If technology is your canvas, what will you create?

“Talking about technology in itself is never a good thing,” Saha said “Technology is the start point not the end point”. So his real goal is looking at how to use tech to help captivate and immerse people. Or better yet to “educate, inspire and empower.”

The first example he laid out was how to let people know about the ‘web speech API’? The name is not rousing. But what it does is turn voice into text via a browser, which in the hands of creative people could lead to unimagined advances. 

To demonstrate the technology, Google Creative Lab made ‘Spell Up’, a voice driven game where non-native English speakers spell and pronounce words to make a tower. The more they get right, the higher it goes. But one mistake will topple it down. Of course it only works with Google’s Chrome browser.

Each part of Saha’s talk looked at how gamification or partnering with unusual suspects could spark engaging new ways of deploying technology. The most original examples came from the company’s DevArt project, which just finished a run at the Barbican in London. It’s all about making art with code and the inspirational ways that form and function can come together.

Campaign's observation: The only disappointment was that though the whole session was about exciting ways of using technology, the presentation itself was just a guy on stage pushing the play button on a series of videos.  Good thing the message is more than the medium.