Devon Lyon: What is augmented storytelling?

With TEDxSalem mere days away (who else is excit­ed?!) we are delight­ed to announce the last in our tal­ent­ed speak­er line­up: Tigard-based sto­ry­teller and film pro­duc­er Devon Lyon.

Lyon is the founder and force behind Lyon Films, a pro­duc­tion and media com­pa­ny based in the Port­land area (Lyon him­self grew up right here in Salem). After grad­u­at­ing from Lin­field Col­lege in McMin­nville, Lyon went on to work in com­mu­ni­ca­tions in the Ore­gon leg­is­la­ture, ulti­mate­ly serv­ing as com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for the Speak­er of the House.

“That was fun,” he said. “When I was pret­ty young, though, I always want­ed to go to law school and so that’s what I did.”

Lyon head­ed down to Cal­i­for­nia, passed the bar exam and began work­ing in busi­ness and enter­tain­ment lit­i­ga­tion in Los Ange­les. But it was­n’t long before he missed Ore­gon.

“I was­n’t born here, but I moved here when I was four,” he said. “So every­thing I can remem­ber is from here and I want­ed to get back to the Pacif­ic North­west. That was like, 10 years ago, and I want­ed to hone in more on visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions. So nine years ago, I start­ed my com­pa­ny.”

Lyon Films does com­mer­cial pro­duc­tion, from every­thing to music videos to nation­al com­mer­cials (includ­ing a recent spot for Intel, filmed right in the Port­land Air­port).

But for TEDxSalem, Lyon wants to explore the inter­sec­tion of his inter­ests, includ­ing tech­nol­o­gy, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and sto­ry­telling.

“Bri­an Hart approached me and said I might be a good per­son for TED talks because of my back­ground,” he said. “There’s been a big tech­no­log­i­cal change and democ­ra­ti­za­tion of the way pro­duc­tion works. But I was­n’t inter­est­ed in a nuts and bolts speech, so I asked, what if I did a fun, imag­i­na­tive talk?”

The top­ic of Lyon’s TED talk will be aug­ment­ed sto­ry­telling (it’s his term). We won’t give away too much here, but the way Lyon sees it, there’s a num­ber of excit­ing and imag­i­na­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties in the con­ver­gence of vir­tu­al real­i­ty, Google glass and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty gam­ing.

Not famil­iar with aug­ment­ed real­i­ty? Devel­op­ers have been cre­at­ing video games based on live, direct views of the real world with com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed sen­so­ry (like sound or video or graph­ics) added on top. It’s quite lit­er­al­ly a tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-sup­ple­ment­ed ver­sion of your real­i­ty. And Lyon wants peo­ple to use their imag­i­na­tions and explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties as it relates to sto­ry­telling.

“It’s still kind of a niche thing, but I’m just real­ly inter­est­ed and curi­ous in it,” he said. “All this tech­nol­o­gy is con­verg­ing in this way, but we’ll have to wait a lit­tle longer to see the horse­pow­er. Most peo­ple get Google glass, but I want to kind of get their imag­i­na­tions going as all this tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­ues to con­verge.”

It’s not too late to get your tick­et for TEDxSalem! Tick­ets are avail­able here at http://goo.gl/pI3UJ2 or at the Elsi­nore box office.