Finally. Augmented Reality that I don’t have to WORK for. Only 3 shakes (fingers crossed)! The updated Yelp app contains an AR easter egg called “Monocle” that allows users to view business ratings overlayed on a video stream from their iPhone’s camera. Very cool considering how much I use Yelp.
“The best use case for this Yelp app might not be for finding businesses out of sight, but for pointing your phone at businesses you are physically near and discovering Yelp
reviews of those places.”
Instapaper is a free online service that allows you to click a “Read Later” button while surfing to save something for later on. With our world becoming near-paperless, this is a handy tool to save and read articles.
It’s not only web-compatible but iPhone/iPod compatible, too.
I’ve seen a few concepts around that involved saving and aggregating online reviews for products as well as other information, and this is the most straightforward way I’ve seen to accomplish this.
This highly interesting speech from the July 2009 Global TED talks really got me thinking. How can we all stay motivated, and complete our tasks quickly, and correctly? Some would say material motivators, money, car, apartment, are the things that motivate us to work harder, but this talk smashes that notion to bits, and puts forth a really interesting view of managing smart employees in the 21st century. Very interesting. Click the image to go to the story.
Additionally, I’ve seen a lot more examples of horizontal scrolling like this recently. For some reason, maybe because it’s novel, or maybe because no clicks are necessary, it makes scrolling seem less tiresome than when it’s done vertically, or when you have to click through multiple pages to view more of the same.
Interaction could be added to an execution like this to provide more information to the user.
Project Natal takes gaming and home entertainment to the next level, allowing gameplay without the use of controllers. Interactions are processed using full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition. It will be sold as a hardware add-on for the Xbox 360 in late 2010. [src: wikipedia]
Here’s a video of Jimmy Fallon testing it out and a link describing the technology that makes it work.
Ubiq’Window, a Japanese company is trying to spice up window displays with “Minority Report” style interfaces projected on glass. There’s some really interesting/amazing work, and many many examples on Ubiq’Window’s Site, and on Vimeo as well.
Lovely story in the NYT’s today about GPS drawing – urban drawings and maps made by tracking a person’s movements and physical location using GPS technology. It’s like a data visualization of your run! Awesome…
‘Part sport, part art, GPS drawing lets runners, walkers, cyclists and hikers imagine themselves anew — not just as a collection of burning muscles, sweaty armpits, forward motion; not just as people endeavoring to crest a hill or lose five pounds. Instead, they are neo-cartographers, jumbo-size doodlers and bipedal pencils, mapping their track lines across cities, roads and farms, and sharing them online.’
‘Mr. Berezinski, 40, has run three marathons, lost 16 pounds and taken to creating huge drawings by following routes through city streets in the shape of faces, dogs and anything else that strikes his fancy. After planning a route, he traces it on foot or bicycle carrying his GPS device to record his progress. Then he uploads the “drawing” he has made to a map-sharing site called everytrail.com.’ (Via NYT)
If you missed it, Lombard street recently turned into the feel-good advertisement of the year: Candyland for sick kids. UC San Francisco Children’s Hospital and the organization Friends of the Children paired with the makers of Candyland to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the game, raise some money, and the spirits of the children. The kids were able to team up, play the game full-size, interact with the characters, and eat some birthday cake at the end.
As someone who played Candyland as a kid, this hit me right in the heart. Good advertising FTW!
From Wired: CBS is embedding a video player in a print ad in Entertainment Weekly that will serve up a video buffet of its fall lineup.
The ad, dubbed by CBS and partner Pepsi Max “the first-ever VIP (video-in-print) promotion,” works like one of those audio greeting cards. Opening the page activates the player, which is a quarter-inch-thick screen seen through a cutaway between two pages concealing the larger circuit board underneath.
