UNC-Chapel Hill's CHAT Festival, an ambitious mash-up symposium on the busy intersections of technology, art and entertainment, wraps up today. Participants at the CHAT - which stands for Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology - included scholars from UNC, Duke and N.C. State universities, representatives of RTP's burgeoning gaming scene and a few special guests.
On Wednesday, keynote speaker Robert Bach, a UNC-CH alum and president of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division, delivered a casual, but fascinating, message on the future of entertainment.
It's no secret that technology in general - and consumer electronics in particular - is radically changing the landscape of home entertainment. Bach's presentation attempted to bring into focus the increasingly blurry lines between movies, games, TV, books, music and the Internet.
Consider the popular genre of music video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, Bach suggested. "What's coming - what's already here - is entertainment that is not labeled as game, movie, TV or music," he said. "It is all of these, a new form of media that blends all these labels."
The examples are endless. Amazon's Kindle and the new Apple iPad are turning books digital. PCs and laptops offer hundreds of ways to produce and consume media. Game consoles such as the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft XBox 360 also function as DVD players, digital video recorders and social media portals.
One of the most interesting statistics Bach dropped is that, according to Nielsen Media research, 60 percent of Americans watching TV at any given time are also online - chatting with friends about the show or Googling the name of that familiar character actor.
"The next 5 to 10 years is going to drive more changes than the last 20 to 30 years," Bach said.
Addressing the students in the crowd, Bach said that there has never been a better time to get into the entertainment business, precisely because of all the radical change afoot. "We are seeing a fundamental change in the creative community," he said. "You have a generation of artists that use technology to create their art."
Bach also briefly previewed Microsoft's highly anticipated gaming technology, code-named Project Natal; it uses motion capture and voice recognition to do away with the game controller altogether. The first Natal games are slated to hit shelves in the fall.
"In my lifetime, this enormous field we call video games became possible," Bach said. "Think what is going to happen in your kids' lifetimes."
