Not to be confused with Inifiniti or Toyota, oh yeah, or Hyundai, yet another company has done a white car projection mapped to make it seem magical and augmented. I don't hate the creative, it is quite pretty in fact, I just don't like the constant reuse of the same idea, for the same type product, in the same type of experiential manner. Creativity people, that is the business we are in.
As AR image recognition gets better, it allows for more manipulation of the world through our mobile devices. The Public Ad Campaign and Heavy Projects are working on this app which replaces advertisements with curated art pieces. As this tech gets better it will be interesting to see what the ad community does to counteract it. Imagine if your photo app automatically removed any known ad it recognized while taking pics of your family on vacation?
Check it out if you want. I am also giving a presentation on the topic at the Creativity Creative & Technology conference, If they video it, I will post that as well.
Here is some of the latest out of Supertouch Labs. It utilizes a kinect, spacial recognition and activation, remote iPad control and gesture based media control.
The user, once in our Coverflow application can control media using simple gestures right and left. Additionally, the system adjusts the volume based on how close the user is to the screen, so if she is farther away, we can play the content louder for her to hear, if closer, it will be softer.
The core programming works for a variety of media. One can control music, video, movies, presentation slides and images to create amazing presentation control in virtual space. Interested in this? Drop me a line.
1. Augment the future! - Self Portrait as a model for a hacked kinect project - If you are not paying attention, you will get passed by. More to come on this soon.
2. Time Warner goes guerrilla to promote it's new iPad app. I wonder if NYC is still cracking down on street stenciling they way it or other cities used to?
3. Random Lady GaGa poster deterioration creates new artwork?
So not only is our visible world up for sale, but it would seem, so are the darkest corners of our mind.
In Inception Point-like fashion, BMW created this experience to 'place' their logo behind your closed eyes using a subliminal after image effect. Yes, they told the audience what they were doing, and the ad team claims [often] that it is 'harmless' (define harmless please) and of course the process is quite interesting, but I am worried about what we could not be told about in regards to this technique and how it could play on our unconscious. Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself but neuromarketing is something to take seriously as the ideas of free will and desire get challenged and planting messages becomes a corporate possibility.
Love this guerrilla art/activism campaign from New Orleans' designer Candy Chang called I Wish This Was. The familiar Hello, My Name Is design is adapted to I Wish This Was and encourages people to show their wishes and desires as to what is still needed in the community. The stickers were placed in local bars, coffee shops, salons, etc. and people were encouraged to share them and post them.
It has taken me about a week, but they have finally convinced me that this is a moment. I am not talking about a Kanye storming the stage moment, I am talking about a MOMENT. And I will be frank, it came from one of those companies I was least expecting to see it from. Yeah, you know who I am talking about, Microsoft. With the release of Kinect, they have launched a game changer. Not game as in the gamer sense of the word, although I can see myraid applications for such. But we are talking behavior change. A Star Trek meets Blade Runner surfing on Minority Report's Tron light cycle change. When we think leaps and bounds, this is what we should be thinking about. Oh yeah, and there is a good chance that Microsoft will have little to do with how it all ends up.
The gaming with Kinect will be fun, but I am not really a gamer. I played the Wii and enjoyed it, but in the end reading Steig Larsson on the Kindle is preferable for my spare time device handling. What will come out of the technology of Kinect will be a different story. As you are standing on your rug, pretending to play with animals as Microsoft portrays in the commercials others are hacking this technology to reveal ways of looking at the world that you only saw in the movies.
Using the IR mapping that is the basis of how Kinect works, some programmers were able to hack it and create a 3-D point cloud of the world around them using just the Kinect camera. Other programmers are doing some very cool stuff as well.
Here is object recognition using a Kinect
And check out someone using the Kinect camera to creat a gesture based multi-touch interface.
What does this all matter? Well, think of it this way, if through computer vision, we can map the world around us in 3-D space, we have exponentially increased the spaces and surface potential for interacting with technology. And when you combine, gesture, object recognition, facial recognition and other interactive technologies, you realize that you may remember this moment when things changed, when a new technology that has the power to adjust how we react to the network and each other went mainstream. This is very exciting for a marketing technology company like ours, and as well, we should also recognize that it can be a scary concept to think that the world around us can be scanned, integrated and utilized more than we have ever realized. We as marketers and technologists working in these platforms need to aknowledge this and reassure people that we are trying to enhance their connected lives, not record their every breath and blink.
Rewind to today, and we have a Kinect camera in the office and are starting to work on how we can integrate it into our SuperTouch technologies, but I felt the need to pause and share what seems to be a potential inflection point in our relationship to technology.
Want to see how the Kinect reads all that spacial data? This video shot with a night vision camera gives a hint.
Ralph Lauren might have just set the bar for creative architectural brand projections with this nifty little experiment in "4D". Done at their flagship store in NYC, this execution is one of the best examples of video and animation mapping I have seen.
Jay Silver, researcher at the MIT Media Lab has created Singing Fingers. A sweet and amazing combination or sounds, music, light, creativity with a sprinkling of the future baked right in. This is the type of app that makes feel good about why you dropped all that cash on your iPad.
