'Cross The Breeze » technology

When augmentation is about reducing

Kris Hoet — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:37:14 +0000

Here’s an interesting interview with Kevin Slavin at PICNIC NY Salon. It’s 8 months old but only just came to my attention thanks to a tweet of Helge Tenno. His thoughts around augmented cities and why maybe ‘augmented’ should be about taking things away instead of just adding them to the world as we are already drowning in data as it is. Take a look.

Looking at this (what I wrote earlier) that definitely makes sense to me.

I’ll be good catching up again with Kevin in NYC in March. And Helge, I hope we will meet each other as well one day ;)

Augmented (hyper)reality

Kris Hoet — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:33:12 +0000

An iPad, why would you be needing that for? Today you hold a little square in front of your webcam, not anymore tomorrow. Sure you are ready for the future? ;)

This looks a bit like it could be Capital 4.0. If you don’t know Capital, check it out below (blogged about this long time ago).

Pictionaire 2.0

Kris Hoet — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:24:53 +0000

Gosh. Would I love to see what we could do with this at the agency, out the current ‘review’ table – in the new one ;)

[Via my buddy Steve]

Now that’s what I call targeting

Kris Hoet — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:56:45 +0000

Wanted: experienced security personnel.

[Via @heldenmerk]

Mindgoggling

Kris Hoet — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:59:55 +0000

This is how the Urban Dictionary defines this: “(adj) something that is so baffling only goggles could understand”. I suppose that is how you got to think of Google Goggles, a mobile tool that allows you to take a picture of something to get instant search results based on the content of the picture. Sounds cool, check this out.

It did remind me of a Microsoft project I read & blogged about 3 years ago, a side project of Photosynth at that time. They talked about a very similar tool but don’t remember hearing from this after that.

Question to ask the Photosynth guys maybe? Or Steve, maybe you know (can find out)?

Follow me: the rabbit edition

Kris Hoet — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:43:59 +0000

To promote the show SyFy, Fallon created a multimedia marketing campaign, which includes the following twist on out-of-home:

Other campaign elements include a detective agency, a tea shop, and a casino. So what are you waiting for, go check it out ;)

[Via AdPulp]

Cereal gaming

Kris Hoet — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:37:53 +0000

Augmented reality is the new black, but only few people seem to be doing something really interesting with the concept of AR. I don’t really want to hold a white paper with a black mark on it in front of my laptop to get a 3D image of a car projected on it… or at least on screen that is. I could already see that same 3D car on my screen in the past without all the AR complications. Catch my drift? Do something different and fun like the example below, or make it useful like what Ray Ban did recently with their Virtual Mirror.

Enjoy.

And if you do want to create some AR with cars, maybe make it some more like this ;)

[Via Helge Tenno]

WordPress 2 for iPhone

Kris Hoet — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:00:27 +0000

Trying out the new WordPress 2 app in the iPhone. IT beats me why this is a new app and not an upgrade to the v1 of which I had already but anyway the app looks handy and a good step up from the first version. Two things I still miss are the lack of access to your stats such as you can see at http://m.wordpress.com and … there is no more second point since inserting link just now takes away the comment I wanted to make related to the lack of an easy way to add links :)

Looks nice, now hit publish.

Sketch2Photo: do want.

Kris Hoet — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:30:00 +0000

This is a pretty awesome piece of software I must admit, too bad it’s not publicly available yet so you’ll have to do it with the photos and videos instead. The software composes a realistic picture based on simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. Basically the sketch below is supposed to result in the photo next to it (and a few alternatives) based on photos found on the internet. If that really works… you’ll have to agree that that is pretty cool.

Here’s the full process:

You can see more examples as well as a video showing the process on the Sketch2Photo website.

[Via The Web Life]

Because clicking is so 90’s

Kris Hoet — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:40:10 +0000

This trailer shows a the website project created by Andreas Lutz as part of a study project and is rather inspirational. The website uses video and sound input to control the navigation, so basically you navigate using gestures and voice.

Make sure you try it out for yourself on Andreas’ website as well. I found it still pretty hard to use the navigation and have to admit I still prefer clicking for now :) but you can see where this is going and that’s an opportunity that I do want to think about. Very cool!

[Via fubiz]