Tweenbots

This is just about one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.

Kacie Kinzer (a student at Tisch ITP in New York) set out to explore the nature of movement and people's preoccupation with getting from one place to another. Kacie raises the question, "Could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it?" An extremely bold question in my opinion, and one that I wouldn't think was easily answered. To make things even more complicated, Kacie takes it a step further, asking, "How could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself?"

Where to start? What to do?

Simple (in Kacie's mind at least) - build a robot.

To answer these questions, Kacie conceived the Tweenbots. Human-dependent robots that navigate through the help of the pedestrians they encounter. The robot itslef will move at a constant speed and in a straight line. The only indication of their mission is a flag baring their destination. After that it's up to those around to help them.

Would you trust strangers minding their own business to stop and help a robot? Considering the dangers that the robot would face it's seems impossible that it would get more then 15m (imho). Never-the-less Kacie placed the Tweenbot down on the path, walked away and set it on it's journey.

Surprisingly as it turned out, over the course of several months and numerous journeys, the Tweenbots successfully got from their starting point to their designated destinations. Although there were instances of a bots getting caught under park benchs, stuck against a curb, or trapped in a pothole, there was always a random passerby who would rescue it and send it toward its destination.

Not a single Tweenbot was lost or damaged. Brilliant stuff - perhaps even a sign that human nature isn't that bad?

What's In The Box? (ARG)

Following my post yesterday I was excited to see an article by Hashem Bajwa on Augmented Reality over on AdAge today. Hashem discusses some recent AR campaigns, including General Electric's Smart Grid technology (also here) and the Topps' 3-D baseball cards system. He also goes into detail on the Mobilizy app that I've previously posted about. All this even further reinforced my belief that ARG or AR apps/games are the way forward.

Low and behold I then received an email asking for my help with a Flash file and an image. Two guys I know were trying to crack an ARG that they had been sent a link to.

Have you seen this:



Do a Google Search for 'what's in the box?' and you'll see a lot of online chatter. Admittedly this video first appeared online about 4 weeks ago but the microsite didn't arrive until a week or so later, and it's only in the last 2 weeks that most of the really interesting stuff has come to light. Most probably this is an ARG for the next Half Life episode (based on the sound effects and audio used). There are also a lot of clues pointing to J.J. Abrams, which immediately brings to mind his 'Magic Box' outlook on storytelling (see his TED presentation).

I really want to go into the details about what I was able to work out so far but what's the fun in that. Go check it out and see if you can get anywhere. But be warned, I quickly discovered that whoever is behind this definitely sees their target audience as being very familiar with Flash, Java, Photoshop, HTML and CSS. Perhaps the modern gamer is far more educated then we were back in my day?

Watch and Read

I was hoping to get a post written this evening following on from this morning but I'm totally wrecked and have decided to share some cool articles and what-not that I've been reading/viewing today. Enjoy.

Fortune 500 List Demonstrates the Power of Blogging

Business in the cloud

Web Trends Visualization: 2009 - 2007 “Web Trend Maps”

Why You Need a Social Media Champion

Facebook Opens Homepage Stream to Devs; Seesmic, TweetDeck Bite

Honda's Road Music (via Seventy Seven)

Alternate Reality Interface

A friend was asking me about Trent Reznor's Year Zero on Saturday, and whether I knew of any other big ARG successes and how they worked. Other examples were Audi's 'The Art of the Heist', the Nokia Game (which ran for 6 years), and perhaps the most famous after Year Zero, The Beast. The Nokia Game was the first ARG to use an extremely diverse range of communication channels, with The Beast and Year Zero both pushing those even further. So what next I wondered? What other interfaces could be used for an ARG?

You may not remember the following video, it first appeared doing the rounds in July 2007. It's a promo released by HP to show off their Mscape geolocation platform, which was developed by their labs in Bristol, UK. The video shows “Roku’s Reward” - HP's idea of how game development could utilise the platform. Admittedly you need to over look the terrible stereotypes of who gamers are, but their vision was certainly ground breaking for the time.



The most interesting thing isn't necessarily the video itself or the vision that HP had. HP were in many ways right on the ball. The most interesting thing was the online reaction to the video. Virtually everyone agreed that the concept was fantastic, and that the platform had a lot of potential. However, they also all agreed that HP's prediction was crazy that the technology for this type of game play would be available on hand-held mobile devices within two years. Of course we can now all agree that this technology was very much only two years away (demonstrated recently by the Mobilizy landscape system and Dutch Bank ING's ATM finder).

So why haven't we seen more games/apps appearing that utilise the Mscape platform (or similar). Why has no one looked to use this type of platform for an ARG style marketing campaign? There are a huge amount of GPS enabled hand-held devices now on the market, and for those that aren't surely there is a cell-tower based alternative?

There is a limitation with the platform in that it needs to be based on a specific real-world location, or ‘anchored’ in Mscape’s terminology, but there are many large cities around the world that could sustain a user base within their population that would make it commercially viable. In fact if you think about it there are many cities that would have a transient tourist population that could benefit from some sort of GPS-based interactive system like this; museums, galleries, theme parks etc.

In my opinion, this is where we will see the next 'big thing'. The newest Nintendo DS is already equipped with a camera; a GPS unit could easily be added as a component or built-in to the next gen. The Sony PSP is in the same boat (with a camera and GPS unit already available). So who's going to do it? I wager it'll be Japanese and it will sit on one of these platforms, with customised versions for a dozen or so of the largest cities in the world (mostly US with Toyko, London, Paris and Berlin).

Heineken Walk-in Fridge 2

I got an email this morning from Roger van Zijl with a link to the new Heineken ad. The ad is a follow up to the previous Walk-in Fridge ad. Funny stuff - definitely worth a look.