The ‘totally digital world’ is nearly here – and creative industries need to get on board if they’re to grow and prosper

Management

Sponsored by Seventy7 Ventures

Ketan Makwana, Chairman, Seventy7 Ventures

The first ever videogame was invented in 1958, and it was only in the 1970s that videogames became mainstream, with the release of Pong in 1975. The following two decades took the games industry on a digital acceleration journey, with games consoles becoming more and more common.

Today, gaming is one of the most valuable creative industries in the world. And it has evolved into a more immersive experience: it doesn’t just provide escapism for its players, but also a form of community. Today’s younger generations (Gen-Z and Millennials) are all products of a digital age, and this is their world.

The future of verticals such as sports, media and entertainment are rapidly joining this digital age too, and the initial point of entry is immersive experiences. The next music concert or festival you attend will likely have AR/VR features. E-sports and VR simulation of sporting events is becoming widespread, and holographic productions are appearing in the theatre and the arts. We’re edging closer to a fully digital world.

By 2030 the creative industries could employ more than 50 million people worldwide and contribute $3 trillion to global GDP, according to the World Economic Forum. But to ensure these targets are met, there needs to be a significant overhaul of the technology adoption strategy and digital acceleration of creative businesses.

The creative industries are a core component of innovation and entertainment. But as the world entered the Covid-19 pandemic they were particularly badly hit, and it became evident that many creative sectors lacked agility due to technical and digital capacity issues.

Digitisation is having its own effect on consumer behaviour and consumption, and the adoption of technology, as we can see in the rise of Web3 (a more decentralised web incorporating blockchain technologies), artificial intelligence and an ever-increasing demand for immersive experiences.

Immersive experiences are the gateway to the digital world: both physical and digital, or “phygital”. Phygital is the bridge from the analogue world to a total digital world; however, there are critical challenges with immersive technologies, such as:

Infrastructure: the physical environments for full immersive experiences are still being constructed; there are many different components such as haptics, volumetrics and digital twinning that need to be connected into the infrastructure.
General heath and safety: the human brain isn’t trained in the dynamics that a fully digital world delivers and this can be seen as a health and safety risk.
Multi-sensory limitations: virtual reality, for example, is heavily reliant on optics and long-term exposure can cause symptoms such as headaches and motion sickness. Immersive experiences will require the use of multi-sensory (smell, touch, taste) to go with the audio/visual concepts.

Entertainment and advertising experiences need to embrace digitisation to be more immersive. This is currently delivered through augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR), but these alone have their limitations. Mixed reality (MR) employs a hybrid of AR/VR/XR to enlighten the senses and deliver more, and deeper, immersive experiences.

We are seeing education adopt virtual reality to enhance the learning experience, and industries such as health, wellbeing, law, sports and entertainment will all require digitisation and technology adoption strategies to ensure their sustainability and scalability. These trends are all pointing towards digital acceleration and the adoption of immersive experiences within business.

Seventy7 Ventures was launched after its founders commissioned a whitepaper (2030CI), which serves as a blueprint for what is required in the creative industries. The task isn’t just about digital transformation but also the transformation of leadership, behaviour and attitudes to digital adoption.

The work we do at Seventy7 is centred around one thing: to accelerate the digitisation of the creative industries. So whether we are strategically consulting, providing investment advisory services or developing spin-offs through our Venture Partnering Programming, Seventy7 is actively contributing to develop the “phygital” platform from which we will be catapulted into a totally digital world.

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