Teach your world to touch

It was 4 years ago I was walking into a Red Robin restaurant in Anaheim and there was a family in the entrance. Embedded into the floor was a TV screen. This little girl, who seemed to be around 4 years old, was busy tapping, tapping, tapping her foot on the screen waiting for it to interact with her. I could see it was a “what the...” moment for her. After all she had just been to Disneyland.

 That was a major shift to me. That kid, just past walking, was expecting this static screen to have a response.

The AV industry had touch first come into our offer with the famous Smartboard. It never caught on in the enterprise. Why? Of course, there was the issue of the projector casting a shadow where you were drawing. The other was with each use, people had to relearn how to use it.   It failed in business communications when conference rooms were outfitted with it. People were not used to the “apps” associated with it.   Sure, education jumped on it because some teachers made it their teaching tool. Though many were sold, “some” is the key word there.

I’d say the biggest drawback to touch then was because people did not have a stand-up and touch behavior. Let’s face it, we didn’t have a regular touch experience other than the ATM machine, until our phones got smart. And that brought not only familiarity of apps, but a thirst for them. They became “my apps”. But that has been 10 years. Large format group meeting touch has been around, but it has been expensive.

2017 will be the year to stand-up for touch. We are headed towards touch immersive environments. Why? The tipping point of human behavior has come. And it is attainable. Vivitek is introducing the NovoTouch series with 98” interactive screens under $20K, 86” under $10k, 75” under $5k and 65” under $3K. Putting them in a conference or classroom is now doable.  Add to it that there is a wireless Novo connection to it for any laptop, pad or smart phone. It has annotation and other collaboration tools (aka apps). There is an on-board slot to add a resident PC. You have a powerful case of wide adoption.  Starin will also facilitate having a touch-through capability to control the sharing device from the board.

All those features present how differently people will meet and share. They will stand and interact.

Have you noticed what is called the “stand-up” meeting. This is the Agile, Kanban and sprint mentality to not only project teams, but all teams. The morning get-your-stuff-together-and-go exists now in many departments and fields.  Starin uses it with the sales team and others.

So, this remarkable evolution gives the ProAV world a chance to lead. I titled this article Teach your world to touch. In fact, your world already knows instinctively and wants to have more capabilities doing it. It is up to the AV communications channel to model it, proactively promote it and fill the inherent need.