Giant LCD touchscreens make a splash at UK fashion events

Bloggers raved about them, and young fashionistas couldn’t wait to get their hands on them. The main attractions of the Future Fashion promotional events held at Westfield shopping malls in London and Stratford earlier this year were their digital “Styling Cubes” 103-inch interactive LCD touchscreens, which enabled users to quickly put together personal “mood board” collages of fashion images.

The Styling Cubes allowed users to drag, drop and manipulate images of clothing, shoes and accessories from more than 30 Westfield retailers onto a colorful personalized style board. The 1000 or so available images were pre-selected and provided by the retailers, and were grouped into four of the latest fashion trends. A few random images also were thrown into the mix, such as flowers and cupcakes, to add more colorful choices for the boards.

Once completed, the styling boards were being shared by email, on social media or in the Westfield malls’ Style Board Facebook Gallery. Oh, and users could handily order an item-by-item list of where to buy the products on their board.

How social is your “mood board?”

The Styling Cubes, each mounted in its own colorful booth, offered an interactive collage-making experience similar to the Polyvore.com sets available online. The main differences are size—the Styling Cubes are enormous in comparison to the average computer screen—and location of use.

The Styling Cubes were up for display at busy malls where users could try them out alone or with friends, and could quickly share the results with more friends and the broader community. Consequently, people described the Styling Cube experience as creative, social and fun.

Users also reported they enjoyed the mixing and matching and ease of use. “We were so impressed with how sensitive the interactive screens were, it let you to drag and drop the items and delete as you wish. Making choosing outfits so easy!” wrote the London Styling bloggers.

The Styling Cubes became the main attraction

There were other goodies at the Future Fashion events, including a 3D film fashion runway show, and a “Tweet Mirror” for posing, snapping pictures and sharing the pictures on Twitter. But the Styling Cubes were “the real draw,” according to Digital Style Digest.

I watched the Westfield promotional video of the event, which shows a teen running up to a Styling Cube and then using both of her hands (yes, the screen is enormous!) to shrink down a foot-wide image of a colorful daisy, and then expand the daisy again. It definitely looked like she was playing and having fun, not working. Being able to manipulate and assemble images into a collage is a thrill—just ask any Polyvore or Pinterest user—and I can only imagine how amazing it would be on a giant touchscreen like this.

The wilderness downtown is a new interactive video that demonstrates pretty well some of the experimentation going on right now with HTML5. The experience is customized by inputing an address. You can see my customized experience near where a buddy of mine and I had an apartment back in the day.

The alternative rock music group Arcade Fire released this interactive video that uses a combination of google maps imagery and HTML5 video and sound. The main concept of the interactive experience is to enter a street address and the experience is customized to that address. It starts out with one window of a man running followed by several windows open showing google imagery and a nicly animated effect of birds flying. The birds flying effect is impressive on its own, but is also synchronized between windows as birds fly from one window to the next. There is an animated drawing section where you can write messages and the final effect is trees growing all over the google maps imagery. The experience is summed up by a call to share your “movie”.

While the window synchronization is not a new effect (I guess so old that its now new again) and user experience professionals would frown down on this type of functionality in a real site. I think as an experiment the site does well. The site apparently was good enough to win an FWA, which I believe may be a first for an HTML5 site.

I’ve examined the code a bit, the birds and trees overlayed behind the google maps imagery are done in Canvas. I’ve a feeling that the animation is mainly all code driven especially, though I believe the animated trees are some videos which are imported and manipulated with canvas.

The video is directed by Chris Milk and the development was done by the crew at radical.media.

The Let’s Color Campaign from Delux which is just now getting traction in the states, but has apparently been going on for a while, has Delux paints going to cities around the world, bringing as much paint as anyone could want, and commencing to “Colour” all types of public and private buildings.

This short documentary features footage of locals in Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Istambul, and Jodhpur India, going completely color crazy.
I was particularly interested in the time ramping technique they used in their timelaps. The letcolor youtube user gave clarification:

We used motion control to track very slowly at 0.5mm per second or slower. Some of the moves took 90 minutes in real time For the shot at the start we tamped the camera tps, iris and exposure time in sync to move from 25fps to 0.1fps – all in camera!

A while back I heard the architect James H Kunstler give an excellent speech arguing:

What we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.

Here is Kunstler’s speech:

The idea is something that has been sticking with me for a while. In many cities in the US we haven’t taken the time to build them to connect with us on a human level as opposed to a utilitarian one. Thats one reason the Let’s Color connected with me. I will say that painting places with much color is something I’d like to do, and its something I will do at the next opportunity because places should be worth caring about.