In order to future-proof our client’s projects, our company continually performs extensive research to understand the impact that constant connectivity and digital entertainment, as well as other cultural changes are having on the location-based entertainment industry. Along the lines of what we are finding in our research, I found a very interesting comment by James Cameron, director of The Titanic and Avatar movies in an interview by Jose Rottenberg in the current issue of Fast Company magazine:
Rottenberg: In The Terminator, you envisioned a future in which machines would become self-aware and take over humankind. Thirty years later, how do you think that prophecy holds up?
Cameron: It’s happening. When people are arguing over whether drone aircraft should be able to autonomously take out a human target, you’re into Terminator territory. Sit in any airport lounge and look around at the number of people hunched over, looking at a device. The machines have already won—only in a way that the Terminator films didn’t imagine.
And I’d add, just think about it, we now talk to our devices asking them for information and advice and take directions from them. Oh, how the age of the machine is upon us in such a short time.
About Randy White
Randy White is CEO and co-founder of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group. The 31-year-old company, with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, has worked for over 600 clients in 37 countries throughout the world. Projects the company has designed and produced have won seventeen 1st place awards. Randy is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on feasibility, brand development, design and production of leisure experience destinations including entertainment, eatertainment, edutainment, agritainment/agritourism, play and leisure facilities.
Randy was featured on the Food Network's Unwrapped television show as an eatertainment expert, quoted as an entertainment/edutainment center expert in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and Time magazine and received recognition for family-friendly designs by Pizza Today magazine. One of the company's projects was featured as an example of an edutainment project in the book The Experience Economy. Numerous national newspapers have interviewed him as an expert on shopping center and mall entertainment and retail-tainment.
Randy is a graduate of New York University. Prior to repositioning the company in 1989 to work exclusively in the leisure and learning industry, White Hutchinson was active in the retail/commercial real estate industry as a real estate consultancy specializing in workouts/turnarounds of commercial projects. In the late 1960s to early 1980s, Randy managed a diversified real estate development company that developed, owned and managed over 2.0 million square feet of shopping centers and mixed-use projects and 2,000 acres of residential subdivisions. Randy has held the designations of CSM (Certified Shopping Center Manager) and Certified Retail Property Executive (CRX) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
He has authored over 150 articles that have been published in over 40 leading entertainment/leisure and early childhood education industry magazines and journals and has been a featured speaker and keynoter at over 40 different conventions and trade groups.
Randy is the editor of his company's Leisure eNewsletter, has a blog and posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
