Guest blog Fred: Armin Stross-Radschinski: The future of content?

What is the next disruptive thing coming our way? Difficult to say: streaming video: yes. Apple Newton: wrong timing.

Interactive content could be the next thing. Viewers control the content and choose what to do (next).

Media assets, what do we have now? Text, images, audio, video.

The browser is a stage. Sliders, accordeons, carrousels. Timing matters, video is linear, only one thing to control.

Another example of new interactive content: the scrolling one-pager, where you scroll down a page and there's a parallax effect, scrolling animations, movies. etc. Java and flash enabled these kinds of things earlier but didn't catch on that much. HTML5 and javascript are stronger enablers.

Why is interactive content interesting for business? Offer all the overload of content in different representations. Multichannel publication is another thing: re-use content in different ways. Tell different stories, tell the same story in a different way.

Warning: keep your assets under control, the cloud is a dangerous place for your media. Have a media archive internally. Control metadata. EXIF can be corrupted by external (cloud services). Also usage and license tracking is difficult if not impossible with many cloud hosting services. The best future is now: the browser has become very powerful.

Digital signage: public screen, led walls, info screens. But you need a CMS as a backend to provide the data. Display devices have become powerful: PDF display, 3D, panoramic images. Audio/Video. And you can do this on mobile phones, tablets, pc sticks you just insert in the back of your TV.

Something else that's coming: gamification. Interactive solutions, touch is getting common to interact with content. Don't overdo control though, sometimes people want to relax and sit back to enjoy the content.

Panoramic views are quite old already: viewmaster toys, 3D stereo images with special goggles and the stereoscope. New VR technologies allow to give viewers an overview of an area or geography, but imaging showing an overview of content, documents, images on a virtual 3D wall in front of you. Or overlay reality with computer content.

Devices now: Google Glass, Oculus Rift. Expensive, but costs start to decrease. Google Cardboard. In 2016 the consumer version of Oculus Rift will be coming. VR viewers widen your horizon. A monitor only gives you a very small view angle. But a headset will scroll when you move your head, giving you the illusion of a huge view angle and it will become an immersive experience.

Navigation in 3D. New input devices: display control items as overlays in the virtual environment, when you look at control links you can jump to them. The CMSes will have to support these new controls and directives, with extra assets and application settings to control these 3D devices. 3D impresses: it's like being there, the context is always right and memorizing (the experience) is more intense.

Plone will need to adapt to make this future happen and support new approaches and integrate these technologies. There's more than the web. Plone already has a lot: secure base functionality, can deal with unstructured data, python to script a lot, workflow process control.

[Thanks to Fred van Dijk for this guest blog.]