Did I also mention skateboards?
Outstanding:
Recently in physical digital Category
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?
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.
Thanks PSFK.
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.
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!
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.
via Cool Hunting
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.
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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.
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.
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From Gizmodo comes word of a vodka bottle with a programmable LED ticker on it. Why it isn't pre-programmed with "Buy Me, Please" is curious.What do they say, three is a trend? Are there any other things like this out there?
To quote Marvel Comics: 'nuff said.
Image via Wikipedia
What is most exciting is the way they are creating the exhibition. A full 500+ days in advance, they are utilizing the internet in an industry-leading way by soliciting projects, ideas and research to include. The entire process of curating the show is being assisted by and revealed to the public like nothing before it, all through the digital channel.
Their blog, linked above, is also an excellent gallery of the integration of digital and physical, and I expect to refer to objects I find there often.
PSFK gives an excellent nod to the growth of physical-digital interaction, a subject core to this blog...
Over at Inventing Interactive, my friend David Young interviews my friend, David Small, who was a key mentor during my days at the MIT Media Lab. Please go check it out, they are two of the most creative and smart people I know who work in the digital field.
Saturday morning I made French Toast using milk that was past the expiry date. While I thought it smelled fine, my wife (who has a much more accurate sense of smell) told me it was spoiled. While we argued about it, I wished I had an easy way to tell the quality of the milk without depending on some printed date that doesn't take in to account environmental conditions.
Turns out British milk producers Cravendale has a solution to the problem -- a so-called "magic milk jug" that tests the pH level of the milk and reports back if it is safe to drink or not. Besides improving marital relations, Cravendale estimates that over 300,000 tons of milk is thrown away, almost a third of which is totally safe to drink. In fact, milk is the most thrown away food in the UK!
While the industrial design of the container leaves a lot to be desired (especially the display), I'm all in favor of smart containers helping consumers understand their contents better. The product is still in R&D, but I hope it gets released soon.
A new toy launching fall 2010, Xachi Pets are a cuddly little stuffed animal with glowing animated eyes, an 8-bit speaker, accelerometer, robotic legs and touch-sensitivity. While that sounds interesting enough, even more exciting is that the toy comes with coordinating iPhone/iPod Touch software. For example, a Xachi can be triggered to dance to music from your device, and there are games that display certain things on the toy and require the user to interact on the iPhone as well as a slew of education-based games. As MobileCrunch explains, it is similar to a Tamagachi (track and maintain its hunger, thirst, health, and happiness), but this is first toy to utilize that sort of technology by way of an iPhone.
I'm sure both of my kids (ages 6 and 3) would stay entertained by this for months. The Xachi pets will be available for a reasonable $40.
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German Jonas Heuer has prototyped a rather simple, yet compelling, example of a physical/digital interactive machine to teach people about music. The Noteput allows users to physically place giant notes on a screen showing a musical scale and then plays the music accordingly.
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As he describes it, the Noteput was designed to combine as many of the senses as possible -- touch, sight and sound in this case. As someone who has forgotten how to read music, I could certainly see playing with this for hours on end.
NYC BigApps is a contest to drive innovation in software that can help the city of New York become more sustainable through transparency, accessibility and accountability. The requirements were simple: write an web-based app that utilizes data from the NYC.gov "Data Mine" -- a catalog of sets of public data produced by local agencies.
The content awards $20K in cash prizes to 13 winners announced tonight. I know a lot of the judges and I think they did a great job acknowledging some really good entries. Personally, I think Trees Near You and WayFinder are the best of the best. Core77 has some in-depth reporting on these and other winners.
Last weekend, at the Grammy's, Imogen Heap wore was was called a "Twitdress", a dress with an attached monitor that supposedly displayed tweets in real-time. The screen was so small and hidden during the broadcast that it was difficult, if not impossible, to tell if it was working but it sure looked interesting. While this wasn't the best example of how to infuse an outfit with technology, given the size of the viewing audience, might be the most exposed example of interactive fashion in the world. The parasol-as-wifi-antenna was a particularly inspired touch.
She wore the dress as she accepted the (appropriate) award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Not only does she have 1.3 million followers, she's embraced the digital age by inviting her fans and followers to provide feedback, remixes and lyrics ideas.
Thanks to designboom and pixelsumo, I got to see this amazing video by Tokujin Yoshioka for Maison Hermes. The combination of digital video and fans make an incredible illusion that blends wit, grace, digital and physical. File under "I wish I had made this."
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