EXP: realtime Archives

The Average Color of the NY Sky. Right Now.

By Craig Kanarick on June 22, 2011 4:34 PM | No Comments

This lovely little site charts the average color of the New York City skyline in real time, updated every five minutes. Created by designer Mike Bodge from his East Village apartment, the system takes a photo of NoHo and computes the average color of the sky and adds it to the site.

The past few days are currently archived there, so if you visit the site, be sure to scroll. It is all over the blogosphere, so the site might be a little slow, but Mike just tweeted that he's working on it.

Swedish McDonald's Interactive Billboard Game

By Craig Kanarick on June 17, 2011 3:00 PM | No Comments

Ahh, those wacky Swedes.

about a fun interactive billboard in Stockholm that allows people to play Pong on a big screen for fun and prizes.

Japanese Earthquake Interactive Data Visualization

By Craig Kanarick on March 14, 2011 11:45 AM | No Comments

In what is sure to be a large number of interesting ways of viewing the latest tragedy in Japan, New Scientist has published an interactive data visualization of the history of earthquakes in Japan. Like the damage itself, the images speak for themselves.

Two Awesome Bus Shelter Ads

By Craig Kanarick on January 26, 2011 4:04 PM | No Comments

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.

Digital Water?

By Craig Kanarick on October 19, 2010 1:33 AM | No Comments

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.

Gary Wolf on The Quantified Self

By Craig Kanarick on September 27, 2010 4:20 PM | No Comments

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.

Old Spice in Real Time

By Craig Kanarick on July 13, 2010 9:49 PM | No Comments

Isaiah Mustafa, the star of the Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" is now the star of dozens of personalized videos on YouTube responding to bloggers, celebrities and others who have complimented his videos online.

The writers are responding to consumer generated content and inspiration as close to real-time of anything with this high production value. The writing is as great as the acting. I think they are posting something like a new video every hour. In any case, it feels real-time and is very enjoyable.

I Agree With Cannes

By Craig Kanarick on June 25, 2010 11:31 AM | No Comments

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?

Thanks, Ad Age.

Nike NBA

By Craig Kanarick on April 29, 2010 10:07 AM | No Comments

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.

UTweet by Uniqlo: Stylized Tweet Show

By Craig Kanarick on April 7, 2010 10:33 AM | No Comments

I love the way Japanese fashion brand Uniqlo uses the web -- they really embrace the technology and have made some of the most memorable web timewasters ever. This morning I came across UTweet, which is their latest effort: Just enter in a twitter ID or a few keywords, turn up the volume, and sit back and enjoy the full-screen show, comprised of real-time tweets and other goodies. The catchy soundtrack helps make the quirky experience even more enjoyable.

Will it sell clothes? I doubt it, but it will make you smile. Is it completely novel, new, innovative? No, but it is well executed. Think of it as a full-page spread gone digital and you won't be disappointed.

EXP-like Videos

By Craig Kanarick on March 25, 2010 3:30 PM | No Comments

First, a great interview from Engadget with Nicholas Negroponte, who was the head of the MIT Media Lab when I was a graduate student there. What the interviewer, Josh Topolsky, correctly notices, is that Nicholas' book Being Digital, while 15 years old, holds up remarkable well in terms of its predictions. My favorite quote: "How can there possibly be books in the future?"

Thanks, David Young, for the great reference.

Next up, Henry Chesbrough, the person who coined the term "open innovation" and is considered the godfather of this important new field. While this video is really a sales video for an academic book, it is no less important in terms of future thinking.

Last, but certainly not least, is this video about Lee Odden talking about real-time marketing, what I think is the next (or current) wave in marketing.

Enjoy!

Take 10 Map

By Craig Kanarick on March 24, 2010 5:19 PM | No Comments

The United States Census Bureau has a great interactive map tracking the response rates of each city in the country. The site is specifically tracking the relationship between how long a city is taking to send in their surveys in 2010 versus how long it took them in 2000.

Hey Midwest! Slow down! You're making the rest of us go-getters look like slackers.

Sarkissian Mason Redesign

By Craig Kanarick on February 23, 2010 5:51 PM | No Comments

New York agency Sarkissian Mason just relaunched their website with a combination

worship/slam of data gathering and analysis.

The firm wired up their office with a bunch of sensors, tied them together using Arduino, and are publishing the real-time results of their data gathering on their homepage, providing a peek at various metrics about life at the firm. It would seem that by doing so, they are implying that the gathering and analysis of data is relevant to creativity. Not so, however. If you watch their "behind the scenes" video, they clearly state that gathering numbers doesn't lead to better ideas. I strongly disagree. While it isn't enough to just gather data and look at it in order to come up with better ideas, data gathering and visualization can certainly give people the insights needed to make better decisions as well as provide inspiration for great ideas.

Either way, the site totally works.

Four Ways of Looking at Twitter via HBR

By Craig Kanarick on February 22, 2010 8:57 AM | No Comments

More than just transforming data into practical information, Jeff Clark has made data visualization "cool" with his twitter-based interactive infographics. Highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review online article, Clark is a computer programmer whose brilliance is manifested through his discerning research and ability to translate the results graphically.

Featured in the article are four of Clark's Twitter infographics--TwitterVenn, Twitter Spectrum, TwitterArcs and StreamGraph (shown below).

While the graphs are both beautiful and accurate, one of the major concerns is using java as this language is particularly slow.

Regardless, Clark is paving the way for how we use and view information, especially relating to business and social activity. Read more about his data visualizations and see more stunning examples from his website.

Imogen Heap and Her Interactive Dress

By Craig Kanarick on February 4, 2010 3:08 PM | No Comments

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.

Bigert&Bergström: Tomorrow's Weather

By Craig Kanarick on December 15, 2009 10:59 AM | No Comments

Stemming from a childhood fascination of a weather ball on the top of a bank building in Minneapolis, I am intrigued by Tomorrow's Weather, a double helix sculpture in Denmark comprised of over 60 molecular globes.

What's interesting about this is that traditional weather balls--also known as weather beacons--are usually located on top of buildings or attached to towers. Tomorrow's Weather uses current technology to forecast upcoming elements just like a weather ball, while remaining affixed to the side of the building.

Weather beacons are found in cities from Sydney to Cincinnati, so have a look around to see if your city is included. Often a little poem is attached to the weather codes to make its information easy to memorize. I will never forget that "when the weather ball is red, warmer weather is ahead..."

For real weather fanatics, check out the ambient weather beacon, a home device that also forecasts the upcoming weather.

Reactive and Interactive Digital Billboards

By Craig Kanarick on December 9, 2009 4:06 PM | No Comments

As we are knee deep in decade-review media chatter about the death of the TV ad, I decided to think about other forms of advertising pronounced dead in the past, billboards.

One of the oldest forms of advertising, the billboard first gained traction in the late 1800s. The popularity of the Model T in 1908 drove billboards to become common as roadside advertising and in 1925, the Burma-Shave billboards start populating US highways, cementing outdoor as an important channel for consumer messages.

Over the years, the billboards were the playground of advertising creatives and continue to push the limits of the format. In the 1920's, billboards became reactive and changed their content in realtime with giant thermometers, changing their display with the ambient temperature. What follows is a brief natural history of the reactive and interactive billboard in recent times.

October 2003

Coke launches a 99-foot wide interactive billboard in Picadilly Circus recognizing and responding both to the weather and people waving to it from below (above left).

May 2004

Stellar interactive firm R/GA creates a billboard for Yahoo!'s automotive web site allowing pedestrians to play a video game on a 23-story billboard via mobile phones (above right).

July 2004

Ogilvy launches an SMS-reactive billboard for the Ford Fiesta in Belgium, the first of its kind in Europe (above left).

February 2005

Amex Belgium launches a billboard in which users can upload a photo to a website that in turn displays it on the billboard where a live webcam photographs the billboard and emails it back to the user (above right).

May 2005
Nike ID uses a 23-story Times Square billboard for users to design shoes via mobile phones and see results in real time. The one-minute design session also sends emails and discounts to the designer, er, customer (at right).

February 2006

Disney Interactive has an 57-story tall reactive billboard featuring imagery of the Himalayas. The billboard blinks the eyes of a yeti upon receiving SMS sent to it.

January 2007

Mini Cooper USA launches in Chicago, Miami, New York and San Francisco. After the Mini drivers answer some basic information about themselves, Mini USA sends them a special key fob identifiying them to the billboards they pass by, delivering a personal message based on the information provided.

June 2007
One of my absolute favorites is the BBC America billboards shown above. They were placed in New York where viewers sent SMS messages to answer polls and updated the billboard in real-time.

July 2007
Adobe uses a billboard that reacts to the motion of the person standing in front of it. The system, which uses a simple webcam with complicated processing code behind it is a joy to look at and fun to interact with.

August 2007
Ecko launches a billboard that allows users to digitally spraypaint using a Blackberry.

Feb 2008

Australian billboard sneezes on people.

October 2008
A billboard in New Zealand by ddb tests earphone levels from the National Foundation for the Deaf.

January 2009

Sharpie creates gorgeous interactive billboards.

Feb 2009

Cadbury Splat the Egg interactive bus shelter ad allows waiting passengers to pass the time by playing a video game.

March 2009

In a Rotterdam bus stop, health club chain Fitness First converts the bench into a digital scale with the readout on the shelter wall (at right).

July 2009
Caldwell Banker creates a live 150-foot billboard that responds to text messages with Zip codes by displaying the highest, median and lowest price properties in that zip code within seconds.

July 2009

In Korea Nikon does what looks like a truly amazing job with an interactive billboard that simulates paparazzi to launch their D700 camera (at right).

Sept 2009

I hate to end with a billboard fail, but who can resist laughing at the twitter-enabled billboard below...Happy New Year!

Continue reading Reactive and Interactive Digital Billboards.

Weekend Visualizations To Be Thankful For

By Craig Kanarick on November 30, 2009 9:13 AM | No Comments

As it was the most digital, this past holiday weekend most likely generated more data about our habits than any other in history. Two great new online visualizations portray this with beautiful and clear stories about the typical Thanksgiving activities--shopping and cooking.

I first saw eBay's Black Friday map on TechCrunch and was immediately impressed with how hypnotic and psychedelic it was. The pulsating graphics illustrate interesting patterns of our eBay shopping habits on Black Friday, the supposedly biggest shopping day of the year.

The New York Times published What's Cooking on Thanksgiving, a typically clean, clear and wonderfully produced map of allrecipes.com search terms, showing overt regional patterns in our holiday food preferences, or at least our desire to research recipes about those foods.

Realtime: This site is being upgraded

By Craig Kanarick on November 29, 2009 12:59 AM | No Comments

If you are here and notice that it looks different than the last time you were here, that is because I upgraded the blogging software. Unfortunately, that downgraded the visuals for a while until I figure this out. My apologies.

-- cmk

Live Ships Map

By Craig Kanarick on November 9, 2009 12:01 PM | No Comments

MarineTraffic.com is a new website based on Google Maps and some open data that allows people to monitor real time ship traffic around the world. Because of some data constraints, the information is mostly about ships on the European and North American coastlines, but a full range of ships are in the system.

The project is hosted by the Department of Project and Systems Design Engineering at the University of the Aegean in Greece. Rolling over a ship icon reveals information such as the heading and history of the vehicle.

The site refreshes itself automatically every minute or so (depending on what part of the world you are monitoring), making the entire experience fun to just use as a screensaver.

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