This afternoon when Arcade Fire posted about their new Sprawl2 video, the website wasn’t available yet, so as a huge fan i was a tad disappointed with only the quirky video available (below).
But now it’s live the new interactive video by Vincent Morisset (who just joined unit9), and you really have to exercise your dancing skills on this one. Enjoy the interactive version at http://www.sprawl2.com/ (webcam required) or just the official video.
I’ve been trying to pitch a Google Street View interactive campaign for a while, so it’s with mixed feelings — happy for the great use of technology, sad that i wasn’t hunca life convincing enough to make it real before – that i’m sharing this playful approach of Google Shoot View by Dutch agency Pool (who previously did Muppets Voices for TomTom).
As you can see from the teaser trailer, it all boils down to using your assault rifle on Google’s Street View scenery.
Not sure if the PG18+ is against Google’s terms of service (which got shorter), but from Columbine to the Tower of London, there’s plenty to choose from.
via Kotke
There’s the big and expensive kind of projection mapping, and there’s the smaller but equally aweseome ones as the 3 films created by Studio Output to promote Sony’s PlayStation@Store.
Everything is one take, using real time tracking, projection mapping and Augmented Reality technology, which they’re terming “Immersive Imaging”. By attaching the PlayStation Move to the camera, they could track projections to screens in real time, enhancing the effect of spatial deformation and false perspective on the projections.
Just have a look at the 3 films.
The videos highlight the VideoStore service on PlayStation@Store where users are able to rent or buy their favourite films in high definition.
Agency: Studio Output – http://www.studio-output.com
Production Company: Marshmallow Laser Feast – http://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/
Director: Memo Akten, Barney Steel, Robin McNicholas
Producer: Ian Hambleton
via vincenzo
I’m currently teaching a few classes for the New Media Production course at the Restart Insitute, in Lisbon. While discussing new media, i try to emphasize the transcodification of objects, and what happens when physical things are transformed into computational data.
One of the students suggested the possibility of translating feelings into digital, and even if i presented We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris as an bayilik example, i believe the work below is much more representative of transcoding physical into digital.
Feel-O-Meter by Julius von Bismarck , Benjamin Maus and Richard Wilhelmer is a media installation at the Lindau (Berlin-Schöneberg) Gasometer featuring an oversized smiley face, as the crown of the lighthouse at the harbor entrance.
A camera placed at the port, reads from faces, analyzes it and forwards the details to the installation, interpreting the different emotional expressions hunca life katalog from the faces of residents and guests of Lindau. The lighthouse Smiley then imitates the recorded emotions, expressing the mood from the city.
And they can always add extra signals from Twitter of Foursquare 
Source: Infoesthetics
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For those living under a rock, the movie adaptation of one of the most famous comic characters is almost here: Green Lantern.
The trailer above should be enough to seduce fans, but why stop there? And instead of the regular blockbuster campaign why not appeal to the geeky teenager and entice the astrophysicist within? That’s exactly what the agency Hide&Seek, Warner Bros. and Oxford University did, “bringing hardcore astrophysics and superhero movie fans together”.
At StudyTheSkyes.com, fans and aspiring astrophysicists can be explorers of The Zooniverse, a science project that allows internet users analyse photographic data generated by some of the world’s largest telescopes, and pass their findings for the research teams. Os as some say in marketing lingo, crowdsourcing. But in a geeky-milky way
So how does this relates to the character Green Lantern? Well, because the task at hand (tutorial above) would be looking for ‘bubbles’ produced by the formation of stars, that show up as … Green Rings.
Yeah, i know it’s geeky, but also a refreshing approach to movie campaigns.
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Vanessa from DDB Brasil just sent me an example of Digital Out, Interactive In.
Brastemp, a Brazilian electronics brand shows how you can be interactive with radio. The campaign was so successful that it was replicated in Portugal by a couple of radios.
The spot, that aired simultaneously in 11 major radio stations in the capital city, suggested: “Right now, millions of people at their cars, listening to the radio. All serious, sleepy, until an inspiration changes everything. We invite you to smile to the driver next to you. If he heard it, he’ll smile back …. See? Inspiration changes everything and life becomes just likeee… a Brastemp. “
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The past few months already, the term digital has mostly left my vocabulary as an advertising professional. Instead, the preferred word is interactive. Not only because words matter, but considering computational ubiquity is just a few years away (from TV to nano sensors), saying a media is digital is almost an oxymoron.
Interactive goes beyond online communication and starts to explore new frontiers, from outdoor advertising to context sensitive ads (Minority Report, anyone?). Take for instance a shopping center in Portugal, promoting a witchcraft fair with an outdoor taking sensors and measuring the amount of people who walked underneath the ladder.
Would you call this digital? maybe. But interactive it definitely is.
If Leo Burnett did the above being a somewhat traditional agency, you can expect digital agencies to do the same. R/GA is breaking down walls, exploring new areas such as event marketing or data visualization, while creating and producing commercials. But they surely kept their interactive background.
It’s the evolve or die time for digital agencies, and they could start by dropping the digital.
On a side note, the same thing happens regarding ‘social media’. Even if the most experienced web professionals call it ‘social web’, the former has become so popular with the press, that it’s hard to escape from this broadcast view.
Digital or social is not about the media. It’s about how people behave on those channels. Or as it’s often called, culture.
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WNYC’s RadioLab is a radio show at NPR (which includes another favorite, This American Life) that did a few days ago an episode on ‘Desperately Seeking Symmetry’.
If the above gorgeous piece of film wasn’t enough, now follows Radiolab Hyper Audio Player, based on the same episode.
Henrik Moltke took the amusing conversation of radio hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, built a custom HTML5 player, mixed it with Popcorn.js (a javascript framework for multimedia assets) and added the collaborative features of Soundcloud, the music sharing platform.
If we’re used to think of semantics regarding hypertext, this experiment ‘shows’ how this semantic value can be added to multimedia content. For instance, when a comment or image is added by Rabiolab on Soundcloud track it generates the corresponding visual cue on the player, incorporating Creative Commons images. Another feature uses one of Henrik’s experiments Hyperdisken, to get the show transcript.
Interactive creativity is not only about visual; sources can be found in audio also.
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Just a quick note for Portuguese readers who might be interested on learning a bit more about new media:
Next November i’ll be teaching a module on Marketing and Strategy, as part of the curriculum at the New Media course available at Restart this year (Nov 10 -Jul 11). Registration is still open, so you still have a chance to learn from strategy to creation, transmedia to emerging technologies by a group of seasoned digital professionals.
It’s hard to get up to date education on such dynamic subjects, but the industry depends on these brave new media schools to improve the quality of interactive professionals, and as consequence, the work produced. The course materials won’t be available here, but i’ll post any interesting thoughts worth discussing.
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On his latest post, Tim Brown talks about the future of the book, and how it shows up as an experience on tablets.
From share of voice on Nelson, reading list suggested by your coworkers with Coupland and rich, contextual narratives with Alice, IDEO explores some of the themes we’ve been discussing at Fullsix recently: think beyond the hardware and instead push the limits of what you can do with content and social technologies.
For those interested in UX, mobile and new forms of publishing, head to Big Conversations Facebook page and share you opinions.