It seems like once a month or so I come across a video of some guy in his living room doing some proof of concept with a Wii remote that advances interface technology into the realm of science fiction. Multipoint finger tracking like Minority Report, a multitouch digital whiteboard system made with Radioshack components… Oh wait… it’s the same guy every time.
The video below starts with some explanation of what is about to happen, which is worth listening to so you understand the reason your jaw hits the desk at around the 2:45 mark.
Head tracking desktop VR is the new black.
As you are now well aware, the guys name is Johnny Chung Lee. He’s a graduate PhD at Carnegie Mellon. In addition to writing sweet code, he also makes and sells a $14 Steadycam.
1967 had a pretty good read on 1999. Which naturally leads one to think about what 2039 might have to offer the home of the future (hopefully an ice maker). If the unending cycle of retro-to-cool rebirth continues unabated, it’s a fairly good bet that 32 years from now, 20 year olds will be wearing the clothes we buy next year. The coolest among them will shop vintage, by standing in front of the holographic projector mirror in their closet, which presents them with outfits that hover in front of their bodies like paper dolls.
Now if we could just figure out a way to get those future vintage Rock and Republic jeans delivered via the Home Post Office featured below…
I’m involved in the advertising and marketing industries, so I pay attention to the ways that companies market their products. Figuring out the formula for successfully doing so on the internet is where a lot of the action is right now. Google hit it big with the text based “relevant advertising” model that proliferates the side bar of properties like search and Gmail, and rich media ads are starting to come into their own with the more widespread adoption of broadband. Taken together though it’s all very old school “advertising” rather than anything resembling the modern version of “branding” that’s being done. Most branding has been left to the companies websites and micro-sites.
Viral marketing holds promise online - especially as it relates to video. BMW created a series of films with high profile names to pimp their brand, delivering it through their own website. It made a lot of noise at the time, although I’m not sure how it affected sales, it surely helped shape the brand.
So how about skivvies? You can advertise them the old school way… like really oldschool… pitch them as the perfect Mothers Day gift (even the dog is in on this one), or the new “internet way” as Google does (if you click the skivvies link, you’re guaranteed to be served underwear related ads on the sidebar of Urban Dictionary site).
But what about branding, and online viral video marketing?
UK boutique lingerie house Lascivious has teamed up with motion shop Wyld Stallyons to create a campaign meant to both sell some delicate unmentionables and raise the profile of the design studio. The result is a short film called The Doll which has just been released. (NSFW if you work somewhere where people care about that type of thing)
As of right now it’s got about 1300 views on YouTube. It will be interesting to see if this combination of slick editing, nice effects work, scantily clad ladies and the promise of violent lesbian robot sex will “go viral” as they say. Are you kidding me? With all of those geek sex credentials and a nice behind the scenes flik as well, it’s hard to imagine how it won’t have hundreds of thousands of page views in the next week or so… but will it sell the underpants? For $100 a pair (and way up), are you in?
The comments of that post are where the real action is… plenty of back and forth about the promise and/or folly of multi-touch as a viable day-to-day interface for working with the Macintosh. When it comes to how I work on the computer - mostly designing in Adobe Applications, I can’t imagine multi-touch having enough resolution to work well. A mouse seems way more precise when it comes to selecting control points, or even adjusting parameters in filter menus than my finger. I’m not even comfortable using a laptop’s touch pad.
Certainly there are applications where this wouldn’t be the case - specifically, the post talks about Apple’s Pro applications like Logic, and presumably Final Cut at some point. I can definitely see the advantage of working on a multi-touch interface that emulates a mixing board - but that’s pretty niche for a major announcement. It reminded me of a patent application Apple filed a while back for interfaces that combine “mechanical overlay” devices with touch screens. In the patent drawings they sketch out what looks like a mixing board with a row of sliders on top of a touch screen. The apparent advantage would be having the familiar feel of feedback that you get from analog controls like sliders and knobs. In the sketch below, #14 represents the touch screen that the mechanics would overlay. Seems very cool, but also very niche.
Mac NN did a major post on the patent back in November which is worth reading if you missed it. There are plenty more drawings that explore the possibilities of the overlay as interface.
Obviously years from now and with significant redesign at the most base level of how we interact with computers multi-touch could be amazing, but I’m more interested in now.
My friend Tunc is probably the most technology hungry Mac fanatic early adopter I know, so what do you think Tunc? Are you on board with the mutli-touch revolution or is it just a niche gimmick better left to big table tops in hotel lobbies?
So the computing division of Microsoft finally comes up with a product that has the potential to reposition the brand as a market leader instead of just the leading developer of bloatware, but the marketing department designs, approves and releases creative that resembles stock video clips for a prescription drug advertisement with copy and voice over as soulless as a stripper’s eyes. Their initial market for Surface is obviously high end hotels like the W that are very concerned with design and “hipness” and this is what they decide to go with? Really?
Likely from the same minds that decided to call the Zune file sharing feature “squirting”.
Perhaps a Google search is in order next time?
I used to be a 3D modeller. I worked in Alias Studio on an SGI back when the idea of layers in Photoshop was unthinkable. The idea that we would all soon be able to use our laptops to run high end animation software to make our own movies was ludicrous… But here we are.
I’ve never been a fan of the big Hollywood animated feature. I’ve never seen Toy Story or the sinister Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo or the majority of the genres œuvre, but for a long time I was still “wowed” by CGI in a technical sense. That one concession ended a while back though. We’ve reached a technical plateau in the sense that the visuals being presented aren’t compromised by the softwares inability to deliver, aside from those projects which try to achieve human realism.
For these reasons and countless others, I champion projects like those below. Please, isn’t there a single director in the Hollywood system with the tenacity and resources to make a sci-fi movie the old school way? Where is the next generation Ridley Scott? Somebody bust out the glue and make some goddamn miniatures. I’d put 2001 or Alien up against any CGI malpractice from the last decade.
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