Blast from the BBC
BBC has launched an amazing digital and real-life experiential event called Blast which was conceived and built by Fallon London.
The project was developed in 2002 to encourage 13 to 19 year olds to develop their skills in art, dance, film, music, writing and games. Since then, it’s had many guises, with the latest being a truly amazing virtual-control meets real-life interaction experiment.
Visitors to the site can write stories that print out within the Blast Studio, paint the walls, add to a constantly evolving sculpture and control a huge light installation.
Fallon has said that the studio experiment will contribute to TV commercials and invited artists will also be encouraged to participate with the wider internet audience.
Check out the video below to see it being setup or visit their Flickr photostream for some great visuals.
Rethink music streaming - We are hunted
I came across a new music streaming site on Mumbrella this afternoon - We Are Hunted. The site tracks what’s being said about music on various blogs, social networks, forums and even peer-to-peer networks. It then compiles these into the top 99 that users can listen to and then buy (beating copyright infringement).
The site’s a collaboration between wotnews and Native Digital who got a bunch of press a little while back for creating EMI’s ‘The In Sound From Way Out’ MP3 blog.
Enjoy the fresh sounds…
Streaming games platform debuts
A new video gaming system has been debued by ex-Quicktime developer, Steve Perlman, after spending 7 years in development.
The system, known as OnLive, claims to stream games seamlessly to either a Mac, PC or TV (with attached Onlive MicroConsole). They claim that “OnLive turns games into video data sent across the net to a hardware add-on, or software plug-in, which decompresses the data back into video”.
Sounds great huh? Well, I’m guessing that the proof will be in the pudding here. True HD supported graphics streamed in real-time sounds pretty audacious to me, especially in Australia.
They’ve already signed up the big content partners including EA, Ubisoft, Take2, Eidos, Atari, Codemasters, Epic and THQ to deliver games such as Burnout, Fear 2, Tomb Raider: Underworld and Crysis: Warhead.
Read more about it on the BBC website.
Digital bus stops - Cadbury goo the egg
Interactive bus shelter panels are nothing new - think bluetooth movie downloads, searchable maps and so on, but this game for Cadbury by Saatchi & Saatchi London takes it to the next level. What a great little branded time-waster. Surely there’ll be some great extensions to this idea in the future.
A publisher’s nightmare…
Sick of banners intruding on your browsing experience? Look no further than Add-Art, a free Firefox add-on which replaces adverting on websites with curated art images. I’m not sure it’s going to be popular with advertisers but hey, interesting concept.
Go swimming with Google Earth
How good is this? Finally Google Earth has an ocean - one that you can actually ’swim’ in. Launched yesterday, Google Earth 5.0 now allows users the ability to submerse themselves in the world’s oceans, exploring the ocean floor through video, images and 3D mapping. You can read more about this on the official Google blog.
Pipl - the people search engine
When we think of search, we think of Google. But even Google has limitations to what it can find. Take people for example, it’ll return a list of indexed results containing names or relevant details, but these are not specific and are often mixed amongst totally un-people related results. Enter Pipl which has just overtaken Spock (the former default people search engine) in ComScore’s December numbers.
It’s pretty scary as to what it can find - see image above. One search under my name brought back a table of images with 3 of the 19 being me. Big brother is watching.
Article / Top tech trends to watch in 2007 (SMH)
- Blogosphere growth tapers
- Vista take-up slows, Linux following grows
- Web 2.0 start-ups weeded out
- HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war decided
- Continued migration from desktop to online applications
- VoIP takes off
- Computers in the living room still won’t fly
- Mobile video proliferates
- YouTube won’t feature in the 2007 Federal Election
- Microsoft ramps up its online business
- Downloadable movie space heats up
- Wii wins next-gen console war