Unique interface design
Cloudy with a chance of music videos
Singer/song-writer Lissie has release a new music video on her web site that is controlled by the current weather conditions in your location. When you get to her site it will determine your current position or you can choose yourself and the background of the video will change according to the current weather outside. If you select a new location while the video is playing a TV weatherman will provide a new forecast as an intermission while the video transitions to the new location’s weather. I think creating this type of unique digital experience is a smart investment for artists trying to break into the main stream media consciousness and you only have to look at OK GO’s YouTube sensation ‘Here It Goes Again’ to see the possibilities.
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Flipboard: The iPad’s social media powered magazine
Thanks to my job I have spent some time over the past few weeks with a fully loaded iPad which has been enlightening to have the chance to experiment with it and confirm my feelings about how useful it would be for me. Putting my feeling about Apple’s application creation and approval process aside I can see it’s potential but in it’s current form with the current portfolio of applications I still feel that it’s the spork of computing.
To be fair, the one thing I consistently liked about it was the size of the device useful on my train ride into New York City because the seats are like an airplane and too close together to let you open your laptop comfortably. I could surf the parts of the Internet that worked on it but it didn’t come close to being able to become a light weight replacement for my laptop. I was frustrated that I was never able to do any real work on the thing aside from starting to write a few blog posts through the WordPress application.
I did experiment and try out a lot of applications and was really disappointed to see how many of them like ABC News, Gilt and Wired were just iPhone applications with new layouts or repurposing print content with a little interaction sprinkled in. The one application I was really impressed with was Flipboard and you may recognize the development crew from the mobile sales tool called Square (new video here). The application is only for iPad and takes your data from Facebook and friend’s Twitter photos and links to create your own personalized, social media powered magazine. I love the concept because each ‘edition’ of the Flipboard application is unique based on the fact that every person is going to have a unique collection of friends. Should you have boring friends there are also a few collections on various topics that Flipboard has put together similar to what you would find in an application like Cool Hunting. So in the end this new take on the magazine that is powered by dynamic media is really interesting and starts to pay off on the potential of the iPad. I only hope more publications bring this kind of innovative thinking to their digital versions and applications.
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Toyota creates a four wheeled computer mouse
Toyota in New Zealand needed a way to demonstrate the agility of their super compact Toyota iQ car so they turned into a four wheeled computer mouse that could move a cursor on a giant screen and operate a desktop computer. They did it a lot like motion capture that is used in 3D animation where a camera captured the car that had a light strapped to the top of it. Software interpreted the data from the camera and translated its position into X-Y co-ordinates. The co-ordinates were then sent to a second laptop 30 times per second which read the data and moved the cursor in real-time. The image on the second laptop was then projected onto a large screen.
The whole thing is reminiscent of the BMW Expression of Joy campaign where they used a Z4 as a paintbrush but in this case they went for something more revenue centric by using the car to create a print ad for the car itself. You can see the whole thing in the video above or at their microsite and they have made the code they used to create the event available to everyone as a free download.
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Architecture + digital technology = N Building Tokyo
In tokyo near the Tachikawa station amidst a shopping district you will find the N Building. It is unique because if you have ever been to Asia you know that most ever building in these commercial districts has signs and billboards covering almost ever inch of the facade but not in this case. The facade of the N Building is one giant QR code that triggers up to date shop information, Tweets from building residents and even AR decorations for different seasons and events. Check out the video above for all the details but I think this is a fascinating direction for new retail experiences that can go far beyond the traditional store windows and branding.
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I am Iron Man with markerless AR
Marvel & Paramount releases a new augmented reality site / application today powered by Total Immersion technology that lets you see what you’d look like wearing the Iron Man / War Machine helmets or go inside the helmet to see the internal Heads Up Display. I’ve written before about Total Immersion AR for the work they did with Tops Baseball Cards and this new Iron Man AR experience is just as interesting as that was one. The big difference between the two is that this new Iron Man experience doesn’t require you to have a baseball card or print out a marker for it to work. You would think that would a huge step forward but it comes with a different set of problems. First is that you have to go through the dreaded plug-in download which is only around 5MB but we all know how prohibitive that simple step can be for people. Next is that I found the plug-in initialization took a really long time. I launched the site, clicked to start the experience and it took me over 5 minutes on my insanely fast FIOS connection to have the plug-in initialize and download the content. During that time I was treated to only a spastic loading bar which felt like a missed opportunity to sell tickets, market a promotional partner or pretty much anything but making me look at that load bar. The plug-in finally came online, I picked my webcam and a few second later the video came up with an open Iron Man helmet popping over my face. After a second or two the helmet snaps shut to give you the full effect of the helmet. The helmet is able to track with your head pretty well and would only consistently lose position if you the turned part 45 degrees right or left. After trying it a few times I found it struggled with how big to make the helmet and it would either make it too small so I had red hair sticking out the top or too big so it would make me look like a bobble head. You can record all of this which is a great idea to make the content viral but yet again I found it crushed by technical problems. I hit the record button, played around with the helmet and when it was done I hit OK hoping to be able to post in this article. The first times I wait 30 minutes and got nada. Tried a third time and waited and hour and you got it – nada. The ‘Processing Video’ message was the only thing I was treated so sorry but you get the generic YouTube video instead.
So while you can see how augmented reality technology is advancing in this site the technical problems are just too much overcome. If they can find a way to create this experience more in line with the older embedded web site technology and lose the install and initiation time then I think it will be moving into an area where we can start creating some seriously interesting experiences.
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Nikon moves one step closer to Minority Report
I don’t know anyone who didn’t want Tom Cruise’s virtual desk in movie Minority Report and the new Nikon Cool Pix web site has us one step closer to that dream. The site uses your web cam to let you explore and manipulate your photo libraries on the site with gestures like what you would use on their Cool Pix camera which amazing just like the ones you use on your iPhone. You can experience the demo with some sample photos here. The element that isn’t pictured here and is probably the coolest executions are that in addition to the Web site they also put the technology into ad units and for use on other sites like Flickr through a simple bookmark. It’s a really nice tie-in from the product to the interactive experience that lets you experience something on the camera without ever having one.
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Skittles.com Ends Social Media Experiment
Less than a year after Skittles launched their social media centric clone of Modernista.com they have re-designed the site yet again. This new version again looks to go against traditional conventions by foregoing navigation in favor of a long scrolling web page. I found it surprising that in spite of the page length there is very little content and even less interaction available. There are some photos include a clown in an astronaut suite, links to their Twiiter accounts and a YouTube video but that is pretty much it. Wrigley’s also launched a new microsite called ShareSkittles.com where you can upload video to a randomly paired interactive montage of two people sharing Skittles.
Though the content is light it looks to create a strong interactive platform for the brand that looks to make much better use of the medium than what we saw with the previous generation of work. It is also worth noting that this work is the first to come out of Wrigley’s new roster of digital agencies after they replaced Tribal DDB, Agency.com and Digitas with Firstborn, Big Spaceship and EVB. The three agencies collaborated on the Skittles work, with Big Spaceship handling Skittles.com, Firstborn building ShareSkittles.com and EVB doing their soon to be launched Facebook campaign.
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Social media content compose Grammy nominated artists
I can say with almost complete certainty that the launch of a new awards show Web site has never created the least bit of interest on my part until today and the launch of the Grammy Awards new site WereAllFans.com. The site creates pseudo photo mosaics of 11 featured artists from Dave Matthews to Beyonce out of YouTube, Twitter and Flickr content that was tagged with each of the artists. Each image only borrows from the photo mosaic aesthetic but is more of a semi-transparent image imposed over top of all of the content. Putting the social media content into this format takes it from the thing we have started to overlook because it is so ubiquitous on every site to an interesting and compelling experience that makes it fun to explore. You can look at all the content at once or narrow it down to just site through the simple control interface at the bottom of the page. ‘Join the Conversation’ lets you sign into any of the sites and post your own content with the correct tags so that your content will appear on the site for your favorite artist.
The other half of the site is the The Fanbuzz Visualizer that is a real time data visualization that monitors the daily and total social media buzz for each of the Grammy nominated artists. This experience isn’t nearly as well done as the social media mosaics as I found it littered with technical and design problems. I started with Today’s Posts and was only able to drag and scroll down the 3D list once in 10 tries. Frustrated with that experience I switched over to Total Posts that changes the view to a 2D list and I found that I could click and drag to scroll the content. That relief was quickly replaced by a new frustration as I found that if I kept my browser window in it’s normal more vertical shape the artists and the results were cut off to the point where I couldn’t read a lot of it. After some exploring I realized I had to change the window to a more horizontal shape and that would force the content to zoom back so I could read it. So while it would have been nice to see the same level of innovation and polish put into both halves of the site, the social media content mosaics make it worth checking out.
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Graffiti Analysis 2.0 – Documenting more than just ink.
I found an interesting site today called Graffiti Analysis that studies the unseen motion involved in creating a tag as opposed to just documenting the results. The original version of Graffiti Analysis, developed in 2004 as part of thesis research at Parsons in New York City and can be viewed here. The new version is done with custom software that records the motion data and archives it in a free database housed at 000000book.com in Graffiti Markup Language (GML) files, a new digital standard used by other popular graffiti applications such as Laser Tag and EyeWriter. Influential graffitis artist such as SEEN, TWIST, AMAZE, KETONE, JON ONE and KATSU have had their tags motion captured using the Graffiti Analysis software.
The custom software they use is Graffiti Analysis 2.0 that are playback and capture applications available for free in OSX, Windows and Linux as well as the open source code for both applications. You can also get both in one package with their iPhone application called Graffiti Analysis available through the iTunes Store for $1.99. The downloadable desktop applications require some handy work to build an acrylic capture stand that isn’t that hard to make but the iPhone application may be easier starting point for most people. The iPhone application records your tags with line thickness based on the speed you draw the tag and you can uploaded your tags to 000000book.com for free just like the applications. The resulting tags rendered in 3-D space with the ability to rotate the phone rotates the tag in 3-D and use multitouch to zoom in and out.
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Browser Pong
The guys over at Stewdio have launched a very cool new take on the classic pioneering video game Pong done with three browser windows. The controls couldn’t be any simpler but it still is fun and you can play against the computer or another person.
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