Evolutionary Leaps in Technology Post Pandemic

(An edited version of this article was published in MeetingMentor Magazine in Fall 2021)

We’re not out of the woods yet, but it’s been great seeing people start to get together again. Life’s going to be complicated for a while, and the meeting and events industry will be feeling aftershocks of this pandemic for years. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year, like all of us, dealing with what’s right in front of my face: first the pressing and immediate need to shift to online events, followed by the pressing and immediate need for reincorporating in-person audiences in a safe and secure manner. But we are starting to meet again in person.

In that spirit, I thought it would be fun to take a moment to put down the book of Life, Interrupted, open up the windows, and daydream for a bit about the future of event technology, and how the pandemic has affected a few key examples. Technology usually evolves slowly, so much so it’s easy to forget how much progress has been made. One of my favorite quotes about tech comes from the renowned computer scientist Alan Kay, and it reflects this perception:

“Technology is anything invented after you are born.”

Rarely does technology make an evolutionary jump, but every now and then...

One Giant Leap for Video Conferencing

To say that video conferencing has become “a thing” in the last year is an understatement. And yet it would probably surprise most of you to know that Zoom just celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2021. It wasn’t one of those “it started as a web store for dog toys and then pivoted” things, either. Sure, Microsoft and Google had their own video conferencing and chat apps, but these felt more like interesting dalliances, well down the priority list. Video chat was slowly gaining steam with those experimenting with remote workforces but was far from mainstream. And then, well... you know.

For the short term, you can expect there to continue to be a boom in features and upgrades in the video conferencing and online events world. It won’t quite be the pace we’ve been on for the last year, and will eventually slow down to a more plodding evolution, but there’s still a lot of momentum right now. Big companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google take longer to change direction than an inchworm going a mile, which is why we’re seeing “major updates” to their video conferencing products over a year after pandemic lockdowns began.

Meanwhile, companies like Zoom had to dramatically increase their capacity to handle the load of millions of new subscribers. When that popularity naturally starts to wane as people return to office work, what do you think they’re going to do with all those extra servers and bandwidth? My money is on increased quality. When the amount of traffic on a 6 lane highway reduces, there’s no reason you can’t increase the speed limit, so expect to see higher quality video and audio, better screen sharing, and better audio and video playback capabilities from event and webinar platforms.

Fistfull of Data

Attendee tracking data and analytics is another technology that stands to be supercharged from our pandemic era. Online events provide an unprecedented insight into the activities of your attendees. Not just which sessions they signed up for, but whether or not they actually attended, and if so- for how long? Organizers could give exhibitors not just a list of everyone that stopped by their virtual booths, but also here are 50 attendees that went to breakout sessions closely associated with their products and didn’t stop by their booth. Might want to give them a call?

Of course the real power of data lies not as a tool for planning next year’s event, but rather being able to adjust things on the fly, in real time. As a presenter, I almost always have an eyeball on the number of attendees in real time, and if I start to feel people tuning out, I adjust my strategy and energy in hopes of keeping the rest.

Those that got “into” data in the last year really got into data in the last year, and they’re going to start expecting that level of metrics as we return to in-person events. We were already seeing an uptick in live-event attendee tracking through technologies such as RFID and Bluetooth Low Energy, and in an effort to be “touchless” during and post-pandemic, more and more events have been relying on facial-recognition technology for checking and session tracking. Put those two things together, sprinkle in a little of Amazon’s Sidewalk (where smart devices can talk together without WiFi), and combine it all with the fact that both the cellular 5G standard and the latest proposed WiFi standards include the ability to pinpoint the location of people and devices in space, and you can have ridiculous, real-time insight into where your attendees are and what they’re doing.

Even fully anonymized, this type of real-time feedback could be an extremely powerful tool for planners. We can ensure that registration, buffet, and bar lines are balanced and flowing smoothly. On the more serious side, you can make sure that emergency exits and evacuation routes are clear.

If opted into by attendees, this level of data can be made to work for them as well. During the event, they could be welcomed by personalized signage and registration information, or even “turn by turn” directions around the show floor. Post-event they could receive a summary of their experience, including all the sessions they attended, as well as all the connections they made- and maybe even recommendations for on-demand content they might enjoy or a vendor they might want to follow up with based on their event journey.

All the World’s Display

Of course, technology evolution didn’t stop on everything other than online meeting tech, so there are a million things that have kept advancing, will continue to evolve, and are worth keeping an eye on: virtual reality, augmented reality, drones, 3D printing, LIDAR-mapping of venues. But in keeping with the “these are the things that have leaped forward in the last year” motif, I’m going to close with display technology. I’ll resist the urge to go deep into OLED vs LED vs mini-LED, so let’s just consider this: during the pandemic people bought a metric boat-load of laptops, monitors, televisions, and phones.

As a result, display technology has probably advanced further than it likely would have without the pandemic. Newer televisions and monitors boast higher resolution, greater contrast between the brightest brights and the darkest darks, and amazing color. LED-wall technology boasts higher resolution and easier-to-connect panels. As these two technologies approach each other in the middle, the result will be thin, lightweight, customizable display panels of basically any size or shape you want.

I used to dream of a time when we wouldn’t need projection screens because of this new display technology, thinking it would be decades off. Now it feels like it could be sooner rather than later!