By Craig Kanarick on January 27, 2011 11:02 PM
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While my friend Josh is off on mountaintops skiing, I am home with my kids making igloos. After 19" of fresh snow in the last two days in New York, I am wishing I was skiing. Especially with a pair of custom skis from Wagner Skis.
Here's the way it works: you spend a day on a pair of diagnostic skis with vLinks Racing Computers, tiny little things that record 6500 measurements per second. The vLink was designed to be used by pro racers, ski coaches and the like and can record up to 99 runs of data. Wagner crunches the numbers from the computers and creates a custom pair of skis, just for you, through ski length, width, sidecut, tip and tail shapes, camber and rocker, flex pattern, stiffness, and material layup. They even give you the option of designing the top graphics. If that's too much work, they offer a wide selection of amazing solid colors, wood veneers and artist-designed graphics. In order to use the vLinks for Wagner, you need to go to a place that has them and right now that means Surefoot Deer Valley only, but the company said it plans to have versions they can ship to customers later this season. If you are super hardcore, you can order them directly from vLinks for $800, although getting the data to Wagner is another story.
By Craig Kanarick on January 26, 2011 4:04 PM
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In a previous post about interactive billboards, I wrote about some really nice installations in bus shelters. So far this year, I've come across two more that are worth mentioning.
The first is a bus shelter located in my home town, Minneapolis. Home to severely snowy and cold winters, local agency Collie + McVoy transformed a bus shelter into a giant toaster oven, complete with heating coils, to promote Caribou Coffee. I'm surprised there aren't homeless people living in it by now.
While this one got me excited, a much more interesting project is the one that Yahoo! has hosted in San Francisco. Called Bus Stop Derby, it is being promoted as a citywide challenge. 20 different bus stops have had 72" touch screens installed with four different games for passengers to play while they are waiting. The games can be played solo or against someone in another bus stop. Scores from each bus stop are tabulated in real time and at the end of the promotion, the winning neighborhood will win a concert with OK Go in that neighborhood.
By Craig Kanarick on November 10, 2010 10:05 AM
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The EasyBloom Plant Sensor is a simple device that gardeners can stick in the ground to digitally monitor the sun, soil moisture, soil fertility and temperature. By analyzing the data, the system can help gardeners understand exactly what plants would thrive in their gardens or what would need to be adjusted to get current plants to be more healthy.
The indoor/outdoor stick has a library of over 6000 plants with plant care tips and advice. This $60 gadget would make an excellent holiday gift for friends with green thumbs or those who want to have them. The company recently announced a collaboration with Black and Decker to develop a more advanced version of the product.
By Craig Kanarick on November 9, 2010 11:55 AM
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In this article on PSFK, I learned about how the Clarion Hotel in Stockholm is using Near Field Communication technology to allow certain cell phones to be used as room keys.
I've always wondered why room keys still exist. There are plenty of RFID key systems for cars, why not use them in hotels? If my hands are full of luggage, wouldn't it be better if I could just keep the key in my pocket and the door opened when I got close?
By Craig Kanarick on October 19, 2010 1:33 AM
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Water has to be one of the least "digital" things in the world, so when I see it being used as a medium joined with digital technologies, I always get excited. I think the first time I enjoyed seeing people use water as pixels to create animated displays was in the 1970s, where Disney World had some sort of dancing water fountains. Things have come a long
way since then and this post includes some of my favorite examples of "digital water".
Jeep's auto show waterfall display was a big hit in 2007 or so. It used individually addressable water jets across a high horizontal bar, creating a ticker-type display where the droplets of water were the pixels in this moving display.
German artist Julius Popp's bit.fall was considered fine art in 2005 and is generally credited with being the first version of this type of display.
And just to show how far this has come, check out this video and tell me the guy in charge isn't having fun.
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OK, a fountain clock. Can I get a miniature one?
Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. How can the absence of water be a pixel? Here's how.
This is amazing. Look at how much fun the people are having with it.
Did I mention bubbles?
Last and in no way least, from Siggraph in 2005, an interactive fog screen. That's right, the "screen" is a thin curtain of water vapor onto which interactive video is projected.
By Craig Kanarick on September 27, 2010 4:20 PM
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Posted on TED today is a great, short talk by journalist Gary Wolf about using mobile apps and gadgets to track personal behavior. Watch it below, it is well worth the 5 minutes it takes. He mentions the FitBit, Nike Plus and other self-tracking tools.
By Craig Kanarick on September 27, 2010 4:09 PM
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The New York Times today wrote about two personal tracking devices, the Withings scale and the Suunto heart-rate monitor watches. They don't reveal any new information, but provide a good summary of the two products.
By Craig Kanarick on September 27, 2010 11:17 AM
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Self-billed as "the world's most advanced hula hoop," the Uberhoop is certainly the most interesting hula hoop I have ever seen. Both my wife and son have gotten into hooping lately and wanted one of these amazing hoops immediately.
Housing 24 independent full-color LEDs, a 3-axis accelerometer (just like you find in modern smart phones), Bluetooth and an Arduino microcontroller, this is certainly the only fully reactive hula hoop one can buy. The hoop responds to the motion of the user and has a virtually unlimited range of lighting options. With Bluetooth, hoops within a certain range of each other can even be programmed to respond to one another.
The hoops are hand-assembled in Austin, TX and extremely sturdy. They are currently custom order only and made for professionals (not cheap) and serious Burning Man attendees with rechargeable batteries and a sealed magnetic on/off switch to keep out dust and dirt.
Here's hoping they develop a less expensive and more readily available version soon!
By Craig Kanarick on September 23, 2010 1:24 PM
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From September 2-11 in Linz, Austria the (25th Annual?) Ars Electronica Festival in Austria was held in an abandoned tobacco factory (called Tabakfabrik). The show was titled Repair - Ready to Pull the Lifeline and among the 200 or so installations/events was iRiS: the Intuitive (Immediate?) Remote Interaction System.
This joint research project from the University of Saarbrücken, Germany and University of Munich, Germany allows pedestrians to "paint" the building in real-time using their mobile devices as interfaces. While certainly not the most eco-friendly art piece ever made, the thing certainly looks awesome.
Here is a German video of it in action.
Also at the festival, this amazingly beautiful thing, Plant, from Akira Nakayasu, a 169-leaf robotic, reactive plant made of shape memory alloys.
Congratulations to Gran Prix winners UnitedVisualArtists for Chorus, something I'd love to see.
Fortunately, it isn't too late to see some of the most exciting work as part of the Media Facades Festival, which is broadcasting online on 2 October, so set your browsers to http://www.mediafacades.eu/ to watch live from Brussels.
By Craig Kanarick on June 25, 2010 11:31 AM
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Yesterday, at the annual ad agency confab, Cannes Lions, two of my favorite campaigns of the year won Cyber Grand Prix awards. Wieden & Kennedy's "Chalkbot" for Nike and DDB Stockholm's "Fun Theory" for VW took the top honors. Both of these campaigns are brilliant executions of strong ideas. Chalkbot continues to be a totally unique concept and one of the best uses of social media and real-time marketing that I can think of. Fun Theory is just that -- fun. Both were given awards because of their use of invisible technology and interactivity. One of the jury members was quoted saying "The stuff that was so innovative was the stuff that seemed magical. It had technology, but that's not what was showing." Most importantly, I think, is that these campaigns were clearly designed with the technology considered at the very beginning. This rarely works in traditional agencies and I think that's another reason for the high honors.
Just a few days ago, VW in Germany released three new videos clearly based on The Fun Theory called Fast Lane, produced by DDB Tribal. The ads follow the same motif as the Cannes Winners -- real world interventions that cause people to pay attention, experiment, and smile. The tag line "Driven by Fun" says it all and is garnering a ton of traffic on Facebook and other places. I particularly like the slide in the subway station, but I am sure that my son who is a fan of rocketships and glass elevators would find that one more enjoyable. Which one do you like?
By Craig Kanarick on June 22, 2010 12:13 PM
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Unilever and agency SapientNitro demonstrated a new ice cream vending machine yesterday in Cannes that has a built-in camera, monitors people who walk up to it, and if it determines that they are smiling, rewards them with a free ice cream. If the user gives permission, the system posts a photo of the smiler on facebook.
The machine was first demonstrated at Rock in Rio in May and this week was shown to the global advertising community, which I really hope motives people to think this creatively for every marketing project.
By Craig Kanarick on June 17, 2010 11:29 PM
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Two of my best friends are traveling in London right now and I wonder if they are going to eat at Inamo Restaurant. Customers at this digital dining extravaganza order from an interactive menu projected onto the table from above. Images of food are projected onto empty plates to give the diner a preview of their meal. That's not all the table does either. It allows diners to pick the decor on the table, place their order, watch a live streaming video from the kitchen or play games.
By Craig Kanarick on June 8, 2010 7:31 PM
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This video is so simple, yet so creative, I watched it twice in a row. Eric Archer, a resident of Austin who makes music and electronic devices combined both in a brilliant experiment. He hooked up a photodiode to a video camera, transforming the electrical radiation of light sources into sounds and then went for a nice long drive in New York City, where he discovered a huge variety of different light sources, each generating a unique sound.
Like a virtual synesthesia device, his modified old 8mm film camera seem like a load of fun! Below is the video he made in late May 2010 in NYC. Let me know what you think!
By cool hunting on May 20, 2010 1:33 PM
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Transforming their dormitory building into a light show extravaganza, the students at Poland's Wroclaw University of Technology demonstrated their tech-savvy skills with this large-scale installation of pixel-like flashes set to an equally animated soundtrack.
Called "Projekt P.I.W.O.," (the acronym means "beer" in Polish), it's simultaneously humorous and beautiful--particularly the Michael Jackson tribute about seven minutes in.
Part of an impressive series that shows off the school's technological virtuosity, this video depicts a spectrum of influences and creates a dynamic landscape within the solid world of dorm buildings. Recently highlighted on Good Magazine, the spectacle brings to mind other light-infused architectural feats such as Aukland's "Night Lights" demonstration.
By Craig Kanarick on April 29, 2010 10:07 AM
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Nike launched a lovely eye-popping twitter tracker called Nike NBA today to track the popularity of the teams in the playoffs, measured by tweet frequency.
The default view is a heatmap, but I prefer the bracket view, that pits the various teams against each other in a virtual popularity contest, with the "champion" changing every few minutes. The system is sitting on top of a live visualization engine created by Stamen Design which has previously been used to visualize tweets about the Vancouver Olympics and the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
Nike is on a internet marketing roll this month, after their recent viral hits, including The Secret Behind Nike Air, and the mind-blowing digital-physical integration Nike Music Shoe, seen below.
An idea I've been talking about for at least a decade is for a hotel or a health club to hook up their exercise machines to generators and capture the energy being produced by users and giving rebates to them. The BBC reported earlier this week that the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Copenhagen is about to launch the world's first version of such a program by offering meal vouchers to guests who produce energy on an exercise bike. The bikes are using iPhones to monitor and display usage. The program launches this weekend and will continue for at least a year. If a guest generates 10 watt-hours of energy, which should take only about 15 minutes, she gets a $36 meal voucher.
The initiative makes perfect sense to me. This hotel already has solar panels on its facade so they are pretty eco-friendly. Over 36% of the city's residents bike to work and treehugger.com just named Copenhagen the most bike-friendly city in the world. Copenhagen is one of the most bike-centric cities in the world, it makes perfect sense. What I like best is that they are saying this is a pilot program and if it is successful, they will roll it out to at least 21 UK Crowne Plazas soon.
By Craig Kanarick on April 15, 2010 11:12 AM
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I spent today at the wonderful 99% Conference and heard many inspiring talks, including one from the totally charismatic Stefan Sagmeister. Even though it was made almost three years ago, I was really intrigued by his artwork, Being Not Truthful Always Works Against Me.
Currently housed in the Art Institute in Chicago, this collaboration with Ralph Ammer is driven by some simple software and Mac hardware. A video of a spider web is projected on the screen and as a viewer passes in front, a sensor captures the movement and degrades the web. Once the viewer is gone, just like spiders do in the real world, the web is reconstructed.
about a fun interactive billboard in Stockholm that allows people to play Pong on a big screen for fun and prizes.
Self-billed as "the world's most advanced hula hoop," the Uberhoop is certainly the most interesting hula hoop I have ever seen. Both my wife and son have gotten into hooping lately and wanted one of these amazing hoops immediately. 
Nike launched a lovely eye-popping twitter tracker called Nike NBA today to track the popularity of the teams in the playoffs, measured by tweet frequency.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=8f548f45-37f7-4d84-bde6-4425465923a1)
An idea I've been talking about for at least a decade is for a hotel or a health club to hook up their exercise machines to generators and capture the energy being produced by users and giving rebates to them. The BBC reported earlier this week that the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Copenhagen is about to launch the world's first version of such a program by offering meal vouchers to guests who produce energy on an exercise bike. The bikes are using iPhones to monitor and display usage. The program launches this weekend and will continue for at least a year. If a guest generates 10 watt-hours of energy, which should take only about 15 minutes, she gets a $36 meal voucher. ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=78cf3785-f762-4cdb-9e74-b303fb3f6fd6)
