This really interesting mixed reality game for MINI came out a few days ago. You use your iPhone to virtually steal the Mini and if you are ‘holding’ onto it at the end of the game you win it. For real.
Check the video.
They’ve also create a neat little google maps mashup showing the location of the Mini and where the players are.
On the surface it sounds like loads of fun, and I wish I could play the game to try out the design as I’ve got quite a few questions on how it plays out.
I can’t help wonder that they might have got the game mechanic slightly wrong. Basically this game is Halo Oddball played out in the real world but there is one key difference. In Oddball, the winner of the game is the person who has held onto the ball for the longest.
When you have the ball you can’t fire so you have to run like a headless chicken away from the hordes of people after you. When you don’t have the ball, everyone is piling in to get the ball. It’s a really skillful and tactical game and one you can be winning and losing every other second – This game is just total carnage.
With the Mini game, as the winner is the person who is holding onto the car at the end, there really isn’t any gameplay advantage for me to go get the car until near the very end. They’ve made the game area quite small and the prize large, so people will be stealing the car off each other but I just think if they’ve used the Oddball scoring system the game would have had a much better game dynamic.
You could argue that by making the game the way they did, they made it easy for new players to join at any time. Pro’s and con’s to both but I think the game would have relied on a lot more skill and cunning the Oddball way rather than just being ‘lucky’ to be the person who has the car at the end of the game.
This isn’t a criticism of their idea as it is brave, on brand and on strategy. Big plaudits to everyone who worked so hard on it as we need more of this type of work.
The London Cycle Hire is a service where you rent a bike pay-as-you-go. If you keep the bike less than 30 minutes you don’t pay a charge so saving 30 seconds might make all of the difference. Those 30 seconds might be lost setting up the seat as you’ve got to set this to your height to ride well.
The seat post has numbers showing you a scale.
Great. If you know your ‘number’ you are set. But a lot of people don’t actually know they need to set the seat correctly or can even remember their ‘number’.
So here is an idea to make the seat post more useful.
Simple. Everyone knows their height (The number i’ve used above are very made up btw). It could have the height in cm on the other side of the post.
When you’ve only got a few seconds to deliver a message it has got to have bags of clarity. This is something that advertising agencies do very very well. Deliver brand truths, clear messaging and a call to action in the blink of an eye.
So it still surprises me when I see media placements of messages that make absolutely no sense. We all know that creative has to be delivered with context.
Here are a couple of examples.
The Economist
I really like this work. Lovely illustration, great use of the double ad space to deliver the dual message. But look at the call to action.
For a free copy text IRAN to 60300.
Fantastic I can get a free copy. But…Hang on a minute. I’m underground. Waiting for the tube. Unless the TFL has secretly installed a way to use my phone underground (which they haven’t) then it isn’t going to work. It would have taken no time or money to have dropped / switched the CTA and run new creative for these placements. They’ve even put a custom keyword on the ad to track it…so close…yet so far.
Cherly Cole
This again is really really good in theory. You check into a poster via Facebook places to win a prize. Brilliant you all say. But look at the poster below.
This looks a little fake so I’m not sure it is real…But taking it as real…it looks like a very very busy and fast moving road. Am I really going to get my phone while driving (and thus breaking the law) to check into a poster. Are the passengers in the going to do this? I would actually say it is impossible for someone to see that poster, register I have to do something, open Facebook, get a GPS lock and check in all within about 5 seconds. Why bother putting a message on a poster that is useless. They could either changed the messaging or just dropped the placement and saved some money.
You could argue that the Facebook messaging is so obscure it doesn’t affect the main message but I would disagree.
The advertising industry has to grow up. Clear communication of creative is the core of the industry. New advances in technology are rapidly changing how the public choose to interact with those brand messages. It is getting incredibly complex to manage and if you can’t deliver a clear message on a poster then I fear the worst when you tackle the hard stuff.
Dopplr as you all know is a great travel service – You fill in the cities you are going to travel to and every six months you are sent a wonderful automated travel report visualising your travel data in a very clear way.
The time taken to add your ‘data’ to Dopplr is something you really don’t mind as the benefits outweigh the ‘cost’.
What if you could record data about anything and visualise this in a personal report?
Nicholas Feltron has been doing just that for quite a few years – collecting everything any and every piece of mundane information and visualising them beautifully in his annual Feltron reports.
Daytum was created as a way for Nicholas to store all of this information. You sign into site and add a ‘thing’ with an ‘amount’ – cigarette : 1
This then gets logged into the system with a timestamp and as you smoke you keep updating the site. A mobile twitter interface is thankfully on hand as updating your data via a website is a chore upon a chore. Now you just have to tweet your ‘thing’ with your ‘amount. A similar system called your.flowing.data created by Nathan Yau is entirely built on top of twitter to store your data.
These are systems for the committed – You have to be in the mindset to fire off a tweet to record that thing.
Can objects we naturally interact with start to share the data they store?
The Wifi body scale is automated and is single minded in what it records.
Another great example is the Sleep Cycle iphone app – It is an alarm clock that wakes you up when you are in the lightest part of your sleep cycle. It does this by monitoring how you are moving while you sleep – the phone accelerometer registers your motion and figures out the best point you can wake up. Aside from sleeping better, the app produces a variety of graphs to help you understand your sleep cycle.
So can we automate the collection of any data without changing our normal behaviour?
Poyozo gives you your own data back by downloading the information you’re currently giving to the web on to your own computer. You can opt-in to importing your data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm, Google Calendar, any email service, any RSS feed, Flickr, Wesabe, Listit, Skydeck, Dopplr, your Firefox browsing history, the local weather, and your location, allowing you to access all of this personal data as easily as the companies that run these services can.
So if we could be generating our own automated annual Feltron reports. What insights could they offer? Could they offer insights into our behaviour and moods
I was having a lovely lunch time chat with Mike Stenhouse about this very subject – He has been exploring a lot of these ways to visualise connections between data at trampoline systems and also in his own time. He started explain some of the prototypes he had built, gave some brilliant examples i’d never heard of and we chewed over some other random scenarios.
Did you gain weight one week (wifi scales) because you ate at a certain restaurant (foursquare) or you went on a business trip (dopplr). Were you sad at work one day (twitter), listening to incredibly depressing music (last.fm) and searching for a new job (bookmarks) and buying something to cheer youself (purchases). Could the report then identity that you were the happiest on a certain day or offer some insight into why.
Would be eventually be drowning in data from our lives and eventually be finding patterns with no meaning? Maybe so, but I for one would love to try it and see.
I love the possibilities of what smaller, faster and more portable technologies can off the world – how human/computer interaction will evolve and how technology augments our lives. It’s really not that far away where data and content will just be able to pass from object to object as easy as in Minority Report.
Slurp is an incredibly interesting concept – giving intangible (digital) information a physical interface. It takes the form on an eyedropper and it effectively becomes a pointer to digital objects – you point – suck in the content from one object then spit it out at another object.
Our goal is to privilege spatial relationships between devices and people while providing new physical manipulation techniques for ubiquitous computing environments.
Slurp is easy to pick up and understand but it lacks a visual interface into the objects you are manipulating. My mind wandered back to how augmented reality mobile GUI’s could start to have the ability to change our environment if we lived in an age of ubiquitous computing. A smart home and a phone app controlling the lights, heating, bath etc is really not that innovative so what types of interactions haven’t we seen?
What if you could point and click onto a light to turn it off?
An interface into physical objects would transform our lives but also raises serious privacy and safety issues, and needs a massive leap of faith for us to embrace it. It only needs technology to improve and a protocol for it to happen – as a theory it has been labelled ‘Endosymbiotic Computing’.
Endosymbiotic Computing entails attaching an RF-enabled microcontroller module (endomodule) to an appliance such that it appears as a networked device in the cyber world. It enables a smart phone to work as not only a universal remote control but also a surrogate GUI for inspecting the attributes of these appliances, without modifications to legacy circuits. To minimize the cost and resource requirements of the endomodules, we propose a generalized active message programming method that executes dynamically-loaded threaded code on-demand without requiring parsing.
3D printing – the ability to think of a shape and have a a physical representation of that shape. It’s fast, becoming cheap and as technology improves – able to print with incredible detail and textures.
This then starts to make you think about what you could design either from a functional or aesthetic point of view.
Then from a personal point of view – what artifacts and objects do I have that I would never want to lose. Could I make a copy of an object – in essence save it’s memory. If you copied a family heirloom – a vase for example. Does this still pass on the memories associated with that object.
Could that object even be alive?
How I arrived at this point was when I saw the following image via the shapeways blog. It is an artistic exercise by a dutch design studio wieke somers to look at how products can be made with human ash.
If we put aside the notion of rapid protyping with human ash and use conventional materials – Can we copy objects and use it ‘ash or even ‘stone” as a texture to recreate that object.
Could handheld scanning be so cheap that you can scan anything?
Handheld scanning could soon be so mainstream that you could scan your cute puppy.
Is there a business model there? Unethical? Nonsensical? One people would use?
What if you could send the ‘data’ of your objects to someone as a gift and they take this into a the 3D printing equivalent of snappy snaps – 1hr later they have an object.
I was flicking through a muddle of documents and found a little presentation of how we created the onedotzero brand identity which we gave at the festival. So here is an expanded version with some reminiscing on what I think is the best piece of work I’ve ever been involved with.
Assemble your A-Team
I think it was June 2009 (it *was* June 1st), a little email pops into my inbox – come to a quick brainstorm for a new pitch. It’ll only take a couple of hours. So off I trot and find myself in a room with a hand picked team (Ez, Tom, Dave, Matthew) being introduced to Shane and Sophie from onedotzero.
We are set a brief – Create the new brand identity for the festival on the theme of ‘Convergence and collaboration’. The festival identity has to work across print, motion graphics and if possible interactive. They’ll come back in two hours and we’ll present our ideas – If they like the idea we get the job. No pressure then.
I break out the white board doing my best ‘ideator’ impression breaking down audience segmentation and the like.
1.50 minutes go by – We’ve got zip. Nada.
Then suddenly it all started to click. We knew onedotzero had a massive global fanbase and community, a healthy 700 or so fans on twitter and well we wanted to harness that conversation and visualise it. That was the core of the idea. We presented this back to Shane and soon after we heard we had the job.
So this wasn’t your typical process for creative development. The reason why it was so rapid was a few fold- As an agency we had all just come out of Hyper Island training. They taught us how to break down creative workshops into short intense bursts of activity. This was a pitch and time of five people is sacred so spending this thinking time in an optimised and way was essential.
The other major takeout from Hyper Island was that creative teams should be tailored to the task in hand. If you know your output from the briefing then you need the people who will be making those things in the first creative sessions. This might sound like a facepalm of obviousness but remember we are dealing with an ad agency used to the art director/copywriter model. This was actually a masterstroke by Rob Steiner and Tony Wallace who put the team together.
Friendfeed is your friend
Through the creative development of any idea, we build a physical wall of stimulus. This let everyone on the team (and indeed) the office see what we are upto (this is very important later).
Once the initial concept had been resolved, we now had the very very hard part of actually realising this. We then went through a massive discovery phase (collecting hundreds of stim images) on how to realise ‘kinetic typography’, conversation and metaphors around this.
Collaboration – Living the idea
We knew pretty early on in the project that we would needed help to create some sort of ‘visualiser’ for all this conversation. I had really wanted to work with Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi for a really long time and I knew he would be the perfect person to take the idea further. Luckily for us, he graciously accepted to collaborate with us. David talks about this moment as being defining and I think so to. We would have never succeeded without Karsten coming onboard – This was key to the project and also pretty brave of everyone to let go a little to bring him into the creative team.
Sketches
The amazingly talented Karen Jane had also now come onto the project as our superstar designer and the creative team was now complete. KJ started on a very rigorous design investigation phase and out of this came some super interesting studies of how lines start to intersect each other.
This led to one of our first ‘eureka’ moments when she produced this little sketch.
The metaphor of convergence was clear in the sketch, it felt a bit rigid but we all knew this was the start of a great direction. We just had to convey the ‘conversation’ in there as everyone was clear this was core to understanding the idea.
Magnets
Karsten also started to explore use the metaphor of magnets ‘pulling in the conversation’ as a way of visualising the strands of conversation.
This led to another study in field lines.
Some old code immediately rapidly led to some great sketches.
This then led to further study by KJ which stared to apply the field lines to create the lockup of the ‘onedotzero’ logo.
So now the basic principles of the system were set. We would take the ‘onedotzero’ logo – break the letters down into ‘poles’ and create a system where lines flowed over the poles. Simple really.
Set the goalposts
The last part of the puzzle was moving into 3 Dimensions. For Karsten this was totally trivial and again very rapidly we led to the next sketch.
So the type is impossible read, there is no visualisation of conversation but in that we’ve got nearly all the tasks needed to push things forward. The goalposts were now set…More parts to this story soon…
Gaming is hot again in advertising. I’m not talking about making online games (that is soooo 2000) or even building on top of Foursquare, but taking elements of gaming (achievements, rewards, levels) and applying this in other ways. The recent Nike Grid project was a great example of how these gaming structures could reward realworld participation.
What if we can extend a realworld participation back into videogames.
The brilliant Nike78 project has a film by Nick Marsh where they have hacked a Wii controller into a pair of running shoes. By running on the spot you control the game.
This is genius but restrictive. Could you do this in the real world?
Well actually – possibly yes. Nike+ is out there. By running you accumulate points.
In Grand Theft Auto your character gets fitter and can run further by running more in the game.
Could we combine Nike+ with Grand Theft Auto so that by running in the real world makes your gaming character fitter?
If there was a clear Nike+ API and the developers of GTA chose to implement this feature then it could be possible.
What other physical or social choices could there be to create this same offline/online reward structure?
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Can shopping create points to spend in Farmville?
Again probably yes. There is a Tesco.com API and a partnership with Farmville could be thrashed out.
So can videogames influence our behaviour? I believe we could be at the point where they actually could.
Virgin Media has commissioned UVA to ‘explore the themes of communication and modernity’ as part of their 10th year celebrations of broadband. As a concept, UVA explored the material of optical fibre and stripped back – it is essentially a beam of light.
The response to the brief is a series of installations set across six rooms and four floors of a raw industrial space behind the OXO tower in London.
As you enter the space, you are posed a question. You speak your answer into a microphone and your voice is amplified and distorted as it is played back to you. Slightly amused and curious, you climb the stairs into the darkness.
As your eyes adjust, flashes of red laser light race round the edges of the room to create hard edged forms. It’s an impressive visual mixed with sporadic snippets of voices, and you quickly pass to see the same effect in a smaller room outlining a TV, table and a sofa.
The next room appears to have a long reflective channel down the middle, maybe 10 metres long. Red, green and blue lasers at either end are mixed together to form white light and then this light is reflected and scattered back down the length of the installation. All the time snatches of voices (which you now realise are the responses to the earlier question) are syncopated into a heavy bass track and perfectly matched in time with the laser sequences.
It’s mesmerising, thrilling and the sense of the world of conversation passing through light is beautifully represented. My photos do not do this justice in any way.
The next room appears to have a ‘smiley’ face and the concept wasn’t apparent.
The last room is in the loft of the building is a sequence where lasers from different parts of the room converge on single points as they move. Snippets of news and other sounds are mixed together and this piece (although very beautiful) felt more of a showcase for effects than the strong narrative that was represented earlier in the show.
Overall a stunning achievement – technically and in terms of drama and narrative.
The behind the scenes videos are a lovely touch into the revealing processes involved in creating this type of work.
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