ABOUT BRYAN:

LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/bryanmeszaros

Websites:

openeyeglobal.com (Company)marketscale.com/industries/podcast-network/experience-by-design/ (Experience By Design Podcast)experienceunitedsocialclub.com (Experience United Social Club)email: bmeszaros@openeyeglobal.com

Bio:

Bryan Meszaros is a 25-year veteran of the digital signage and experience design industry, known for blending innovation with measurable impact. As the founder of OpenEye Global, he proved that a small, focused team can deliver big results and helped shape the early evolution of digital engagement.

He later made history as the youngest President of SEGD and the first with a digital centric background, while also contributing to the Digital Signage Federation and Shop! Association to advance industry standards.

Bryan is also the founder of the Experience United Social Club (XUSC), an international networking series all about bringing together creative minds from the AV, digital signage, and design industries to share ideas and collaborate. With global experience across Europe and APAC, he has spoken at major events including EuroShop, ISE, InfoComm, and DSE, and regularly contributes to leading industry publications.

Dedicated to pushing boundaries, Bryan remains focused on shaping what comes next in digital signage and experiential design.

SHOW INTRO:

SHOW INTRO:

Welcome to Episode 83! of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast…

In every episode we continue to follow our catch phrase of having “Dynamic Dialogues About DATA: Design, Architecture, Technology and the Arts.” And as we continue on this journey there will be thought provoking futurists, AI technology mavens, retailers, international hotel design executives as well as designers and architects of brand experience places.

We’ll talk with authors and people focused on wellness and sustainable design practices as well as neuroscientists who will continue to help us look at the built environment and the connections between our mind-body and the built world around us. We’ll also have guests who are creative marketing masters from international brands and people who have started and grown some of the companies that are striking a new path for us follow.

If you like what you hear on the NXTLVL Experience Design show, make sure to subscribe, like, comment and share with colleagues, friends and family.

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is always grateful for the support of VMSD magazine. VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. I think the IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing us to keep on talking about what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org 

Today, EPISODE 83… I talk with Bryan Meszaros founder of EpenEye Global. Bryan is a 25-year veteran of the digital signage and experience design industry, known for blending innovation with measurable impact. 

Naturally, in a world that is increasingly digitally mediated, Bryan’s business is significantly focused on the emergence of Artificial Intelligence as a tool in his experience place-making toolbox.

We’ll get to more of how Bryan sees the use of AI in digital applications in brand experience places in a minute but... first a few thoughts…

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I grew up on Star Trek. They original version with Shatner as Captain James T Kirk. These were the sightly campy years in black and white but wonderfully prescient in foretelling what was to come. 

I used to say that my father, who lived to the ripe old age of 97 was so into it that was holding out until he could just beam up through the transporter to the next phase of his existence. We all watched, my 4 brothers and I every week, my mom? Well not so much…

I got used to thinking about digital communication, robots, space travel and technology integrated into our lives facilitating everything from washing dishes to extending lifespans. 

There isn’t a day that goes by now where my media consumption doesn’t include something on the evolution of Artificial Intelligence. Both the amazing and the alarming.  

How it will make workplaces completely different replacing much of what we now do with human brain and brawn with algorithms and computer chips that can fit 1000 computers from the old Star Trek days on your fingertip. 

How it is changing the way human brains are wired, though when it comes to our neural networks that trundle along at a speed ridiculously slow compared to the digital pace of change that is exponential and moving at the speed of light.

How as a visualization tool it is becoming indistinguishable from real life people and places. Creating deep fakes that are so good at impersonating humans that avatars are no longer cartoonish but facsimiles of us that are, well, exactly like us - but whose knowledge base is the compendium of all human knowledge that can be accessed on the internet and provide cogent answers to well-crafted prompts and have them served up in a few seconds. 

‘The times they are a changin’ but at a pace that even Dillan couldn’t have imagined. Don’t even get me started about when we finally, and I don’t think it is going to take too long, get to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and what that portends for humankind. 

I am often concerned for my sons and the world they are growing into as young adults. I wish sometimes that they’d have had the experience of growing up in the 60’s and 70’s when times were simpler – but of course they weren’t really. Every decade has it’s messes – sometime beautiful sometimes not and sometimes each of these ends of the human experience spectrum were happening at the same time.

What we are experiencing now is evolution at a revolutionary pace. A slow simmering flame has exploded into a blast furn ace of change propelling us all, whether we like it or not, on a path that at times seems to be heading towards the edger of a cliff. 

Concerned? Well you’d have good reason to be.

But then again, if you accept the Ray Bradburry adage of sometimes while standing at the edge of the cliff ‘you need to jump and build your wings on the way down’, may we all then transform in midflight into some sort of lemmings with wings.

The subject of AI has surfaced a number of times on this podcast notably with data visualization artists like Refik Anadol and architect artist Samar Younes,  spatial computing specialist and near futurist Neil Redding and Synchronicity Architect Justin Bolognino. Each of these creators and theorists shape the AI narrative to their own ends, each of them proclaiming the virtues and vices of the technology.

Uses of AI in design and architecture, as well as other industries, is multifarious and, I would admit, well beyond my more general appreciation for using it as an ideation tool and writing assistant in my everyday work.

In the world of experience design there are at least 2 ways - although I would guess many more - to look at it:

- on a very basic level there is the physical integration of digital media facilitated by Ai and then there is actual content that ends up on the digital interface – be it a touch screen kiosk, a display array in a sports bar or an enormous multi-story wall in Times Square. 

Getting these screens to work with the environment is always a challenge. Mainly I believe because they come as an afterthought rather than an integrated design solution and part of a digital experience strategy.

In the second case of content, one size does not fit all. 

Places and people are different. The same content being played on those screens all day are visual noise detracting from overall experience rather than enhancing it. These days, every minute of every day things are changing. Why should digital content on screen of any size and shape be any different?

If purveyors of brand experiences are not changing content to adapt to customers everchanging needs across the journey, digital content simply becomes part of the visual texture of the environment slipping into irrelevancy and lending nothing to the embodied memory of a place.

This is one area Ai is able to change the game – creating content to meet customer needs more directly. 

Now it would be difficult, if not impossible to change digital content in Times Square to continually meet the needs of the thousands of people in that digital epicenter in New York. But then we all carry cell phones – person digital devices. 

All of those phones are geolocated. Each of those those has an address – a personal identifier about who it belongs to and bunch of other information about you – personal, financial, home address, etc.

Are a bunch of guys at google looking at you individually as you make your way across Times Square – not really – but your Hazel and Gretel trail of ones and zeros from purchases, GPS searches, app use, etc., etc., tell a lot about you should anyone want to do a little digital forensics.

The idea here is that we are giving up this information every time we turn our phones on. That information isn’t snatched from us without our consent (generally) it’s in our service agreement terms and conditions – that impossibly long text that most of us scroll through to the end and click “agree.”

But that informatio

Id. d’épisode : 1000739925435

GUID : b4427971-f89f-46d4-93f3-b1baa74a70ca

Date de publication : 5/12/2025 à 23:35:33