Dan Saffer last year coined the term “tap is the new click” at one of his keynotes. It seems that Dan could be right, we’re heading towards more and more “gestural interfaces” where users can interact with an interface by using hand gestures. Apple’s iPhone and lesser known projects as the Attigo TT and Jeff Han’s groundbreaking touch screen prototype are pushing the envelope.
Microsoft, the 800 pound gorilla, is also embracing this movement and recently developed Microsoft Surface a touch screen product that gives “access to digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects”. What is also impressive is the video they released called “Productivity Future Vision” that portrays a not-so-distant future where touch screen artifacts are surrounding us from newspapers, to coffee mugs and tables. Some of these will probably not be realized, but it’s definitely food for thought. Tap is becoming the new click.
Bill Scott, the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, gave a presentation entitled “Bringing Design to Life – What Engineers Wish Designers Knew” at the WebVisions conference last week. Essentially, the presentation was about bridging the gap between designers and engineers and how to bring designs to life by prototyping. One of the main points that Scott makes is that designers and engineers are in many ways wired differently. Scott says that engineers are “implementation focused” and designers are “ideation focused” and wants designers and engineers to work more closely together and think from the other role’s point of view. Looking at Netflix interface, it seems that this approach has been really successful and I fully agree with his statements. However, this also goes for User Experience professionals. We also need to think more like designers and engineers to create projects that everybody enjoys working on.
A stunning video made with the Sprint Cam V3 HD. The camera can capture video from 500-1000 frames per second, thus providing extraordinary detail and clarity.
I’ve always loved album art work. I sometimes even buy 12″ because of their innovative sleeve design. However, because of the MP3 revolution, album art has become a lesser part of the music experience. Thanks to Signal vs Noise I found this post about the site We Are Hunted. The concept of the site is similar to Hype Machine’s Popular section, it aggregates the most popular tracks in the blogosphere. But there is one important distinction, We Are Hunted displays prominent art work for each song. It’s interesting to see how that makes such a huge difference in the user experience. Music and album art need each other. Maybe there will now be a renaissance of that relationship?
Created entirely by Stink Digital, this new interactive campaign promotes Philips latest entrant into the television market, the CINEMA 21:9. Since the televisions 21:9 frame lends itself so readily to film, our friends at Tribal DDB, Amsterdam commissioned us to create a piece of filmed content that could hold its own with Hollywoods best. Director Adam Berg responded with an idea for an epic frozen moment cops and robbers shootout sequence that included clowns, explosions, a decimated hospital, and plenty of broken glass and bullet casings.
This epic film is the centrepiece of the project. On its own, it clocks in at a (totally coincidental) two minutes and 19 seconds, but Berg conceived it to work as an endless loop. Visitors to the microsite therefore have the option to spin through the films single take shot repeatedly, to stop on a specific frame, or to watch it at the preordained speed. The film also contains embedded hotspots, which, when triggered, transport the viewer seamlessly from the heavily posted film to a behind-the-scenes version of the same shot. This constant moving between two layers of reality proved one of the projects biggest and most ambitious production challenges. Other details of the online execution play off the cinematic theme; the microsites loader doubles as a credit sequence, while rich media takeover banners drive traffic to the site by teasing viewers with an original Carousel trailer. All aspects of the production, from the film shoot to web design and development, were conducted by Stink Digital.
Shoes and maps go together it seems. Zappos launched a visualizer a week or so ago that features products that are being purchased on Zappos in real time on a Google Map of the US. Not very useful, but clever nonetheless. Who knew that staring at shoe purchases would be a source of entertainment? Al Bundy, where are you know?
Designed for the Red Bull Music Academy 08, Guten Touch is an interactive installation that involves people into a natural relationship with technology. A two projected display system plus a 3m x 2m multitouch wall showcase applications designed to engage us into human friendly experiences rather than flashy and jaw-dropping visualizations. Space Invaders hitted by foam balls, pixel paintings created with brushes and digital objects holded by hands try to blur boundaries between real and digital.
Pre-loaders can sometimes be extremely annoying. However, some sites do it right. They make pre-loaders into something compelling and now there is a museum for them.
