity to be present in the venue. So I don't predict that'll happen outside of areas that are, for example, theme parks or specific amusement entertainment that is very fixed and repeatable. They certainly wouldn't be leveraged very effectively in a live concert.
However, the next portion of augmented reality is, and we see it all the time on our TVs when we're watching sports in particular, where you can see the lines down on the NFL fields that don't exist in reality but are shown there. You can see it in NASCAR where they are tracking the cars and they tell you who's in the car and the position and all kinds of other things.
That type of utilization in spaces where you can, you don't naturally see the live performance. In other words, you're not going to be looking at your phone while you're at a NASCAR event.
But if you're in a suite, you may well have a large screen TV with augmented reality on it, giving you a lot of interesting information.
The big shift that's coming that is very difficult to predict and which is not being spoken about a lot of, is that the level of technology that exists in sports with respect to player tracking is extremely advanced.
And so every facility and every, be it collegiate or pro sport, has an enormous amount of data.
When we take that data and we think about it in the context of AI, we're not just tracking where someone came from, we can track to where they're going to. In other words, we can see ahead of time because the AI will allow us to do that.
No one knows what to do with that yet because you can imagine the chaos even from a betting point of view.
So a long answer to your short question, which was that I don't see a lot of use in VR AR in most live events.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: And what you're saying about the, the lines and the TVs is, is really interesting because that's something that I, watching live sports and live events always struggle with. I like football and everything better on TV sometimes because I actually know what's going on when they draw the little lines telling me where people would go.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: When, when you see your tv, what you're seeing on the sidelines in terms of the advertisements are personalized to where you are. You know, it's not everyone sees necessarily sees the same, the same advertisements. And you see that more with international sports like soccer or football to the rest of the world.
And in those Conditions, they're getting multiple advertising rights to cover for a particular country or a particular region. And it's all. It's not real, it's not there. It just looks like it is.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Moving on from that little tangent, can you tell me how technology specifically can improve the safety or crowd management in these kinds of large venues, Major events.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Sports events, probably more so than concerts, but some concerts as well are very. Can be quite dangerous places.
If there is a panic of some sort, let's say it's an active shooter or there's a fire or some other kind of natural tornado coming, for example, or major thunderstorms with lightning.
The. The biggest challenge is how do you control the flow of people? How do you give them advice or tell them what's going on and tell them what to do?
And so audio is, is probably the least effective in that.
Video is extremely effective. And so if you imagine being in an airport where you've got this long area that you can traverse along and video can tell you where to go, it's simply by having a huge arrow and say, go this way.
And in crowd situations, technology starts becoming very, very valuable. It also starts becoming more predictive.
In other words, you can start setting the safety mechanisms to run to a set of rules.
If something of this sort happens, then the technology will tell people to go in this direction, to behave in the following ways.
There's actually a lot of science behind the area of safety. It's not my area of expertise, but I'm fascinated talking to the people who design life safety systems in these large buildings, how humans react under pressure and under threat, in the need for clarity, which technology allows you to give.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Can you tell me a little bit? When you're developing new venue technologies, what does sustainability, what role does sustainability play in the development of those kinds of technologies?
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Just about everything we design pulls power.
So intrinsically, I mean, they're becoming the products of any range of technologies. They're becoming a lot more efficient. But intrinsically, we eat power, which is not a sustainable factor. However, what technology does allow is, allows you to scale, expand the reach of a venue. So the most expensive things from a building, from a sustainability point of view in a building, or put it a little differently, the most sustainable building that you can build is the one you choose not to build.
So size drives an impact on sustainability. Anytime we can reduce the scale, we have a profound impact on sustainability. And so you'll see that in a number of settings where, you know, concert settings, where more intimate settings are very desirable. And this has Obviously been going for a very long time is the ability to broadcast those to a larger audience. So the local audience is small and others are watching the watch parties. They're sitting at home. They, you know, any number of mechanisms.
The World Cup, Soccer Cup a number of years back, had watch parties all over the world.
And the sustainable capacity to put 100 million people to watch together or 200 million people to watch without actually leaving their hometown has a massive impact. Technology enables all of that.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's really, really awesome and interesting to think about. Can you tell me a little bit about your personal experience attending live events and how you've kind of seen them change over the years?
[00:15:41] Speaker B: Sure.
While I'm an engineer, my, my, my beginnings, at the root of what has been doing what I'm doing is I'm a musician, as are a lot of the people who do the work that I do.
And I then transitioned from that to being a, a mixing engineer for, for touring artists, amongst other things. And so the big things that I've seen is, is the quality of the technology has dramatically improved. For example, a concert that you would go to 20 years ago or 30 years ago is night and day difference to the sound quality that you can achieve now.
And it's tenfold difference when you look at the video quality and the ability to have very high resolution screenshots, which then coupled with computing power, allows creative minds to create almost anything you could want.
Those things have been tremendously important. The other big one would be in this, in a sense existed for centuries, but less so in concert venues where you would have levels of experience, where you've got a VIP and a VVIP and so forth. So we see a lot of buildings that are creating those varied expense, varied experience, levels of experience. And of course, with the commensurate cost, suites at stadiums, for example, clubs at stadiums. And the technology in there starts becoming very, I wouldn't say sophisticated, but very supportive of the overall experience.
The other component that we've seen is the ability to work in real time. So sports is a fantastic user of technology. And another one, interestingly enough, is churches, because both of them are reacting into the moment for an experience that may or may not have been predictable. It depends. Some churches are incredibly predictable, others lesser. Sports, for example, if you have a baseball game and the batter's coming up to the plate, you don't know that and no one knows that until they come on the field.
And so the technology to pull up their stats and their data and the information has required very Very rapid real time access to information, everything from slow mo replays and so forth have all changed profoundly in the last 20 to 30 years.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: That's a, a great answer. And you're talking about being a musician yourself. Can you tell me about the best concert or best live artist that you've ever seen?
[00:18:33] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. I get asked this all the time and my brain freezes.
You know, I don't know that there's any. There's any. I was, I was recently at a Taylor Swift eras concert at SoFi and well, I might get mobbed when I say this. I didn't really know that much about Taylor Swift.
I. It was an extraordinary experience. Not because the sound and the video was particularly good, but because of the environment that she had created and the just being there was just a wonderful experience to, to be part of.
Obviously msg, which is a fairly recent one, again was very different.
You know, the Taylor's concerts are firstly, the loudest thing at the concerts isn't the sound system, it's the, it's the singing of the audience.
We went to the U2 concert. Everyone's just in awe looking around in this, this massive, massive video screen. So those are two fairly recent deals. I tend to, from a musical point of view, experience point of view. Love going to clubs where jazz bands play or small rock band plays where it's a very connected and intimate experience. It's probably my favorite.
So I gave you three different, very different perspectives there.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Oh, those are, those are great answers. I also love seeing smaller venues and smaller artists also because it's just kind of fun to see people when they're just starting out and you get to say, and I saw them back when tickets were only 20 bucks at this small, tiny venue and it sounded awesome. There's just something fun about that.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. We have, we have a really good jazz club near our house and my wife and I go there fairly often and it's just a great experience.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's. It's just fun. Something fun about small venues and being one of the few people in the crowd. So yeah, wonderful. Well, this has been an incredible discussion and overview. Do you have anything else that you want to touch on? Anything else you want to say?
[00:20:39] Speaker B: What I would say is I think that culture, you know, there's a lot of things have gotten, gotten really screwed up. The technology, you know, social media being an example of, of a double edged sword of great for connecting people and great for promoting wacky behavior.
I think broadly speaking what technology is allowing us to do is to envelop us, to engage us with other people. I think that's an incredibly positive thing. One of the great joys we have in the work that we do here at Salis, Bryan, up in the venue work that we do is we're gathering people together in a way that is typically very healthy for society. I get a huge kick out of that. And I think it's gotten better over the years because. Because of technology. And that's why I do what I do for a living, is help people connect and help them tell their story, whatever that story might be.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a great and a beautiful thing to end on. So thank you so much for joining us today and talking about venue technology and everything. We really appreciate it.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Absolute honor. Thank you so much for your time.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Yes. And to our audience. For more information on designing unique building types, please visit Consulting Specifying Engineer online at www.csemag.com. thank you for listening and we will talk to you next time.
