SXSW 2019 Interactive Innovation Awards Ceremony March 11th

March 4th, 2019

David Keene

 

SXSW announced the 2019 Interactive Innovation Awards Finalists in January. The Awards Ceremony will take place next week, on Monday, March 11, at SXSW 2019 in Austin.

Beginning in June of 2018, innovators and creators from around the world entered their new projects to vie for top honors and the opportunity to showcase their work in front of SXSW attendees and Innovation Awards judges. Five finalists in each of the 13 categories were selected to come to SXSW in Austin this March and demonstrate their work at the Interactive Innovation Awards Showcase on Saturday, March 9, and to attend the Awards Ceremony on March 11.

Anyone who attended SXSW 2018 in Austin could not come away from the conference, as I did, with anything other than the strong feeling that the tech landscape is changing in ways now more exciting than confusing. As I wrote in my conference coverage last spring, “if you understand what SXSW is doing, and you understand what a few extremely creative companies like Moment Factory, and Obscura, are doing– you’ll be further along the path of understanding the new experiential landscape.”

Most refreshing of all: the landscape at SXSW last spring changed dramatically. Out was so much obsession with smartphone apps, and in – if you knew where to look– was the kind of interactive technology that would make any seasoned veteran of the NAB, CES, ISE, DSE, or InfoComm shows pause and take notice. Larger (and some huge) digital palettes (think bigger displays, direct-view LED, and large venue projection), and VR, AR, and AI had finally turned the attention of SXSW and its corporate attendees (the SXSW Interactive portion of the event that has 25,000 badged corporate attendees) away from all those apps and toward the new kinds of immersive technologies that are raising the bar for all things experiential

Indeed. But don’t confuse SXSW with a typical trade show or tech conference. Thank god, it’s not. SXSW takes such a different approach to technology, including interactive, that, well, you just gotta experience the conference and Awards programs in person to see how they do things differently. And the event is coming up fast – and this should be on your radar:

The 22nd annual Interactive Innovation Awards, according to SXSW, “brings together the most innovative and forward thinking advancements from the digital space. Open to all SXSW Interactive, Film, Music, and Platinum badgeholders, the Interactive Innovation Awards will display the most impressive projects in the fields of AI & Machine Learning, Health, Med, & BioTech, Music & Audio Innovation, Robotics and Hardware, Speculative Design, VR, AR & MR, and more.”

 

Read the details by clicking here.