Metaio—the technology vendor behind the augmented reality retail experience for LEGO (“Digital Box”)—has produced an augmented reality cover for July’s issue of Popular Science. By visiting a page on Popular Science’s website with a computer equipped with a webcam and microphone, visitors are able to see a 3D wind turbine. The piece is also interactive; by blowing on a mic visitors are able to make the blades on the tiny wind turbine spin.

We’ve previously mentioned some potential usability issues with Augmented Reality, and with this execution we ran into a few hiccups as well. To begin with, for one reason [...]

Bacardi is touring its LED bottle wall around Toronto festivals this summer. The mobile fixture is made up of 253 bottle sized holes arranged in an 11 x 23 grid with LED lights in the back which are computer controlled. The piece is participatory as well; the wall doesn’t come with the bottles in them. Seems like a good way to collect bottles for recycling no?

[via rubbishcorp, photo via likecool]

Earlier this year at our New York Conference, Kevin Slavin of Area/Code shared with us a presentation entitled “This Platform Called Everyday Life” about how technologies are breathing life and infusing intelligence into the physical objects around us. Expanding on this idea, Matt Jones of Dopplr explains how, increasingly, tangible products are interfacing intangible services, and conversely how intangible services are replacing products.
In explaining the product service interchange, Jones highlights projects in which data is collected from interactions with services that are then translated into physical totems, or what he terms “attention anchors” that serve as a representation the services [...]

As a follow up to last year’s “Urban Tumbleweeds” art installation at Burning Man, this past weekend, as a part FIGMENT, New York based design studio MSLK has assembled a new eco-art project entitled Watershed.
Watershed is composed of 1,500 plastic water bottles (the number of bottles consumed every second in the United States), strung from a tree—perhaps arranged symbolically pointing to our consumption’s burden on the earth. The downsides to bottled water have been well documented; from the energy and resources required to producing and transporting the bottles, to the pollution and waste resulting from the whole process, and that’s [...]

Late in April, our friends in Toronto (Janet Jones and Capital C) hosted an honest and heated discussion about the transformative effects of social media and Internet technology on traditional media spaces—indeed, one of the more exciting salons we’ve participated in yet. The well rounded panel, featured members representing different facets of the media landscape: Mathew Ingram of Globe & Mail (print), Jesse Hirsh of the CBC (broadcast), Jonathan Lister of Google Canada (Internet), David Jones of Hill & Knowlton (PR) and moderator Tony Chapman of The Capital C (advertising and marketing).
Some of the critical points of discussion include:

How has [...]

This weekend at the Renegade Craft Fair in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we spotted an interesting line of jewelry generated from rapid prototyping technology. Named Nervous System, the pieces were created by Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenburg — both former students at MIT (appropriately enough) who studied in the fields of Architecture, Biology and Mathematics.

The jewelry — completely constructed using 3d printing technology, and titled with names such as lamina, dendrite and radiolaria — take inspiration from organic structures. Many of their pieces are generated from algorithmic processes and even allow you to customize your own pieces of jewelry through their website.

Recently there has been a rash of cautiously critical opinions in the advertising blogosphere about augmented reality. Commentators at Advertising Lab, and Supercolider all believe augmented reality to be this year’s “Second Life”: over-hyped, under tested, and, at worst “disposable eye-candy”.
We fully acknowledge the potential for this technology to be merely an addition to the marketer’s arsenal of gimmickry. And, also see that there are still many kinks to iron out with it: the process of getting AR to work with your home computer/webcam can be cumbersome, and even when you’ve got it to work properly, you’re oftentimes peeking around [...]

We caught up with Stefan Boublil this past Monday at MEET’s First Monday coworking sessions for some lessons in personal branding. Stefan as the owner of the New York based multi-disciplinary design firm—the Apartment—has had his hand in all sorts of gigs, from helping developing the urban relaxation sanctuary YELO, to running a mayoral campaign for a fictitious political candidate under the banner of “the democratization of design” for the ICFF in 2003. Naturally we wondered what made him tick.
Stefan shared his experience as a French ex-patriot in New York City. He came to the city in 1989 to learn [...]

Earlier this year at the Guardian, Clay Shirky of Here Comes Everybody, made the prediction that book publishers would soon turn to on demand manufacturing solutions as a response to the media landscape becoming increasingly digital.
Recently we came across On Demand Books based out of New York. Like a physical analog to Amazon’s kindle, On Demand Books’ “Espresso machine” pulls from a digital catalogue and prints, and binds and vends books on the fly. On Demand Books’ catalog is currently somewhere around 500 thousand titles or so and looking to expand past 1 million titles by the time summer passes. [...]

In a week’s time Microsoft will be launching its new Internet Search site, Bing, previously code named “Kumo”. Microsoft tapped Interbrand to conceive this moniker, which is meant to be a verbable phrase. Their hope is that in 6 months time we’ll be “Binging” things rather than “Googling” them.
Reviews have sprung up across pundit sites in the digital space. Their verdict? Microsoft’s offering does innovate in particular search tasks; notably in local, travel, shopping and health. Microsoft leverages an semantic approach to search, scraping partner sites to aggregate product and restaurant reviews for local and shopping, and competitive pricing for [...]

Yesterday we finally got around to checking out Alioscopy USA’s “glasses-free” 3D LCD display on 50th by 7th in midtown New York. The display is being used as a part of a storefront ad for TWBA’s middling, yet unavoidable “snacklish” campaign for Mars’ Snickers brand of candy bar.
We found ourselves underwhelmed, as the display — little more than an LCD TV placed behind a lenticular screen — appeared to be clunkier and choppier than its analog counterpart. At the same time, we couldn’t help but to wonder if the content simply did not showcase the technology’s potential for immersive experience. [...]

Clive Thompson at Wired reports on how the competitive nature of games can be injected into everyday mundane tasks making them more fun and more interesting. You are probably already familiar with the way Nike Plus injects game-like qualities into your everyday cardiovascular workout, but Thompson highlights some other examples including; digital gas mileage readouts in hybrid cars being used for hypermiling games, Dennis Crowley’s pub-crawling based Foursquare, and, get this – a “game” built into corporate email aiming to reward a reduction in email volume.
Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can [...]

Earlier this month we reported on Eminem’s twitter-based treasure hunt. Sony, in promoting the new Terminator film, has created a game built on the twitter platform. To play you must register at www.resistance2018.com and follow tweets from @resistance2018. Game play follows in a similar manner to @playtwivia in which you @reply solutions to simple puzzles—word scrabbles, fill in the blanks and trivia. As the game is billed as a means for humans to communicate with each other in the “resistance” participants also get to receive “skynet warnings” about ongoing events in the terminator world and, of course, updates about the [...]

Last Thursday we attended the Anti-Advertising Salon at MEET hosted by Marc and Sara Schiller of the Wooster Collective. The evening served as a thought provoking expose on “billboard liberations” and the motivations of their creators. The discussion featured Jordan Seiler of the Public Ad Campaign, who most recently orchestrated the NY Street Advertising Takeover; and Steve Lambert of the Anti-Advertising Agency, which is perhaps best known for its collaboration with eyebeam (Firefox plugin Add-Art) and the Graffiti Research Lab (an ad-jamming campaign entitled Light Criticism).
Marc and Sara started off the evening sharing their motivations on the event, expressing their [...]