“An interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the types of creatures that inhabit it.”
Remember Tamagotchis? This kind of reminds me of those.
There’s something to be said for a clever or interesting screensaver.
Yes, they require a user to download an application from a site and therefore take more effort (and even a little trust: “This file may contain an application. Continue downloading only if this is from a trusted source.”).
However, a good one can last longer than a user’s experience on a site, may affirm a user’s relationship with the brand, especially if the branding is not obtrusive, and may even inspire others who see it to ask about it when the user’s computer nods off.
Beyond the usual simple slideshow of images that you might create when “downloadable screensaver” comes up as a piece of a project, why not make a screensaver a more prominent piece of a digital branding experience and put more of the production effort and dollars towards something that, if cool, could last a bit longer on user’s screens?
Here’s a site with some intriguing screensavers. Many are for Macs AND PCs and are open-source, meaning their code could be borrowed and modified by other developers. http://www.usingmac.com/2009/5/13/mac-screen-savers
Google has chosen some interesting ways to promote its new browser, Google Chrome.
In addition to the “Chrome Shorts”, as it calls its viral videos , Google has also created a site to showcase developers’ experiments using Javascript and browsers. Most of these can be viewed using any old browser, but apparently work “best” with Chrome. They’re pretty cool and fun to play with, some sort of like the Wario Shake viral but they take it a bit further and let you control the page.
The Chrome Experiments even go beyond Flash to make the playful aspect integrated with the whole functionality of sites. The wide variety of experiments is difficult to explain without taking a peek, so be sure to take a look at the site and play around (do the experiments, not just the videos) so you see what I mean.
The site mainly seems to be promoting awareness of and interest in Chrome, and it’s an interesting and slightly confusing method of doing so, but sure to develop interest among the developer set. (sorry, buddy, Chrome is not yet available on Macs).
Link from Caio Lazzuri: Touch screen navigation often seems to be hovering on the horizon of the next thing in hardware, but what happens when you take touch screens and use them for art instead of navigation?
Guten Touch is an interactive installation designed for the Red Bull Music Academy (hello, sponsorship) that features a multitouch wall designed to engage people in “human friendly experiences” to try to blur boundaries between reality and digital reality.
Users can draw and manipulate objects, play games, and more.
The site for the group which designed this (Multi-touch Barcelona), which has a fun Google Chrome-style interaction of its own: http://www.multitouch-barcelona.com/
Microsoft’s Photosynth stitches together photographs from a real world 3D space and makes them viewable within a web browser in a 2.5D environment. Essentially, it allows anyone to create an experience similar to Google Maps Street View from their own photographs.
The Photosynth development team even did their own version of HP’s François at the bottom of the About Page.
