Projects: Boston’s SoWa District Gets Projection-Mapped For Illuminus October 30, 2014 by Dave Haynes A chunk of the hip, historic SoWa district of Boston was lit up last Saturday night in that city’s version of a Nuit Blanche festival, making heavy use of projection-mapping. Called Illuminus, the event was an opportunity for regional artists, designers, creative technologists, architects, performers and fabricators to push their creative chops to the limit using …
Some 300 Expected For Next Week’s Xlab In NYC October 30, 2014 by Dave Haynes About this time next week I’ll be running a panel at Xlab, a conference put on in New York by the Society for Experiential Graphic Design. It’s all about how the digital tech that’s converging to change how places – like retail and public facilities – are designed and experienced. I’m running the Make session, on the …
Kickstarter Project Aims To Reinvent The Lowly Digital Picture Frame October 29, 2014 by Dave Haynes There’s a new project on Kickstarter that’s looking for $100,000 to start producing networked digital picture frames you can’t help start thinking about as digital signage displays. These will be 15-inch units running Android 4.4, built in BLE and WiFi and a pretty fast quad-core CPU – nothing like the hunk of plastic gathering dust …
Projects: Xbox Mutants Run Amok On Streets Of Three Cities October 29, 2014 by Dave Haynes Here’s another riff on the idea of layering motion graphics into a visual of the nearby streetscape to create something of an augmented reality experience in transit shelters. This one, for a new Xbox game called Sunset Overdrive, is running San Francisco, London, and Melbourne as part of a worldwide launch. The game is set …
Tokyo Scientists Create Touchscreen From Thin Air October 29, 2014 by Dave Haynes I’m not even going to pretend I understand what the heck is happening here, but it looks pretty intriguing. A team at the University of Tokyo has created a virtual holographic screen that you can see, feel and use as a touch surface. Called HaptoMime, it uses reflective surfaces and infrared sensors that detect fingers. …
HTML5 Is Done Evolving October 28, 2014 by Dave Haynes The really technical stuff is here, but the doofus version that suits me much better is that the W3C organization that sets HTML development standards globally published its Recommendation of HTML5 — the final version of the HTML5, years after it was first introduced. All the cool stuff that you never used to be able to do …
Looking Ahead To CEW In NYC October 28, 2014 by Dave Haynes Customer Engagement World is next week, and I took some time to see what all is there in terms of exhibitors and speakers. It’s really clear now that the event is not at all a digital signage show, something organizer Lawrence Dvorchik has been telling anyone who’d listen for a few years now. He started …
Lowes Testing Robot Store Associate: Goofy, But Then Again … October 28, 2014 by Dave Haynes Lowes Innovation Labs is testing and planning to deploy in a Silicon Valley store, not a big-ass Lowes but a smaller chain it also owns, a roaming robot that will answer questions and lead you to the particular fastener, tool or whatever you are looking for. This thing looks like a Jetsons robot and moves …
Using WiFi To Measure Crowds, Estimate Waits October 27, 2014 by Dave Haynes We’re starting to see technology emerge that can establish patterns in retail and public environments just by picking up the MAC addresses on smartphones that have their WiFi on and triangulating roughly where they are. That can establish heat maps of where people go and how long they dwell, and in some cases, start to …
