herebenotions

Mobile arcade

Via this post by iain tate I crackunit.

Like Iain, I just love the idea of this. Maybe because it's got a low-tech finish which is quite refreshing, or maybe it just looks like fun.

Photosynth

Read this.  Checked it out at Microsoft's Live Labs' photosynth site.  Watched this....

Feeling the wow.

Socialight

A nifty mobile thing that lets people connect and share their experiences and ideas from the real world in a new way.

"Socialight is a community that lets you create, share, and discover virtual Sticky Notes placed anywhere in the real world. You can create local Stickies just for yourself or for everyone. You can create a personal map, complete with pictures, videos and sound clips, or you can share a group map with friends."

"See some great jeans at the mall? - Sticky them for friends to see.

Are you at a music festival and want to meet up with any friends who might also be there? - Create a Sticky.

Was the waitress at dinner a total freak? - Warn everyone who eats there!"

"As you travel around the world, you can find Sticky notes that are tied to the places you go. Socialight can notify you on your mobile phone any time you're near a Sticky. As your phone buzzes, it will display the Sticky, and you can check out some background on the person who set it. From there, you can instantly respond, leave your own Sticky, or just move on."

A simple cartoon demo, also here's the socialight blog.

There's also dodgeball...

Something to check out next time I'm in the US.

via Contagious

MIT Sketching

Pretty neat - an intelligent whiteboard.

Beautiful data

Crazy, beautiful and weird - information as you've never seen it before in the information aesthetics blog.  They say 'form follows data'.  Here's a few of the more artisitic ones, but the geeky ones are just as fascinating.  All the descriptions are gaked from the information aesthetic blog - if you want to read on and get more info you need to go there.

A light sculpture, titled "plastic trade-off", that visualizes the global financial markets by translating real-time data of these markets into abstract light flows. The coordinates of selected places of the stock market system were marked on a globe & spatially connected, hereby creating a 3-dimensional & spatial data visualization framework. There's more here.

Graphical visualization map of the websites people are visiting, updated every second with where people are going & coming from. As sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm & grow larger. conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center & grow smaller. Website traffic is symbolized with thin lines: each line symbolizes a move from one site to the other. Try it at the swarm.

A collaborative net art piece in which the numbers of each visitor's IP address are added to a single image. The 4 sequential 8-bit numbers that make up the address are recontextualized into particular PHP shape functions in the order they are required: x,y,w,h (x,y coordinate pair & width/height), as well as color: r,g,b,a (red, green, blue, alpha) to create a rectangle of a specific color (& transparency) at a specific location. Viewing the piece changes it permanently - do it here.

A hybrid visualization system that explores the dynamic & spatial qualities of smoke & light in relation to contemporary mobile SMS messaging technologies. Local & remote (online) participants are invited to communicate with the project by sending SMS messages to 1 of 2 smoke signals located at the event, which are then visualized via the responsive nature of "ephemeral memory clouds". Read and see more here.

In-game advertising

With the continuing rise of games systems that are connected to the internet, in-game advertising is being taken very seriously by companies like Microsoft. They recently bought Massive Incorporated, which along with several others, develops and delivers real time advertising to video and mobile games. 

But there are still big questions about how much gamers can take, as this BBC news article points out, "Would players welcome additional levels or characters for a reduced cost, if there are brand names involved?"

Advertising and brand-name goods can add caché to communities in virtual worlds like the Sims, as this paper on advertising and virtual worlds discusses - (the images left and right are from it). There's more info and papers on virtual worlds here.

The alternative is a kind of virtual sponsorship, where it is before and after game advertising that doesn't disrupt game play, "this game brought to you by..."  This is quite common for mobile in-game advertising.  Apparently advertisers will be able to update, change, geo-target and receive detailed reports on their mobile campaigns.  Geek-wonderful.