I've got used to the fact that product presentations can no longer take place as on-site events in times of pandemic.
But what I've seen of online novelty shows in the past few weeks makes me think that we've now reached the next level.
The virtual product presentations started with a strange Huawei press conference in February 2020 in Barcelona. The Chinese company actually wanted to appear at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), but it was canceled because the corona pandemic was beginning. However, Huawei's managers did not let this slow them down. After all, they had flown in their staff two weeks before the show so that all employees could sit out the quarantine required at the time in their hotels.
What was then offered to around 200 to 300 people in the hall was hard to beat in terms of absurdity: a film was simply played over the completely empty stage in which the head of Huawei's mobile division, Richard Yu, stood on precisely this stage, the presented new smartphones and called up the presentation slides with a click, which were shown on other screens in parallel.
A few months later, Apple presented a kind of blueprint for the web events of the following months at its keynote streamed online for the WWDC developer conference: an elaborately pre-produced show in which innovations are shown every second. The Californian company didn't even try to give the impression that something was happening live. Instead, Tim Cook was shown at the beginning, introducing the keynote in an apparently deserted Steve Jobs theater.
One and a half years after Huawei's pseudo live show in Barcelona, the former Huawei subsidiary Honor showed last week how it shouldn't be done. In the performance shown as "live" on the Honor website and other channels, Honor CEO George Zhao gave a 90-minute presentation that featured two absurd stylistic devices.
On the one hand, there were video recordings that looked like TV advertising, in which an apparently American spokesman in a sonorous voice again touted the properties of the new smartphones that had just been presented. And secondly, the applause from the scene, which, like an American sitcom, always flared up at exactly the right moment, always had the same intensity and subsided after a few seconds. If these recordings had been varied so that they didn't seem quite so static, it might not have been so noticeable.
Not noticed at all - and therefore all the more effective - was the stunt that Nvidia, which specializes in chips for graphics cards and data centers, carried out in April. As is currently customary in the industry, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave a virtual keynote at the beginning of the event. Nobody noticed at the time how virtual his speech actually was. Only now has the company lifted the veil and declared: The real boss could only be seen at the beginning of the show, but then a computer-generated virtual counterpart in a digital replica of his kitchen took over the job. A virtual product presentation cannot be made more virtual.
As impressive as the coup may be from a technical point of view, I still hope that this will not be standard, but that there will finally be events again in the coming year for which you don't just have to open the browser.
Although, of course, they also have their advantages.
Because if the applause played in from the tape is too annoying, I can simply close the browser, wait for the press release and meanwhile use my time more sensibly.
It's not that easy with a live event.
External links: three tips from other media
"Looks That Quill: The Dark Side of Hedgehog Instagram" (English, 15 minutes reading time)
If you didn't realize that hedgehogs are the secret stars of the internet, you should read this somewhat dissolute treatise on the subject.
Perhaps afterwards you will also subscribe to 553 hedgehog accounts, like the author of the text.
»Nestflix« (as much time as you like)
The creators of this website have gathered more than 400 fictional films that appear in films and fictional shows that appear in shows, show screenshots and explain in which shows, films and Series they occur.
You can just click through it - or turn it into a guessing game.
"#TGIQF - The Friday Quiz: 40 Years of IBM PC" (as long as you need)
Just like us, "heise online" honored the anniversary of the legendary desktop PC with a text last week.
This quiz is a great way to see how many details you really know about the history of this computer.
Stay healthy!
Matthias Kremp
