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.
I am uniQue by Foxtel
Lowe Sydney have recently launched a lovely new campaign for Foxtel called I am uniQue. The premise is pretty simple, create a 3D portrait of yourself that incorporates text, video and images from social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Logging-in is easy if you’ve got a Facebook account (using Connect) and the navigation for viewing the portraits once they’re uploaded is pretty neat.
One nice aspect to the campaign is that these portraits can be enhanced by others with them adding greater detail than the original creator may have given. Having not done this, I wonder what kind of moderation levels there are in place.
As each update is made, the users Wall on their Facebook page is also updated keeping people on on the platform up to date with how their 3D profile is progressing.
Gallipoli: The First Day
Gallipoli, The First Day is a beautifully executed portrayal of the ANZAC’s ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, told through 3D animation, video and audio.
For me, this is a great extension to traditional storytelling (fact or fiction) as the audience becomes so heavily involved. If you’ve ever read Les Carlyon’s ‘Gallipoli’ (and you should), you can appreciate how this interactive piece condenses so much information into rich, palatable chunks. I can see projects like this becoming fantastic teaching-aids in schools and universities.
Another amazing project from your ABC!
Offline shopping experience goes online
Imagine shopping online but still being able to browse the racks, drag items to have a closer look, and finally add them to your own rack of chosen goods before purchase.
Japanese website Hoop has done just this for their new online store. While I can’t read/understand much of what’s going on, the idea behind it seems pretty cool. Not sure if it’ll prove to be a success or failure for the customer, but good on them for giving it a try.
Flickr video visualisation
I love this simple clock visualisation on Flickr created by Stamen, a design and technology studio in San Francisco. It’s not the first Flickr visualisation they’ve created, but certainly their best.
It’s essentially a video browser set against a timeline allowing access to recent uploads from the flickrclock group. The interface allows users to scroll back and forth in time giving a broader perspective of Flickr activity.
Define yourself with only 5 brands
5brand is essentially a blog that allows people to submit a list of 5 brands that they believe define themselves. These are then listed with your name, occupation and where you live. It’s largely full of Brazilian and Portuguese entries at the moment - think sports apparel and football.
A good portion of the entries are by copywriters, designers and marketers so brands like Apple, Sony, Virgin and Converse seem to be regulars.
It’s harder than you think, really…. it is… I hate being put in a box…
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.
Every wondered what’s being said out there…?
Spy can listen in on the social media conversations you’re interested in. Type in a word or phrase (’snow london’ entered in the example above) and let it search Twitter, Flickr, Blogs, FriendFeed and others to deliver an interesting snapshot of current dialogue taking place.
Data visualisation by Gapminder
What is Gapminder? In their words it’s about “unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.” For me, it’s a beautifully presented, easy to use time-based graphing tool. Checkout this graph I built to show the number of internet users (per hundered people) in the US, Japan, UK, China and Australia over a period from 1998 to 2006.
Website / TuneGlue
TuneGlue is one of the latest online offerings venturing into relationship visualisation. In this case, TuneGlue maps the links between various artists and genres of music from Last.FM and Amazon. Type in the name of your favourite singer or band and the mini-app generates threads of similar artists, albums etc. From here you can drill down to albums and tracks.
All the data is pulled from the EMI owned Last.FM which adds credibility to the offering and once again shows the faith and commitment EMI have to the digital space - read their press release on the issue here.
A similar offering named LivePlasma has been around for quite a while and although not as slick, does a better job of visually representing the relationships. The addition of size to the generated nodes and multiple linkage paths gives depth and relevance. Try searching for the same artist and see what happens.