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.

A student project at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment and Technology center have completed the 4th iteration of their Dungeons and Dragons Microsoft Surface game, and it looks like alot of fun.  The game’s structure is that there is a Dungeon Master who is the game leader and he is in control of the monster team, and the players up to 4 of them are in control of the heros.

The game uses a combination of RFID tagged figurines that the represent the monsters and heros, and a heads up display facing each of the 4 corners, plus, users can bring up menus around their figurine to cast spells and attack or whatnot. The game shows off the communal possibilities of large format touch screens like the Microsoft Surface.

Volkswagen ran a competition recently to see what kind of apps developers from around the world would come up with if they released a developer kit for flash. I took a couple evenings to see what I could come up with. I had a clear idea that something utilizing the geolocation capabilities would be a good direction to look into. Originally I was leaning towards a directional photo viewer using Flickr’s geolocation API and the photos would rotate around the app as you turn, though the idea felt too distracting for a user.

I ended up going for a tweet map, where the newest tweets around your location would display and you could drill down according to direction.  Here’s the elevator pitch:

Tweet Map – Heatmap of Conversation:  It would be a blast to go out for the evening and see the nearby tweets of special events or of people enjoying themselves and tweeting it. This app will not only allow you to view nearby tweets, but also indicates from which direction conversation is coming from.

I ran through a couple of concepts, and during that time it eventually become clear that:

1. The general direction of the tweets was more important than the individual tweets.
2. The tweets should rotate around the car as you turn. So that if you see conversation coming from the right side. It means directly “look out your right window”.
3. Less information onscreen was required to make the app less distracting.

Here are some shots of the final designs:

The root of the design concept is that the touch screen doesn’t feel like a computer, it just blends into the instrument panel. The design is based off of the new generation of the Volkswagon Scirocco, a European only hatchback model. This Scirocco direction also took into account the aluminum interiors one sees in Volkswagons.

You can see the app here and vote for it if you want. The Tweet Map is more of a proof of concept as I ran into developer restrictions with how many geo-location queries one can make in an hour. So the data is actually canned for the city of Braunschweig during the Germany vs. England world cup match.

Some of the other interesting submissions included:

It was a fun little project and it appears that the in-car application is heating  up in the next couple months, as Microsoft has indicated they’ll release their own SDK soon for Ford’s in car “Sync” system.  Its definitely an area that we’re diving into when we it goes public.