Museums and Technology

One of our recent creative meetings focused on museums and technology and closed with the following debate: Does museum technology get between us and the experience by becoming the experience itself?

Augmented Reality, or using digital information to modify a view of reality, is a hot topic right now in the museum industry. Back in 2010, two artists created a lot of buzz with their guerrilla augmented reality show in MoMA, where they exhibited their own work without an invite and were even able to create an additional virtual 7th floor. Here’s their original announcement: 

Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek cordially invite you to the “WeARinMoMA” exhibition in the MoMA NY, featuring reality art in its proper context: a contemporary art museum. At the same time, the “art invasion” annex exhibition showcases the radical new possibilities and implications Augmented Reality is bringing to the cultural and creative field.

p.s. The MoMA is not involved yet

In fact MoMA was never involved and never needed to be - such is the nature of Augmented Reality, where anyone can put together a virtual show and no artwork needs to be physically placed or removed. 

More recent examples includes bringing dinosaur skeletons to life in the Ultimate Dinosaurs Exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, bringing dinosaur skeletons to life or “Who do you think you really are?”, an interactive film at the Natural History Museum in London.

So what are the pluses to this technology? For one, a visitor can see a piece in its original context instead of a white gallery box. Imagine pointing your phone at a ceramic vase and seeing that vase in a small hut in ancient Rome. Another hurdle this technology is overcoming: Displaying pieces digitally that might not otherwise see the light of day. 

But for those of us who enjoy quiet and look forward to the meditative gallery experience, those days could be coming to an end. The industry is still in the experimental phase - at this point no one knows what museum visitors need and want in terms of digital enhancements to the museum experience - but the shift is toward interaction, not silence.  

At Redshift we think the key to success will be finding a way to keep older, more traditional viewers comfortable and younger, tech-savvy viewers intrigued. 

Happy Holidays from REDSHIFT

Augmented Reality

We started this week’s creative meeting with a quick exercise. We each jotted down examples of design problems that are challenging because of the separation between the digital and the physical worlds. Then, we looked at the evolution of Augmented Reality technology. Like most burgeoning technologies, the evolution of AR is peppered with examples of applications best described as gimmicky and useless. We wanted to look instead at the best of the best in order to find ones that either help solve a real need, or at least create a truly unique experience. Our ultimate goal was to identify the types of design problems for which a solution involving AR could be appropriate, either now or in the future (you know, when the technology is better). 

Here’s what we found. 

AUGMENTED REALITY THAT ENHANCES ENTERTAINMENT: 

Harry Potter Deathly Hallows DVDs

The animated characters that animate from each of the two Deathly Hallows DVDs actually sense each other and start to battle. By taking “augmented packing” to a new level, they gave customers a fun incentive to purchase DVDs for both movies. 

AR Basketball 

A sort of AR version of the classic time-killer paper football, this iPhone game puts a mini-mini-hoop right on your desk and let’s you flick virtual basketballs. 

Topps 3d live trading cards 

Trading cards are all about showcasing a player, so seeing an animated 3d version of that player pop up on your desktop - and actually play a virtual game with him - is a natural evolution. 

AUGMENTED REALITY THAT ENCOURAGES CREATIVITY:

Lost Valentinos music video 

It’s already fun posing the bandmates in a music video as if they were action figures, but using them to record your own interactive music video for all the world to see is a win. 

Wrigley’s 5 Gum 

We’re not sure of the connection between gum and DJ-ing, but Wrigley’s came up with a clever way to create a “virtual” physical instrument that you can actually play and record. 

AUGMENTED REALITY AS ADVERTISING:

Vampire Diaries Magic Mirror

Still one of the coolest uses of AR, pedestrians pausing to look at this billboard for a series about vampires think they’re looking into a mirror. Then poof their reflection disappears. 

VW Beetle Juiced Up billboards 

You have to pre-install the app and aim your iPad at the ad, but Volkswagen’s static billboards will come alive in an impressive display of 3d animation. 

Esquire’s Find Brooklyn Decker 

Goldrun’s iPhone app gives you rewards for taking fake photographs with celebrities. It’s a bit hard to imagine posing in front of my phone with a celebrity photo, but at least this campaign makes it more of a paparazzi game, driving customers right to the magazine aisle where they are (in theory) more likely to buy Esquire’s latest issue. Generally speaking, this probably works best with kids and animated characters. 

AUGMENTED REALITY AS UTILITY:

Holition’s Augmented Retail 

Holition has a whole line of “augmented retail” experiences. They use printed cutouts that you strap on your body, or facial recognition, to help you try on luxury items such as rings, watches, and sunglasses. 

USPS Priority Mail Virtual Box simulator 

The postal service tried a clever solution for all the time and materials people waste selecting the wrong shipping boxes. Just put your item on your desk and slip a virtual box on top. The idea is great, though it’s hard to say if all the prep is simpler than just grabbing a tape measure. 

Browse AR 

There are many of these “real life browsers” coming out now, and until something like Google Glasses comes out and removes the need for a viewfinder, their utility is suspect. Yelp’s Monocle might have been the first (and Google Glasses might be the endgame), but they all use GPS and your smartphone’s camera to show you where points of interest are in real time.  

Word Lens 

If it worked as well as advertised, this comes as close to magic and a perfect, transparent UX, as anything I’ve seen. Aim your phone at a sign, a document, or any word or words in a foreign language, and this app not only translates it for you in real-time, but replaces the foreign text with the translation. This was our favorite in concept. 

Conclusions

With an understanding of the range of modern AR applications, we now reviewed the results of our initial exercise to determine whether any of them would be appropriate for an Augmented Reality solution. We discussed the challenges in knowing the true color of physical objects online, mimicking the emotional depth of face-to-face conversation through video, checking the tactile properties of fabrics and similar items, representing network maps (i.e. real devices in digital space), and of course the ability to taste food and smell perfumes across the web. Challenges with physical space seemed more promising, such as when you’re trying to buy furniture, replacement parts for mechanical objects like a bicycle, or looking at apartment rentals and understanding the size and layout of the rooms. We also discussed the many applications within remote healthcare, and possible ways of using AR to teach someone to play an instrument remotely. 

But what about the problem of learning how to tie a tie? Drawings on how to tie a tie are confusing and difficult to translate into 3d space. And it’s still a challenge translating the motions of someone in a video to your own reflection in a mirror. AR’s “magic mirror” effect might be able to solve this. It could place a 3d tie on your real-time video and animate itself being tied. Or it could create a semi-transparent tie for each step, allowing you to simply match the shape of your own tie below it, guided by helpful arrows. A fancy version might allow you to manipulate the tie and give you immediate feedback on whether you’re doing it the right or wrong way. 

In the end, we believe that AR has two big hurdles to surmount if it’s going to hit the mainstream and have real utility. Whether through better algorithms or hardware, it has to recognize and track objects better so we can get beyond printing out all these silly paper symbols. Ideally, this would better help it mimic the dynamic occlusion effect (which would make trying on sunglasses feel a lot better). The second hurdle is the display screen. Mobile phones are an integral part of daily life, but pointing it this way and that in public to view AR content feels just dorky enough to be a barrier. Only when the screens are big enough (digital billboards) or small enough (contact lenses) that the screen disappears will AR really take hold. 

A social mirror

Think people don’t throw out casual slurs that much anymore? Watching real-time use of the words like “faggot” “so gay” etc. on Twitter might change your mind. Just last week, there  were over 218,000 tweets of the word “faggot.” University of Alberta created the site Nohomophobes Dot Com to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society. They’ve asked users to reply with #NoHomophobes to show support and let people know that homophobic language will no longer be tolerated in our society.

Great design, great data, and great message. Check it out!

Stickies and Lean UX Process

In a recent engagement, we were tasked with re-imagining the interaction design of a client’s backend platform. In particular the way various types of users manage organizations, teams, and projects. There were a large amount of possible users with varying permissions, needs, behaviors (you know, “use cases”), and tasks. 

To keep track of everything, we wrote down all the possible scenarios on stickies (one per sticky), and then sorted them by user and task. We used a second color sticky to associate a UI feature with that user’s task. 

In reviewing, we were able to quickly recognize a pattern in the way users and organizations managed each other that could simplify it into three simple steps, and which could then be applied to the other major management tasks: works, and time-based metadata. The whole system revealed itself as potentially simpler, and showed obvious parallels between the different types of users and tasks. 

We don’t pretend to use Lean UX tactics or tools in every project, but they have their place. The above exercise was an example of a “dump-and-sort” (dump all your ideas, then sort them) exercise. We’ve found this exercise useful when trying to get a mental picture of a lot of information, particularly when that varying is slight, as is the case often with multiple permission-levels. The single interface that came out of this exercise (after much iteration of course) elegantly accommodated a variety of user types, each with their own set of needs and behaviors. 

Will It Fit?

Buying clothing online can be a dreadful experience.  Sizing is different from brand to brand, the style has a huge impact on fit, and sometimes you find that a certain brand just wasn’t made for your body type.  It ends up feeling like trying to find a needle in a haystack. 

Taking this experience and bringing it online can be even worse.   Imagine trying to buy a hat, a dress shirt, or jeans.  These are all items that people want to see on their body before they can make an accurate decision.

Despite the drawbacks with online shopping, ecommerce sales continue to increase, with clothing being the number two most common online purchase:

But sales are just one half of the equation.  When you look at return rates items like clothing have a 14-50% return rate, twice as high as any other product category, costing $100 billion annually.  The number one reason for returning an item is fit.  So what if we could help online shoppers make better fit decisions?  This is the challenge that designers and retailers have been trying to solve.  There are many ideas out there, but no one seems to have solved the problem entirely.

Here are some interesting things we’ve found that retailers are doing:

Bonobos, a relatively young online retailer, is doing some interesting things around fit.   Their brand is actually based around a better fitting pant so they offer various ways of insuring the correct fit: Fit Education, a Fit Wizard that uses body measurements & comparison data to recommend the right size, and personal fit experts in their brick & mortar stores. 

Animators use 3D printing to speed up the process

Animators over at Portland-based Laika (responsible for Coraline) used 3D printers to create a gigantic library of facial expressions for their latest stop-motion film, ParaNorman.

Instead of sculpting facial expressions out of clay, by hand, the 3D printing process saved them a lot of time - particularly in post production where time is often spent painting out seam lines on faces.

Read more about it here.

Just completed an infographic for OpenTable to celebrate their 15 millionth review. We helped them comb through their data to pull out some interesting facts and figures. Add some cool retro graphics, shake and serve!

UPDATE: The infographic got picked up by TechCrunch today!

REDSHIFT calls San Francisco home and we stumbled upon this great vintage reel of SF from the late 1930s. 

Stunning.

Check out this new installation at Singapore’s Changi Airport departures terminal. German new media firm ART+COM was asked to design an experience that would inject calm and serenity into an otherwise chaotic space. The result is a beautiful kinetic sculpture composed of over 600 individually-controlled copper rain drops that bob and glide together in a computationally-choreographed sequence.  

Super cool.

Here’s a video of it in action.

http://vimeo.com/45188800

Interactive museum games

The ArtGameLab at SFMoMA features a number of lo-tech games, challenging (or allowing) visitors to shift their point of view from simply “museum-goer” to something more focused and interactive.

Call the number printed on an envelope, and enter the world of a conspiracy-theorist curator, then use the map provided to see selections from the SFMoMA’s collection through the eyes of an investigator.

Pick up a postcard with a mission, such as “Create your own version of a work of art you saw at SFMoMA today” or “Find the most beautiful word you can at SFMoMA and use it in a poem, sentence, or story,” or just create your own mission for someone else.

Select one of eight character cards, such as the experimental surgeon Dr. Gross, or Zork the sentient gas cloud, and in the guise of this persona, try your hand at a few associated tasks (“Make some test photographs of people inserted into artworks.” or “Find five friends for Zork. Zork likes shininess, colors, and intersecting lines, and wants a group of friends who all have different tangible qualities.”)

There’s an online component that extends the reach of all these games (and keeps them modern), but it’s their combination of low-tech and perspective-shifting that’s most interesting. Each game has a low barrier of entry and turns the museum into a unique diorama, with its own rules, boundaries, and ways of interacting. (Read more here: http://sfmoma.tumblr.com/tagged/artgamelab)

When designing experiences, remember users are people, and people want to be creative, to play, and to compete. All it takes is a bit of attention and creativity to inspire us to see with different eyes, and when accepting this new perspective, we give ourselves permission to engage with a space, artwork, website, product, brand, or each other, in a new and memorable way.

REDSHIFT Wins 2012 Communicator Award

We are thrilled to announce that Norton Campfire—our interactive data visualization kiosk for Symantec— has been recognized with a 2012 Communicator Award in Interactive Media. 

In partnership with Behance and the International Academy of Visual Arts, the Communicator Awards represents one of the leading worldwide programs honoring creative excellence in communications. With over 6,000 entries each year from Fortune 500 corporations to small independent agencies, it is one of the largest and most competitive awards of its kind. We’re in good company with other winners like Coca-Cola, HP, Disney, Dreamworks, and MTV. Nice!

A big thanks to a fantastic client and dedicated creative team that helped make this happen. 

Logo Design Trends

“The true benefit of studying logo design trends is that they invariable identify trajectories. Once you can see the path a trend starts to take…it’s very possible for you to know where to take it next.”

-Bill Gardner, LogoLounge

This week’s internal creative meeting focused on logo trends from the past few years. We took a look at LogoLounge’s 2010, 2011 and 2012 trend reports to find and compare brewing trends, overly saturated trends and solid ones.  

One of our favorite trends demonstrates bright, light colors, often mixed with transparency and overlapping shapes. A few good examples: Pentagram’s design for Mohawk paper, Vladimir Isaev’s logo for Telecom Trade Company and our own Pathbrite logo (see below).

Our team also made predictions about brewing trends that may or may not go anywhere. Check out this interactive logo for the Russian telecom company Ollo. Users can interact with the logo on their touch-screen devices, creating new versions and shapes that the company can ultimately use for identity. 

Web Trends Exemplar

We recently did a survey of 2011 web design trends, and made some predictions on 2012. 

This beautiful yachting site is an example of a very simple HTML5 concept resulting in an extraordinary experience, and the techniques used display many of the trends (current and near-future) mentioned above, and pulled off with artistry. In fact, it has been a bit of an inspiration on an iPad project we’re currently working on for Symantec. 

http://www.ycoyacht.com/

Click the View The Yachts link as well.  The photography is lovely.

Volvo Ad Reimagined

Here’s a nod to emotionally compelling storytelling, as featured on Mashable. Google had Amil Gargano, the creator of the original 1966 Volvo campaign reimagine his “Drive it like you hate it” ad for today, and put a team of designers and technologists at his disposal. This video features multiple stories, each of which is interesting and inspiring: the story of Amil’s original vision for the ad, its subsequent re-envisioning, Volvo’s brand story, and the story of the owner and his car highlighted in the new ad. Storytelling everywhere! Why does it work? Because these stories interlock and inform each other. Each person involved conveys personal investment in their role, and a sense of risk and hope in the human stories they’re trying to capture. The result? It connects.  

Here’s the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUHEyPtSc1E&feature=player_embedded