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.

Need some motivating before you start on your tasks? Going through a trough phase in your life? Come check out dooism.com where the latest motivational and inspirational quotes will have you pumped in no time. 

Motivation and Doing Things

No one can stay 100% motivated all the time. It’s simply impossible. People burn out all the time. That’s why we created dooism.com for your daily dose of motivation. See what’s up and what’s motivating others in the three categories — trending, new, and top100. These quotes have one goal and that is to get you started on what you want to do. The site utilizes the Twitter and Flickr API to find the most motivating quotes. 

Built on the Latest and Cutting-Edge Technologies

Built on Ruby on Rails, served using nginx/unicorn, and hosted on mediatemple, dooism.com keeps up with the latest web technologies. On the front-end, jQuery, sausage.js, and jquery star rating plugin were among the few tools used to build features such as infinite scrolling. Some responsive CSS styling is incorporated with HTML5 as the structure.

A Great Place To Share Motivations

Have something that inspires you? Want to share it with the world? Dooism.com doesn’t have to be just about purely about motivation. It’s also about what motivates someone and sharing it with the world for others to experience it themselves. However, if you don’t agree with the motivational item, you can rate the entry with 1-star.  The average score is shown to represent the popularity of the entry.

Next time you’re feeling a little lazy, feeling a little sluggish, swing by dooism.com and get yourself motivated.

In no particular order, here is a list of my favorite dooisms:

• “Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can do what others can’t.”
• “Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
• “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
• “The greatest glory in living, lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
• “You, and only you, are the compass that determines your present and directs the course of your future.”

This time of year, many people are thinking about choosing the perfect gift–ideally at the right price and without waiting in any lines. But it’s also a good time to think about gift giving more broadly and creatively.

Universal Gift Registry Cheer

For example, My Perfect Gift appears to be on a promising track with its expanded social gift registry concept.  Here, you can create not only online bridal and baby registries, but also an updatable personal registry suitable for any upcoming occasion.  The idea is that if friends and family members create their own wish lists and make them available for viewing by each other, then everyone in the circle will find it easier to buy the right present.

After setting up a registry, you install a browser application that allows you to place items from online retailers from around the Web into your registry.  If you’re coming up empty,  you can click in items from sample registries of items from Amazon, Macy’s and Target, and celebrity registries. There also are Pinterest and Facebook sites and a YouTube video connected to the website.

When I first heard about My Perfect Gift, I thought it was a great idea, and ideally, we’d all be registered with up-to-date lists to take the guesswork out of gift giving.  But once I visited the website and perused a few of the registries and ran down multiple pages of suggestions, I got a little overloaded on how much stuff there is to buy and list.  My caveat is that distributing a registry like this to friends is a bit of a social frontier. You might want to test the waters with your social circle before jumping in.

When you can’t decide — Let the computer do it.

Another creative startup is Mystery Gift Machine, which is an online platform similar to Kickstarter designed to make it easier to plan and execute a group gift.  Like Kickstarter, it uses the power of crowdsourcing to generate funds for a gift from a group. The organizer identifies the recipient and the occasion, and friends contribute money and ideas.  The “Mystery Gift Machine”  chooses the gift, making it a surprise for all–and who doesn’t like a little surprise element with a gift? This is one to watch.

Global Random Gift Giving

Some of the most innovative ideas around are about gifts to strangers.  Many were inspired by “random acts of kindness,” the mid-2000s global meme about the spiritual benefits of  performing selfless acts to benefit a stranger. Now the concept lives  on in efforts such as World Kindness Day, Gifts For Strangers Day and Gift A Stranger, a startup website created in Belgium that allows you to register to obtain a random address of a stranger so that you can send them a gift. An online map keeps track of the givers and recipients.

As you can see, Gift A Stranger still has the look of a startup after two years,  but I think I will stick around. I think they are onto something.

That’s where Mural Locator comes in. This database of murals aims to pinpoint the massive, colorful pieces of art in all their glory. Murals are submitted by users of the site, who just need to add the location, a short description and a picture.

There are similar sites out there, notably the more Europe-centric streetartlocator.com – but none that focus on such a specific type of art.

Mashing up murals

As you’d expect, the murals listed on Mural Locator are shown on a Google Maps mashup. Although you can zoom in on areas that interest you, there’s no way to search the map, which might become a problem once the number of murals increases.

And that’s the thing – at the moment, of the 500 or so murals listed, over 300 are spread across just a few major US cities. There are fewer than 20 in Central and South America, about 60 in Europe, and just a few dotted across South Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

Still, although numbers outside the US are low at present, there’s a pleasing diversity to the locations covered. For instance, there’s only a single African mural, but at least it’s there. And with every continent barring Antarctica covered, this could become a truly global resource for mural hunters.

Heaven for muralophiles?

Some of the benefits of this cool tool are immediately obvious. If you’re a mural enthusiast (A muralophile? A muralista?), you can look up murals in minutes. You could easily plan a walking tour of New York or San Francisco with the site.

In fact, Mural Locator is a site you should file in your bookmarks, right next to Graffiti Archaeology, another innovative tool which shows how graffiti has changed over time. After all, outdoor art is shaped by the weather. It can be blasted away or painted over at the whim of properly owners. And other street artists may make their own additions and changes.

More for the Mural Locator

There are lots of of exciting possibilities for Mural Locator. How about an augmented reality app for your iPhone which shows you how the mural in front of you has changed over time? A Google Street View tool to show you how a particular mural would look on the site of your own house?

Wherever the site’s creators decide to take it, the connection to the physical world around us should continue to make Mural Locator so interesting. It remains relevant, even when you’ve closed your browser and shut down your computer. So much so that even if you’re just a casual visitor to the site, you’ll soon be paying more attention to what’s around you.

Go on – why not head on over and upload the location of a mural in your home town or city?

History used to be recorded on paper, in books, newspaper articles, photographs and journals. These days, those records live not on paper, film and tape, but as 1s and 0s on computer disks.

This digitisation of history means it’s more accessible than ever before – all thanks to the internet. You don’t have to go to the library or buy a book to read Barack Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech. And you can see exactly how last year’s Chilean mining drama played out by searching YouTube.

Changing how we report history

As if not content with the vast amount of data we’re creating as history carves its path through our lives, we can’t help looking back too. We’re adapting and updating historical records to fit our online world, and finding new ways to replay things that happened long ago.

Take the Washington Post, which is Tweeting the events of the American Civil War as if they were happening today. It’s probably the only time you’ll get to follow Abraham Lincoln online.

Across the Atlantic, the UK’s Imperial War Museum did something similar – albeit on a less ambitious scale – to mark last year’s 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

However, the Washington Post’s efforts go beyond Twitter.  There’s an impressive range of articles, photos and more under the banner ‘Civil War 150’, all to coincide with the war’s 150th anniversary. It’s a great way to encourage people to engage with the past – I wonder how many Washington residents can resist browsing these ‘now and then’ images of the capital.

The space age in the internet age

More recent history isn’t immune either. You can relive the 1969 moon landing through We Choose The Moon. Launched in 2009, again to coincide with an anniversary (in this case, the 40th) this is an interactive, day-by-day recreation of the whole mission – from blast off to splash down.

For those of us who weren’t around to see the moon landing ourselves, it goes some way towards conveying the suspense and exhilaration of watching that fragile craft touch down on another planet. I’m not sure it beats watching the grainy original footage. But it does a great job of showing the enormous efforts that led up to that moment.

Are we changing history?

We’ve become good at finding new, interesting ways to explore the past. But is there a downside? When we show historical events in new ways, do we risk warping our collective understanding of the events themselves? As we retell history, do we risk changing it?

Well, as long as you take note of who’s doing the retelling, probably not. After all, every historical record has to be considered in context, and taken with a dose of commonsense – no matter whether you’re reading the words of a journalist, listening to the voice of a politician or watching a film from a moon landing sceptic.

Historical accounts have always been subjective. The internet doesn’t change that simple truth at all.

Last year epic Canadian rockers Arcade Fire blazed a trail with their Wilderness Downtown interactive music video, which incorporates images of the place where you grew up. And if that impressed you, take a look at this similar project from Japanese band Sour, which goes further by sliding content from your Twitter and Facebook accounts into a multi-window song video. Neat.

I’m expecting a whole slew of similar stuff from bands this year – and although they call them ‘interactive’ experiences, there’s not a whole lot you can actually do other than sit back and watch.

Make your own music

If you want to really create and interact with music, you need to look elsewhere. Thankfully there’s no shortage of websites, apps and tools to unlock your inner musician.

For starters, there are heaps of smart phone apps to help you make music in imaginative and unexpected ways. It may have been around a while, but Ocarina – an iPhone app that turns your phone into an ancient woodwind instrument – will still make you smile as you blow into the microphone and hit all the wrong notes.

Then there’s BeatMaker, a monster mobile app that turns your handset into a music creation studio. See it in action here.

Android owners might like Hit It!, a fun drum machine. Tap the screen or make like you’re Keith Moon in The Who by waving your phone at an invisible drum kit. Alternatively, get hold of Musical, a good all-round app that simulates lots of instruments in one.

There’s more music on the web

Some of the most original musical ideas I’ve seen are available on the web. Take Isle of Tune. Created by Jim Hall, its Sim City-esque interface lets you lay out roads, then add trees, flowers, buildings and street furniture before setting cars off through your streets.

Here’s the trick: as the cars pass items beside the road, they make sounds, which you can build up into a tune. It’s truly delightful – and you’ll be impressed by some of the tracks other users have saved and shared.

I’m also a bit of a fan of this whimsical record player-inspired ad from VW. It puts you in the driving seat, allowing you to create your own Sunday drive soundtrack by clicking buttons and scratching a ‘record’ with your mouse pointer. It’s cute, but lacks staying power.

R-r-r-remix

Finally, if making your own music from scratch sounds too much like hard work, how about using your favourite band’s tracks as a starting point?

Swedish electropop sensation Robyn has created an online beatbox where you can rework clips from one of her songs. And Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails has long loved messing around in cyberspace, even offering a remix tool to get you started. What a great way to get closer to your fans.

The litl webbook is a back-to-basics netbook which rethinks what we actually need from small computers. It does what it’s meant to do really well, and I love its design and simplicity.

Keeping it simple

Simplicity is the litl’s watchword. When you switch it on, it takes seconds to load a custom operating system on the 12” display. A straightforward home screen shows a series of ‘cards’, each offering access to a different ‘channel’.

These channels let you do different things – browse the internet, check the time, watch videos, and so on. The number of channels should increase over time, as software developers use the SDK to create new ones.

It’s all in the cloud

Unlike other netbooks, the litl accesses most services over the internet (‘in the cloud’). That means you really need to be online to use it. No problem when you’re at home with reliable wireless – not so good for working on the train, plane, or other places you can’t get online.

But then that’s not really what the litl is for. The battery is a weedy three-cell affair that’ll likely only last a couple of hours, so it’s not a road-warrior’s dream. And there are considerable advantages to a cloud-based approach. For instance, if you smash your litl or it’s stolen, your data is still safe.

So: no worries about backups or updates. No warnings that your security software is out of date or that your program ended unexpectedly. This might be the closest I’ve ever seen to a maintenance-free computer.

A flexible display

The litl is a good-looking netbook, with a two-tone color scheme and minimal ports, buttons and switches. The beautiful packaging and accompanying illustrated cards give away just how much effort has gone into the design.

The most striking feature is a clever hinge which allows the screen to bend right round. This lets you fold the netbook into an upside-down ‘V’, so it stands up by itself like an easel.

With the keyboard tucked away, it’s suddenly much easier to do a whole bunch of stuff. You can follow recipes without getting flour on the keyboard, view photos or watch the news.

The display changes automatically to accommodate easel mode. So, for instance, if you are viewing photos on Flickr, it’ll jump to full-screen slideshow view. As the keyboard gets hidden, a scroll wheel and button lets you flick between photos, move through text and so on.

Plump for the optional remote control if you plan on connecting your litl to a TV (an HDMI connection is standard). But if that’s your main purpose for buying, hold on for the company’s forthcoming web TV product.

Kill caps lock

Other features of the litl are pretty standard. The keyboard is what you’re used to, just without a caps lock key (hopefully a trend other manufacturers will follow). There’s a green ‘litl’ key that takes you straight to the home screen. And the touchpad mouse works just as you’d expect it to. Simple. Again.

The litl isn’t for everyone. Geeks and tinkerers may be disappointed, and it’s not a workhorse for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. But for low-maintenance web browsing, sharing photos and videos, and email, it works well.

See the litl team explain how the litl works:

But what is does, it does very well. For web browsing, sharing photos and videos, checking Facebook and sending emails, the $399 litl could be all you need. And just for once, ‘so easy your grandma can use it’ might not be an exaggeration.

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.

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.