The International Association of Venue Managers (IAVM)’s ConventionCalendar.com has entered into a strategic partnership with the San Francisco Travel Association to feature Moscone Center, San Francisco’s largest convention and meeting space.

The new Internet-based calendar links Moscone Center with tens of thousands of meeting planners, guiding them through the site selection process for potential new meetings and events. IAVM’s ConventionCalendar.com provides convention center partners a destination marketing and convention booking engine that raises awareness of the economic value convention facilities provide to local communities.

“We have a lot of respect for Mr. Shaff and the Moscone management team. Our unique, collaborative partnership with Moscone Center is a real competitive advantage for San Francisco,” said John Reyes, executive vice president and chief sales officer for the San Francisco Travel Association. “The new calendar program will showcase the combined efforts of the DMO and center staff.”

“Moscone Center is a tremendous economic engine for the Bay Area region and we are proud to join with IAVM to demonstrate how conventions and meetings mean big business for San Francisco,” said Dick Shaff, vice president/general manager of Moscone Center.

The three buildings – Moscone South, Moscone North, and Moscone West – cover more than 20 acres on three adjacent blocks with over two million square feet of building area. Combined, the three buildings consist of over 740,000 square feet of exhibit space, more than 100 meeting rooms, and as many as four ballrooms.

Donovan Shia, managing director of IAVM’s ConventionCalendar.com program, says “the partnership between the San Francisco Travel Association and Moscone Center is a winning model. Mr. Shaff is a long-term supporter of IAVM and a recognized leader in the venue management industry. We are very excited about the opportunity to feature Moscone Center.”

One of the talking points at the recent Performing Arts Managers Conference in San Francisco, California, was about attracting new audiences by expanding a venue’s outreach efforts. For example, during the “Building Demand for the Performing Arts” session attendees were encouraged to work with communities and demonstrate a new level of relevancy. One way to do that is through resident companies. Take the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for instance.

“Orchestras across the country have been shaken by the loss of subscribers, aging audiences, declining corporate donations, labor strife, and the struggle of remaining relevant in an era when technology is redefining how people spend their leisure hours,” Jeffrey Fleishman wrote for the Los Angeles Times. “Younger generations, in particular, are demanding more diverse programming and freedom to choose their concerts a la carte instead of buying season tickets. The L.A. Phil’s success—it has the largest budget of any U.S. orchestra—has kept it from feeling the full force of these problems.”

One way the orchestra overcomes its challenges is through the Hollywood Bowl, which gives the orchestra a steady income through a 30-year lease. The orchestra runs the complex, booking rentals to promoters for other acts when it’s not performing.

“The Bowl, which this year will add new box seats and increase its movie-themed programming, including a screening of Back to the Future, attracts audiences that are more diverse than those who attend the more formal concerts in Disney Hall,” Fleishman wrote. “That’s a big plus at a time when orchestras nationwide are looking to broaden their cachet beyond the tuxedo set.”

And the L.A. Phil isn’t the only orchestra working to bring in new audiences with unique programming. Other organizations are doing such things as Web-streaming live performances, late-night concert events, and partnering with pop artists for shows.

“We have to set a tone and excitement around classical music that it’s not just for an elite group of people who want to get dressed up on Thursday nights,” Diane B. Paul, chairman of the Phil’s board of directors, told Fleishman. “People are experiencing classical music in different ways. You can’t stay still.”

[photo credit: Opening Night @ the Hollywood Bowl. via photopin (license)]

The first annual North American Meetings Industry Day (NAMID) will take place Thursday, April 16, 2015. This North America-wide day of advocacy will spotlight the substantial value derived from business meetings, conferences, conventions, incentive travel, trade shows, and exhibitions.

U.S.-based events will be led by the Meetings Mean Business (MMB) coalition. The Canada and Mexico chapters of Meeting Professionals International, in addition to other industry partners, will be driving events throughout Canada and Mexico.

“We are excited to be involved in such a meaningful day that unites our industry not only across the United States, but also across Canada and Mexico, communicating the critical role in connecting people and driving positive business results through face-to-face interaction,” said Michael Dominguez, MMB’s co-chair and senior vice president of corporate sales at MGM Resorts International. “Across the continent, we will demonstrate how meetings build personal relationships, drive positive outcomes, and support strong communities.”

Registration for events is now open, and an informational toolkit can be found on the NAMID page. It offers talking points, ways to celebrate the day, and FAQs.

In “A Multitude of Realities,” FM contributor Michael Pinchera interviews Dr. Albert Rizzo about virtual reality technology and how it can enhance guest experiences. The following is some background on Dr. Rizzo and his work exploring technology and the brain.

Dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo lost a lot of quarters and, ironically, brain cells playing Pong, Pac-Man and Galaga in bars. But while working at a brain injury-rehab center, around 1990, he was struck by the potential intersection of his interests.

“One day, I saw a patient bent over under a tree and I asked, ‘Hey Tim, are you OK? What have you got? What are you doing?’ He said, ‘The new thing, a Game Boy.’ And I watched him. I was seeing a 22-year-old frontal lobe injury patient that I couldn’t motivate to do traditional cognitive rehabilitation tasks for more than 10 minutes—and he was glued to this and had become a Tetris warlord! That’s when I first thought, ‘We need to gamify rehab tasks.’”

Shortly thereafter, Rizzo brought a Super Nintendo and the game Sim City to the rehab center, and the patients loved it—“They were going to town building cities!” That really got him fired up about the potential clinical uses for game technology.

“[Sim City] is the ultimate executive function-training thing,” says Rizzo, now a research professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California (USC), director of medical virtual reality for the school’s Institute for Creative Technologies, and associate editor of CyberPsychology & Behavior and the International Journal of Virtual Reality. “Executive function is really the brain of the brain—the frontal lobe activities that orchestrate your other cognitive functions into a unified game plan for solving problems. Every normal healthy person has executive function where they’re planning their day and they’re plotting their strategies and organizing—some better than others. Well, Sim City does all that and in a very clear way.”

Although he had to force himself to step away from playing video games as entertainment—“I got a little bit too into it and lost a girlfriend over a game I got hooked on, Contra III: The Alien Wars. I loved that game, man.”—his research marched on.

In 1995, Rizzo set up a lab at USC to explore how virtual reality (VR) and gaming technologies could be used in brain-injury rehabilitation.

“By 1996 or so, we had our first application—that also coincided with the first nuclear winter on VR,” Rizzo says.

In the super highly technological 1990s that introduced most humans to the Internet, inspired modern existential philosophy, and pop science fiction dystopian fare such as The Lawnmower Man, Total Recall, and Strange Days, much of the interest in VR collapsed along with media hype.

“The vision of VR was sound, but the technology just wasn’t there to deliver on it after 1995 when the bottom fell out,” he says. “But a lot of people in mental health and rehabilitation stuck with VR because it was unique, fascinating, and pointed a way to the future. Now I’m happy to say I think the technology has caught up with the vision, so we can do things we only dreamed about back then.”

VR first got clinical traction around that time to treat patients with anxiety disorders and phobias through exposure therapy—confronting fears in the context of safe scenarios.

“That blossomed into the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) work,” he says.

A virtual Vietnam scenario created in 1997 showed promise in treating veterans of that conflict suffering from PTSD. And at about the same time that researchers working with a World Trade Center/Sept. 11 VR environment published positive results (2002), Rizzo started building Iraq and Afghanistan PTSD treatment simulations. (He was subsequently recognized with the American Psychological Association’s 2010 Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Treatment of Trauma.)

He says analyses of several studies found that VR scenarios outperform traditional imagination-only exposure therapy and could be as effective as real-world exposure therapy.

“Mental health, generally, is a shining area where it makes sense to use VR, because we’re taking an already-known principle (exposure therapy), an already known evidence-based treatment, and delivering it more—or at least as—effectively, but with a little bit more excitement and draw for patients.”

Further emphasizing the technology’s impact on the human brain, Rizzo says dramatic results have been realized in its use for pain distraction.

“You put somebody in a VR headset and give them a game-like activity to distract them from the pain and you see dramatic differences, dramatic drop offs in the perception of pain, even to the [extent that] when tested in an FMRI system you see less activation of the pain centers in the brain.”

[photo credit: Sportsfile (Web Summit) via photopin (license)]

Attendees at the recent Performing Arts Managers Conference in San Francisco, California, were given a demonstration of the Constellation sound system at the Zellerbach Rehearsal Hall at the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center. It was an ear-opening experience, in which sound moved in circles or surrounded the audience like a warm fleece.

We weren’t the only ones impressed with the system. Music critic Alex Ross was, too, and he wrote about it for The New Yorker.

“Its principal purpose is to enable flexibility, so that halls can adapt to the needs of different kinds of event. Cinema needs a dry, echo-free environment, so that words can be understood. Chamber music benefits from crisp sound with resonant warmth. Orchestras are at home in halls with a longer reverberation time—more than two seconds, at the Musikverein. And choruses thrive on the booming acoustic of a cathedral. Constellation replicates this range of reverb times, which vary with the size of the space. One can choose from among different settings: cinema or lecture hall (0.4 seconds); chamber (one second); theatre (1.4 seconds); concert hall (two seconds); and “sacred space” (2.8 seconds). Thus, the system can give bloom to a somewhat dry acoustic, as at Zellerbach Hall, in Berkeley, and it can supply a cleaner sound for amplified jazz and pop, as at Svetlanov Hall, in Moscow.”

Zellerbach Rehearsal Hall is also where the San Francisco Symphony holds its SoundBox events that make use of the Constellation system in an effort to attract a different (and sometimes younger) audience. It appears to be working, as each event has sold out.

Please read The New Yorker article, “Wizards of Sound,” for more about the Constellation sound system.

(h/t: Jennifer Norris. Image: San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center)