Bring It Forth

“I want to put a ding in the universe.”

Steve Jobs

THE four elements of the spatial realm are people, products, places and data. To date, products are the most visible components of the realm after people. Product is a Latin word, literally something you bring or lead forth. They are the production of the visible universe and they encompass everything from capital goods to fast-moving consumer products. Not all products are brands, but even white-label goods compete in a universe of branded produce. The brand is the narrative around a product and it envelops that product like a suit or a skin. Holography is the extension of the narrative brand around a product.

Right now, display is the epitome of holographic products. Holograms are already deployed to promote and sell things, earning our attention long before the actual arrival of the physical good. But marketing promotion is merely one aspect of the spatial realm when it comes to products. In fact, the realm comprehends the entire life cycle from design and engineering to recycling. Brands bring products forth not only when they are released on the marketplace – bringing forth starts long before in the minds of designers and engineers. The entire process of leading a product into existence from initial vision to lifetime usage and reincarnation is connected to the spatial realm. Holograms are not just for Christmas.

In some quarters, we have already entered an experience economy where products have been dematerialized and services connect into a continuum. Products continue to play a role, but only as a fundamental part of the overall ecosystem. Is Apple a product company or an experience one? Holograms are also part of the way we experience products beyond their quiddity, their ‘thingness’. By joining products together through narrative, the spatial realm serves to unify the brand story and integrate the customer’s relationship. Imagine if every product came with its own origin story, dramatized in the empty space above the object. Imagine if every product came with its own demo, narrated in air beside the physical thing. Imagine if product reviews were not laborious small-print listings but actual episodes played out in the realm.

The initial contest in a product’s life is to get born at all. Holographic episodes are not only ideal for presentation and display but for ideation and design. What if designers could share their initial visions for new products easily in air to enable creative collaboration? What if far more options could be explored holographically than in prototype? The spatial realm could extend digital twinning as it is known in manufacturing, opening up a new bandwidth in creative experimentation and exploration. When one option has been selected, that product could be further developed holographically long before the need to commit physical resources. At the other end of the spectrum, think about the vast wastage involved in product returns. Literally hundreds of millions going to pure waste. Because products were purchased to test or check, not to possess or keep. When a hologram could have done the test and passed it with full colors.

In other words, the spatial realm not only enables the physical world of products to exist and succeed – it decouples the physicality of products from their brand in all kinds of interesting, lucrative and environmental ways. Think of storage, for example. The tons of resources gone to waste in useless storage, and the equal nightmare of goods not being available to show. Imagine a retail outlet where every product available on earth could be imagined and demonstrated, without the storage expense and risk. Imagine a tiny high-street outlet being able to field the range of an Amazon.

By separating the physics of products, holograms release a whole new kind of exponential potential. Holographic display not only differentiates a product on the shop shelf, it enables a consumer to test out at home without the time-wasting and environment-destroying purchase and return. That whole cycle of useless effort is removed from the consumption equation, along with all the toxic damage to natural resources and climate.

Now let us consider the role of narrative in rich space. A hologram that simply replaces or precedes a physical good is just additional clutter without justification. When that holographic experience starts narrating and dramatizing, the magic happens. For a start, interactive episodes enable consumers to engage much more deeply with products, asking them direct questions. Products will become conversational in the original sense of that word – to converse meaning to live with. Narratives are deep ways of knowing, experience beyond mere experiment. A product is not simply an object. It is not only a thing. A product is the entire narrative of how it came into existence. A product is also all the myriad ways it has been used already. And a product is most definitely its future potential also. Products, like places, have a past, a present and a future accessible through the spatial realm. They become portals.

Once upon a time the brand was the mark of the maker. Today, the brand is the story as owned by the customer. Companies may like to dictate and define the brand, but it is the story we give it as users that epitomizes brand. This is our relationship with the product, the ritual and repetition surrounding our daily, weekly or annual use. In the ultimate phase of spatial evolution, products will also become truly resilient, acquiring new client relationships and usage stories over time. The spatial realm will embody these narratives as episodes in time.

In the old days, advertisements for products would regularly disrupt our narrative viewing on media, helping to pay for creative content but otherwise forming a jarring experience in our storyworlds. Now the products will merge with the media content to become the story itself. And not in any Truman Show product-placement sort of way. In a Toy Story sort of way. In a Lego movie sort of way. The product will not interrupt the movie in future, it will be the movie itself.

Regular usage of products will feed into episodic content, where the product you own can connect with all the other product stories around, including all the clever customer hacks, all the repairs, all the recycling. It’s like moving beyond the promotional phase of seeing what customers like you also bought on Amazon. It’s like seeing how they’re utilizing it. Right now, software updates regularly renew and refresh our physical devices. One day, holographic episodes can regularly renew and refresh our products in the exact same way.

So, the spatial realm around products exists in at least three fundamental zones – the pre-existing development stage deep within the brand organization, the retail or distribution outlet serving to connect it to the world, and the home or office environment where the product lives. Through the realm, the product becomes a platform. The product is not an object lost in empty space – it is storied. Some are more than storied, they are fabled.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

Nikola Tesla

Imagine the four stages of the spatial realm as experiences for the customer. First of all, narrative holograms come together to tell the story of an entire product class or family. Not just the single product from birth to future incarnation, but the entire category of items from any one discipline. Secondly, we get to converse with these product holograms, literally to engage in a story or a learning by inquiry. We are not typing in queries to some chatbot online, we are speaking naturally to the product itself who is answering. At a later stage of evolution, we get to influence the life of the product itself which adapts according to our directions. This is more than interaction – this is creative collaboration. Ultimately, we get to create our own products ourselves using holograms. The entire product lifecycle is synced. Designer as customer. Customer as engineer. The spatial realm is now the workshop and the market.

But long before this happens, we will engage with narrative holograms online at home and in store. Products which don’t come with a holographic experience will be the also-rans. Like products which are not viewable online today, they will disappear. These holograms will start as simple tactics – shiny objects which will attract our attention. But, pretty soon, you’ll notice strategy emerging from the tactics. Products will come with episodic content, depending on client scenario or adaptive purpose. Holography will not only lead the product forth – it will lead forth the usage.

It has been estimated that the human brain has only room for six thousand brands in total. Is yours one of them? Mindshare is the ultimate product home, and the spatial realm is the ideal medium for entertaining it. To entertain is to literally ‘hold between’. To hold your customer’s attention between two moments in time – awareness and purchase. Purchase and re-engagement. A commercial transaction and lifetime customer value.

The act of selling is merely one moment of intensity in a lifetime of creation, usage, renewal and recycling. Increasingly, we are learning to look at the overall impact of products not just on our lives but on the planet. Physical resources are finite, even if they are renewable to an extent. There is no limit to human imagination and its creations. The spatial realm is an expression of this endless imaginative productivity.

Holographic people and products come together in endless ways too. People can introduce products, but people can also use them, educate and entertain with them. A holographic person using a product is a narrative in motion. Imagine the flatpack IKEA item which opens out into its very own holographic demo. The Internet of Things is a trending term which portrays everything connected to the internet for convenience. But what if the spatial realm of things were about more? Whereas we prioritize the digital in everything, what about using digital to prioritize the space things inhabit? Products take up space, but they can also enrich empty space. As the brand expands to include all the experience and services around a product, the spatial realm acts as the narrative medium for its expression.

Space, if you like, is the very first ingredient in a product because it is going to occupy it. Apart from the inner space of the product itself – its mass and substance – it also carries an outer space around it. This outer space involves its color, its style, its brand aura. The outer space of a product comes into relationship with every other object in the universe including the customer’s own habitat. How the product occupies its own space and how it relates to all the space around it is central to its survival and success. Just as people come with reputations which are intangible but their most valuable asset, products come with brands which define them. A bad brand has little or no coherent aura and takes up space in a meaningless way. A good brand plays with the space it inhabits and connects to. Think of the physical space taken up by cars and how they define their own dynamic relationship with outer space. A product is a thing but it is more than a mere thing. A product is brought forth by the producer but it also brings forth a customer experience. This multifaceted relationship between its maker, its quiddity, the space it inhabits and its purchaser is your future growth vector.

In the old days products went to war with each other, category by category. Features fought with features, price with price. In the future the story each product tells will define its success or lack thereof in the market. The space surrounding each product will be its theater. Products will perform themselves in empty space first, then they will materialize to be purchased and used. Tests and reviews may influence, but the holographic performance of the product will now take precedence.

The nearest analogy in narrative terms is the long-running television series, where character arcs are inter-generational. As the holographic experience becomes ever more professional, real-time interaction will overtake recorded script. Products will have voices, just as digital assistants now have. The product will not only have a personality but a character which is the persona in action. A personality is who you think you are. Your character is what you actually do. The spatial realm is designed to exemplify the product in action, its essential character. Products don’t just get their own movies, they become living theaters, live performances. No longer trapped on flat screens or in storage, they inhabit the same space we do, they share in our spatial reality.

In our attention economy, a product lives or dies by how much attention it earns – not steals or purloins. Advertisement is essentially interruptive in nature, with the rare entertaining exception. Adverts are disruptions. They are also almost wholly the projections of brand ego. Advertising attempts to colonize our attention span. Online, it is epitomized by the countdown clock. Our finger hovers over click until Skip Ad appears. The more personalized, the more we disdain their presumption. No, we are not still looking for our last google search. No, we don’t need ten Parthian shots or follow-on pop-ups to pursue what is already a dead end. Advertising doesn’t know us, but what’s even worse is that it thinks it does. Instead of rhetorical interjection, let’s have a genuine narrative which is not hunting our purchase. Entertain, don’t interrupt. Narrate something truthful.

Products don’t deserve advertising, they deserve story. Products deserve to be dramatized in real life, they deserve to be performed like real objects in our lives. A product hologram can form the nucleus of this story. Productive holography can not only demonstrate but educate. It can entertain. It can converse and relate. Episodic product content can engage the consumer audience at a far deeper level than mere promotion. Ultimately, products are what people do with them. They are not feats of design or engineering so much as human experiences that result from their deployment.

Holograms, especially when deployed narratively, can drive massive differentiation in the online purchase of products. But the sweet spot for narrative holography lies in physical retail. High-street retail has been on the back foot ever since the mobile internet took off a generation ago, and global lockdowns in recent years have only inflicted further pain. Now imagine a retail arena where holography not only provided a reason to cross the threshold, but site-specific experiences uniquely distinguished exact outlets. Not just a reason to go physical but a motivation to enter a specific store.

Urban retail is the storehouse of global produce and right now the strategy is aimed at joining up all channels and providing a customer-centric experience. But what’s missing is the physicality of the medium. Holography is physical communication, real-world connection. Holograms of people and products occupy the space we inhabit, they move about just like we do. Now imagine for a moment you are a high-end retailer, say of a luxury outlet. Imagine creating holographic content which not only dramatizes one brand but connects a whole series of diverse brands you supply. Think of what is possible in terms of connected store narratives, especially when you join that to individual clients with their own backstories and future dreams. Your store or network becomes a theater of enactment. The experience is not available elsewhere, certainly not online. You’ve pushed online into offline, sidelined it.

The war between physical and digital can never be won because it is asymmetric from the start. The thing to do is create a Third Space, an augmented realm where digital informs the unique physics of where you are. You’ve made your physical space incomparable. The experience your space provides cannot be had elsewhere. When you make that experience customer-specific, you’ve hit the jackpot. You can defeat digital by going beyond its remit and returning it to real life.

Luxury retail is just one example, but a telling one, where the high-end use of media content is already well advanced. Luxury is the imagination on steroids – you’re imagining the client’s best life possible at all times. Holographic episodes enact that imagination in reality. Whether an outlet is brand-owned or independent, the spatial realm allows you to enact an utterly distinct habitat that turns your location into a destination. The spatial realm inverts the power dynamics of digital disruption and empowers the physical to be unique.

The ultimate contribution of narrative holography to products is to redefine what a product is and does. A product has always occupied space, but now it can occupy the empty space around it too. A product has always appeared somewhere in the flesh but now it can appear elsewhere too in the soul. A product has always told a story, but often that story was mere promotion. Now a product can bring forth a narrative involving the next customer in an altogether more personal manner. A product always aspired to become a brand – now a product can expand into a brand by leveraging a third space which dramatizes everything a product can be.

The spatial realm forms a third option in the brutal online/offline dilemma facing products everywhere. It can narrate the brand story around a product in a home or retail setting that is suddenly intimate and original. Episodic content can enrich the engagement with products so they become relational objects, not just tools. That content can move beyond promotion to involve entertainment, education and interaction. We can meet new products in the spatial realm long before we meet them in the real world. And ultimately, we can create our own holographic content utilizing products.

The digital economy has denuded our real world of retail options, sense of place and serendipitous footfall. As the unique boutiques have boarded up, we’ve withdrawn onto our sofas, ordering an armada of cardboard boxes half of which gets returned unused. It’s a weird dispensation, all sold on the magic carpet of universal availability and environmental mindfulness. In fact, we have disrupted age-old traditions of commerce which originated in the Fertile Crescent. We are left with ubiquitous chain-stores, so similar everywhere there is no reason to set foot in them. And so, the digital cocooning proliferates and intensifies.

Think of the spatial realm around products as the brand’s new theater, a Greek word meaning ‘the place of seeing’. Except this seeing is three-dimensional. Just as we are three-dimensional and our shops are too. A hologram is not a flatscreen which sucks you in and cuts you off from your surroundings. A hologram integrates with your surroundings – it fulfills your immediate environment. A narrative hologram connects at a deeper level, beyond mere spectacle, on a relational plane. And episodic content builds on that relationship.

This new way of mediating products in real space allows us completely new ways of connecting with them. For a start, holographic products are shareable in a way flatscreen experiences never are. Sending someone a link is not the same as intaking the physical presence simultaneously together. Manufacturers and retailers can leverage this new realm to make what they do experiential in an unforgettable way. The linear lifecycle of a product can now become your transmedia IP.

Just as we all rushed online to replicate the worst sins of analogue advertising, the temptation will be to simply replicate the sins of virtuality in the spatial realm itself. Another channel to spam the audience, and one which by occupying our intimate airspace is far harder to ignore. But holography is not meant to be a rhetorical device. It is a new dramatic medium which deserves true stories. The spatial realm will be shared with your audience, and ultimately curated and created by them. By surrendering the command and control of products to these communities of practice, you will also gain far more. Original content for holographic experiences will become a whole new field of consumer expression.

But all of this is some years off from the early 2020s, when products are still recovering from recent lockdowns and environmental strategies are becoming paramount. If holographic products rescued the phenomenal disaster that is product return in e-commerce, they will have been more than worthwhile. If they rescue retail from digital extinction, they will win an illustrious fame. But if they do more than that – if they relate products to people in completely new ways – then what will we say in time to come?

We will find it hard to imagine what the world was like without them, just like we find it difficult to understand the world before mobile telephony. Mobile connectivity was a game-changing moment in human existence that altered the mechanics and dynamics of social interplay. The spatial realm is another moment in our evolution, a point where we returned to our immediate surrounds. William Gibson once said that cyberspace is where you are when you’re on the telephone. We can now say cyberspace is where we are, period. It is here.