News

Apple’s new Next Great Interface

Posted on January 13th, 2012 by admin

3D, Innovation, News, Software, Technology, Usability

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On January 12, 2012, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals an exciting new 3D GUI for iOS mobile devices. The new UI will work with proximity sensor arrays and will respond to hovering gestures. The Crazy Ones in Cupertino have been working on advanced 3D GUIs for some time now. We first learned of a major 3D GUI project back in 2009 that involved using head tracking technology. Then in early 2010 we learned of Apple’s first project relating to a 3D GUI for iOS devices. Later that year Apple 3D multifunctional widgets and over time revealed advanced 3D and hovering based gesturing for CAD users on an iPad. With twenty times the GPU power coming to iOS devices over the next year, Apple appears to paving the way for a new 3D GUI for mobile devices in the not-too-distant future.

Apple’s Patent Background

Modern computer operating systems often provide a desktop graphical user interface (“GUI”) for displaying various graphical objects. Some examples of graphical objects include windows, taskbars, docks, menus and various icons for representing documents, folders and applications. A user could interact with the desktop using a mouse, trackball, track pad or other known pointing device. If the GUI is touch sensitive, then a stylus or one or more fingers could be used to interact with the desktop. A desktop GUI could be two-dimensional (“2D”) or three-dimensional (“3D”).

Modern mobile devices typically include a variety of onboard sensors for sensing the orientation of the mobile device with respect to a reference coordinate frame. For example, a graphics processor on the mobile device could display a GUI in landscape mode or portrait mode based on the orientation of the mobile device. Due to the limited size of the typical display of a mobile device, a 3D GUI could be difficult to navigate using conventional means, such as a finger or stylus. For example, to view different perspectives of the 3D GUI, two hands are often needed: one hand to hold the mobile device and the other hand to manipulate the GUI into a new 3D perspective.

Apple’s Wild Solution

Apple’s latest invention is a wild one indeed. The invention covers a 3D display environment for mobile device that uses orientation data from one or more onboard sensors to automatically determine and display a perspective projection of the 3D display environment based on the orientation data without the user physically interacting with (e.g., touching) the display. In some implementations, the display environment could be changed based on gestures made a distance above a touch sensitive display that incorporates proximity sensor arrays.

In some implementations, a computer-implemented method is performed by one or more processors onboard a handheld mobile device. The method includes generating a 3D display environment; receiving first sensor data from one or more sensors onboard the mobile device, where the first sensor data is indicative of a first orientation of the mobile device relative to a reference coordinate frame; determining a first perspective projection of the 3D display environment based on the first sensor data; displaying the first perspective projection of the 3D display environment on a display of the mobile device; receiving second sensor data from the one or more sensors onboard the mobile device, where the second sensor data is indicative of a second orientation of the mobile device relative to the reference coordinate frame; determining a second perspective projection of the 3D display environment based on the second sensor data; and displaying the second perspective projection of the 3D display environment on the display of the mobile device.

Apple’s 3D Environment for Mobile Devices

Apple’s patent FIG. 1A shown below illustrates a perspective projection in a 3D display environment of a mobile device using orientation data derived from onboard sensors.

In some implementations, the mobile device includes display 102 presenting display environment 104. For example, the mobile device could include a touch-sensitive surface that could receive touch input and gestures. The display environment could be a 3D GUI having a floor (106), back wall (108), ceiling (110) and sidewalls (112a and 112b). One or more two-dimensional (“2D”) or 3D objects could be presented in the display environment. In the example shown, 2D object (118) is pasted to the back wall and 3D objects (114 and 116) are resting the on floor.

Apple’s proposed display environment could be a perspective projection of a 2D desktop or homepage for an operating system or application. The perspective projection could be conceptually understood to be the view from an imaginary camera viewfinder. The camera’s position, orientation and field of view could control the behavior of a projection transformation or camera transform.

Shifting Camera Views

Apple states that the “camera view” of the display environment changes when a viewer rotates their mobile device about a gyro sensor axis. If no gyro sensor is available another sensor such as the magnetometer or accelerometer could be used.

In some implementations, the display environment is determined based on the current orientation of the mobile device as indicated by one or more onboard sensors. For example, the display environment could be displayed when the viewer holds their mobile device with the display directly facing them. In this orientation, the camera view is directly facing the back wall. As the user rotates their mobile device either clockwise or counterclockwise, the camera view is moved towards either side wall.

More particularly, as the user rotates their mobile device clockwise (about the X axis of rotation), the camera view moves toward sidewall 112a. Likewise, as the user rotates their mobile device counterclockwise, the camera view moves toward sidewall 112b. As the user rotates their mobile device clockwise (about the Y axis of rotation), the camera view moves toward the ceiling. As the user rotates their mobile device counterclockwise (about the Y axis), the camera view moves toward floor.

By rotating mobile device about the X and/or Y axes, the viewer is easily able to change the view of their display environment as desired to view various icons or documents as presented on the display.

Angular rotation about the X and Y axes could be measured or estimated from data provided by gyro sensors, accelerometers, magnetometers or any combination of sensor data that could provide an estimate of the orientation of the mobile device relative to a reference axis of rotation.

Apple Introduces a “Snap To” Feature

Apple’s patent FIG. 1B shown below illustrates a perspective projection in a 3D display environment using orientation data derived from onboard sensors, and including a “snap to” feature for changing camera position in the display environment. Note what was on the left wall of patent figure 1A is now positioned in the center back wall of the 3D environment in patent figure 1B below. As the user rotates their device, a new view of their display environment could be seen and snapped into place so that they could interact with it.

When using the mobile device, there are physical constraints on the amount of any particular rotation. If the viewer rotates their mobile device about the X or Y axis too far, the viewer will no longer see their display environment 104.

Exemplary Process

Apple’s patent FIG. 2 shown below is a flow diagram of an exemplary process 200 for determining perspective projections in a 3D display environment using orientation data derived from onboard sensors.

Multiple GPUs and a 3D Graphics Rendering Engine

In some implementations, the process could begin by generating a 3D display environment for a display of a mobile device. The 3D display environment could be displayed using one or more graphics processing units (e.g., NVIDIA GeForce 330M) and a 3D graphics rendering engine, such as the open source object-oriented graphics rendering engine (“OGRE“).

Yet a development this week may prove to be the more likely GPU candidate to power Apple’s proposed 3D GUI for mobile devices. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this week, Imagination Technologies presented their new PowerVR G6200 and G6400 GPU IP cores – which may be able to offer up to 20 times the performance of smartphones currently on the market today. We discussed advances coming from Imagination Technologies in our December 12, 2011 report titled “Apple Pounds out a New Round of Camera Related Patents.” Being that today’s 3D GUI patent relies heavily on utilizing the cameras built-into Apple’s iOS devices, the developments presented in Vegas this week are very relevant.

3D Environments for a Full Range of Devices

Some examples of mobile devices that will be able to implement Apple’s proposed 3D environment include but are not limited to: a handheld computer, iPod touch (a personal digital assistant), an iPhone, an iPod, iPad, network appliance, a camera, an enhanced general packet radio service (EGPRS) mobile phone, a network base station, an iPod, a navigation device, an email device, a game console, or a combination of any two or more of these data processing devices or other data processing devices.

The War over the Next Great Interface will be with us for a Decade

In October 2011, Microsoft revealed their upcoming Metro UI for portable devices and made a pitch at how it would be so much better than Apple’s use of static icons. Well, just when Apple knew that Microsoft would be trying to copy iOS in some fashion, we now see Apple’s revelation of how they may take a future iteration of iOS to the next level. Time will tell of course if Apple gets this 3D GUI out to market in a timely manner. But at the moment, it looks very promising indeed. In the bigger picture, the war over the next great interface for larger tablets, TVs and our vehicles are still up for grabs. But between Apple’s advanced work on 3D graphical user interfaces as well as audio-centric user interfaces like Siri, it sure looks like Apple has the wind at its back.

Apple’s patent applicationwas originally filed in Q3 2010 by inventor Patrick Piemonte. For more on Apple’s 3D related patent applications, see our Archives.

Other Noteworthy Patent Applications Published Today

Apple has designed and invented a new power adapter with an arm mechanism that is manufactured from a single piece of material. The plug arm could include a plug operative to extend into a wall socket, an elongated plate coupled to an end of the plug such that the plug extends from a first surface of one end of the plate, and a pin coupled to the opposite end of the plate and extending from the opposite surface of the plate.

That’s a very nice description from Apple, but it’s still an odd power adapter to me. Yet perhaps the super geeks amongst us could make sense of this (ha!) – and let us know below in our comment section.

For more information, see patent application 20120005897.

[via Patently Apple]

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20 HTML5 sites that changed the game

Posted on January 8th, 2012 by admin

Animation, Campaign, Innovation, Interactive, News, Software, Technology, Web

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This year HTML5 truly rocked. Oli Studholme, one of the HTML5 Doctors, runs through 20 of the best sites and covers semantics, audio, client-side web apps, canvas as well as SVG and WebGL and looks ahead to the future

2011 has been an amazing year for HTML5 and the web. We’ve seen HTML5 continue maturing, progressing to Last Call status in May and on track to be a W3C specification by 2014. The WHATWG have been busy with both improvements to HTML5, and new post-HTML5 features such as WebVTT. The progress for browsers has also been staggering, with all five main players actively pushing the boundaries of the web, and Firefox joining Chrome, Opera, and to a lesser extent Safari in frequent, automatic updates. One more to go!

On the content side, it’s really felt like 2011 has been the year the HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript web stack has come of age. HTML5 is now the default for most developers, and impressive explorations of the new features HTML5 makes available have been coming thick and fast. Here’s a tiny sampling of some sites that rocked HTML5 this year. Quite a few of them made my jaw drop with the feeling “I can’t believe this is the native web”.

Semantics

1. HTML5 For Web Developers

HTML5 for Web Developers might seem like a strange site to include here, because it’s just a version of the HTML5 specification. Historically W3C specifications have tended to be confusing, written for people who make web browsers, not websites. However, the HTML5 spec text is surprisingly readable, and peppered with examples. If you’ve had bad experiences reading W3C specs in the past, you might be pleasantly surprised.

HTML5 For Web Developers was made by Ben Schwarz and friends to be “a companion specification for web developers to use on a regular basis”. It’s a restyled version that drops the “implementor notes” for browser makers, perfect for web developers. Under the very readable print-influenced styling are some nice HTML5 additions too. It uses Offline Cache, and saving it shows a progress bar in supporting browsers using <progress> and the AppCache API. The search-as-you-type feature also works offline, and of course the search box uses type="search".

It also represents how we can all make a difference. Ben did this as a volunteer project, andthe source is on GitHub. And as web devs we have the skills to do so! Which takes us nicely into …

2. Move the Web Forward

Move the Web Forward by Mat Marquis, Aaron Forsander, Connor Montgomery, Paul Irish,Divya Manian, Nicolas Gallagher, Addy Osmani and friends shows you how “you can make the web as awesome as you want it to be”. It lists a range of things for all abilities that you can do to make the web better.

The one-page site features clean HTML5 code, using data-* attributes to tie in Twitter hashtag searches. It also has an adorable but invalid doctype:

<!DOCTYPE html public “i &hearts; the web”>

(The important bit is <!DOCTYPE html, which triggers standards mode.) But above all, more than any of these awes HTML5 websites, Move the Web Forward’s message is crucial. InBeyond the Blue Beanie?, Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis comments “As the saying goes, many hands make light work. How fantastic would it be if there were so many hands that the burden didn’t fall on just a few? Together, let’s make the web rawk even harder!”. You can read more in Addy Osmani’s The Smashing Guide To Moving The Web Forward.

3. Boston Globe

The Boston Globe website is the poster child of a beautiful commercial “responsive web design” website. Built mobile-first, it behaves well in old browsers, even those without support for media queries or JavaScript. Scott Jehl of the Filament Group says “Every critical feature of the site was designed to work independent of JavaScript, but enhanced with richer JavaScript-driven interactions in capable browsers.”

Scott continues “We used HTML5 for a number of reasons. Mostly, it’s future-friendly and offered features that were useful in our feature set. For example, we made wide use of data-attributes for configuring behavioural options or associating content enhancements, we also appreciated the ability to use newer semantic elements in place of div/p/span where they made sense.”

Audio

4. Anatomy of a mashup

Cameron Adams combined his love of music, DJing, datavis and sweet web tech into Anatomy of a mashup.

The audio of his mashup of Definitive Daft Punk is visualised using the <audio> API and<canvas>, with support from CSS3 transforms and transitions. Cameron says “All of the waveform and spectrum visualisation is performed in realtime, so your browser is rendering a music video on the fly!” Proving that Flash isn’t dead yet, Cameron used a custom Flash app to get the audio spectrum data.

On HTML5, Cameron says “The thing that I love most about working with HTML5 is the immediacy of development; I can edit a JavaScript file, hit refresh and see what I’ve done immediately. No compiling, no special plugins. It’s the most accessible way of getting my work out there.”

5. SoundCloud

SoundCloud is a service for recording and sharing sounds, and is a popular way for artists and DJs to share mixes and expand their fan base. It’s also a great case study in pragmatic use of HTML5. While the desktop web app uses Flash to play audio, there’s an option to use HTML5 Audio in settings. This has also allowed SoundCloud to support the iPad, and they’verecently released an HTML5-based widget.

In addition to <audio> and the Audio API, they also use data-* attributes heavily, plus Canvas, SVG, and LocalStorage. Matas Petrikas says “We are especially proud of our use of Canvas in rendering of the widget waveform, the optimisations helped us to reduce the CPU load compared to Flash significantly”. Unfortunately there’s also some user agent sniffing (albeit for pragmatic reasons), and little use of new HTML5 elements or form attributes (although this is changing).

However, HTML5 Audio is not the default due to what Matas describes as “the poor state of HTML5 Media API implementation in web browsers”. To combat this Tomás Senart and Yves Van Goethem created the audio test suite “Are We Playing Yet?”. Matas says “The response has been overwhelming, we already have most of the browser makers participating, and we look optimisticly towards 2012!”

Additional problems in mobile devices include recording sound, the lack of widespread support for position:fixed for UI, and the lack of frequent (or any) mobile browser updates – Android WebKit is becoming the modern IE6. Because of this SoundCloud heavily promote their native apps to iOS and Android users. Matas says “we want to offer users the best experience possible, and currently the mobile browsers are still behind”. However, the future still holds promise: “we are big advocates of the upcoming device API (getUserMedia) and we hope in future to be able to capture sounds in the browser without Flash”.

These areas highlight some current problems in both specifications and browsers, but it’s certain both will continue to improve rapidly. For example Mobile Safari now supports background audio, GeoLocation and accelerometer. Even with the problems Matas says compared to Flash making the HTML5 version “was a pretty fast process. Debugging and optimising were also easier. This allows us to build and iterate faster, and in the end our users are happier too!”

6. The Wheels Of Steel

The Wheels Of Steel by Scott Schiller is two turntables and a mixer, live in the browser.

The demo uses HTML5 Audio where supported, with Flash as a fallback, via Scott’s JavaScript library SoundManager 2. It also uses some other fun stuff, including <input type="range"> for the crossfader and localStorage, plus a bunch of CSS3 for the impressive visual bling. Rather than go into detail, I recommend you read Scott’s excellent article The Wheels Of Steel: An Ode To Turntables (in HTML). I especially like this quote: “the page gracefully degrades and the core UI + content renders nicely even with JavaScript turned off. Blank or illegible pages shown to users without JS … reflects poorly on the site developers.”

Client-side web apps

7. Dabblet

Dabblet is marauding maker of awesome Lea Verou’s newest tool – a live CSS sandbox that saves as GitHub gists, and runs entirely client-side.

It uses a raft of HTML5 and related goodies, including CORS (cross-origin resource sharing), localStorage, the History API, the Selectors API, data-*,contenteditable, and inline SVG. Lea’s considering using the Drag & Drop API for resource embedding and the Offline API in the future, but says “the offline API is a huge pain in the arse”. She also tried using Web Workers for asynchronous syntax highlighting, but this made it seem slower. She’d also love to use the currently-being-specced UndoManager API once it is implemented, as “a big portion of dabblet’s code is devoted to recreating Undo/Redo”.

It also uses Lea’s controversial -prefix-free library to handle CSS vendor prefixes automatically. Lea’s considering a no-prefix-free option, or potentially adding something like LESS. While Eric Meyer has eloquently stated the case for vendor prefixes, Divya Manian,Henri Sivonen, and Lea have all written on how vendor prefixes – as currently used (copy, paste, forget) have problems. While not HTML5, it’s an interesting issue about a fundamental part of how we work, and the CSS Working Group would welcome input via www-style.

Because the target audience are web developers, Lea hasn’t worried about backward compatibility. “If it was for a less tech savvy audience where IE is a concern, I’d still use HTML5, but with proper polyfills and fallbacks in place.” On HTML5, Lea says “HTML5 means three things for us developers: speed, universality, and openness. Making cool things is now easier than ever.”

8. Font Dragr

font dragr by Ryan Seddon allows you to preview custom fonts in the browser by simply dragging a font file from your computer into font dragr, or choosing from a list. Even better, you can use the font dragr bookmarklet and change the fonts on any site, targeting each font using a CSS selector. This lets you preview and compare fonts for @font-face use quickly, leaving the coding until you’ve decided.

It uses new HTML5 elements, the Drag and Drop API, the History API, the contenteditableattribute, and localStorage. Support for Google Web Fonts is also in the works. Ryan says localStorage is used to “do an ajax request which will get the view html, replace it in the DOM and then cache that view html in localStorage. So it only needs to do a network request the first time around.” On HTML5, Ryan simply says “it is the future”.

SVG

While not part of the HTML5 spec, some amazing sites have also been making great use ofthis powerful vector drawing specification.

9. Slavery Footprint

Slavery Footprint is an interactive survey that answers the question “how many slaves work for you?” to raise consciousness about modern-day slavery.

It heavily uses JavaScript to lazy-load and animate content, along with new HTML5 elements, GeoLocation and SVG. While in a modern browser the results are compelling and highly effective, sadly the site is not built with best practices. The survey form is unusable without JavaScript, and the information about slavery (“What? Slaves work for me?”) is inaccessible text-as-image. Perhaps because it didn’t start “content first”, Slavery Footprint also initially had some teething troubles, both with hosting and providing support for old browsers – the client was the USA State Department, who were still using Internet Explorer 7. Despite the problems it’s been successful in interactively raising awareness of modern slavery.

10. Kern Type

Kern Type is a type kerning game by Mark MacKay that is strangely addictive. You try to move the letters in a word to correctly kern them, and are scored on how well you did. Each word is in a different font too.

In addition to SVG with the help of the JavaScript library Raphaël to draw the letterforms, it uses data-* attributes for font data (the initial positions and the x-height), and Raphaël’s drag-n-drop for interactivity.

Mark says “I didn’t plan supporting tablets, but when I was almost finished I fired up Kern Type on my iPad and I was pleasantly surprised: not only was it almost 100% functional, the animations were smooth and the drag and drop worked great. All I had to to was add a couple of lines of JavaScript to prevent the page from scrolling and that was it.” He ended up using Raphaël drag-and-drop because with HTML5’s “I would have had to build an interface between Raphaël and my custom made javascript. I would have used HTML5’s drag-and-drop if I needed to drop over targets, as that’s notoriously difficult.”

When you complete it, have a go at the sister game Shape Type, and stay tuned for Method of Action’s first course “Design for programmers”, of which they’re both a part of.

11. SVG Girl

SVG Girl is a demo site produced for the Internet Explorer 9 release. It showed off IE9’s SVG powers with a very Japanese flip-book type animation running at 10 SVG frames per second, with sound via the <audio> element and an intro <video>.

It was made by the core members of jsdo.it, a social coding community site for creating, sharing and forking JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS code. This is run by Kayac, who describe themselves as “the most playful company in Japan” (as their great `data-*` and SVG-powered team page demonstrates).

I’ve yet to see any Japanese schoolgirls experiencing such a transformation while using Windows Phone 7.5, but hey it’s Japan — anything is possible For another interesting Japanese example, have a look at The Shodo, a <canvas>-based traditional calligraphy web app, that stores stroke info as SVG paths.

Canvas

12. Peoplemovin

Peoplemovin is a personal project from Carlo Zapponi to show migration flows across the world, based around a flow diagram (inspired by Sankey diagrams). More than 215 million people, three per cent of the world population, live outside their countries of birth. Peoplemovin makes it easy to investigate migration by country, with intuitive visual representations explaining the statistics.

Carlo says “The foundation of the website is the canvas, all the interactions and visualisation happens in the space of the canvas that let me draw the connecting lines between the countries. I also used some CSS3 rules for rounded corners, shadows and glows and fonts.” In addition to the latest browsers it also works on smartphones and tablets. Carlo ended up making his own open-source toolkit called DataMovin to achieve this, which he plans to release at some stage (check the source in the meantime).

Describing HTML5, Carlo says “What’s great about HTML5 is that it is the perfect platform for creativity. You have a new crazy idea? Great! In a shorter time than ever before you can build anything into the browser without reinventing the wheel every time.”

13. Rally Interactive

Rally Interactive’s website contains a masterful example of creatively using canvas for interactivity. The triangular shapes react to hover and click in a way that until recently would have required a plugin like Flash.

As Wes Pearce says “We simply couldn’t have gotten the effect we wanted for our site without the HTML5 canvas. Support for the canvas in the latest browsers is shockingly uniform. We also put the new History API to good use, and were surprised at how quick it was to implement.”

14. Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction by Bret Victor is a great example of using interaction in support of text to really communicate ideas.

<canvas> examples are injected into the essay, allowing you to interactively learn about the point being made. I think this kind of thing is going to be a major part of future educational books, making ePUB 3 and HTML far superior to PDF, ePUB 2, and Kindle Format 8.

15. Sumon

Sumon is a simple addition game with great attention to detail. It’s been made by Ludei as a tech demo for their CAAT framework, which outputs to Canvas, WebGL and DOM/CSS.

As with Agent 008 Ball and Pirates Love Daisies from 2010, it’s a great example of the combination of canvas and audio plus talent – a fun game that runs right in your browser. It’s also available in the iTunes, Chrome and Android stores, plus as a Facebook game, all from the same codebase. That’s the kind of reach native apps just don’t have.

Iker Jamardo writes “JavaScript and HTML5 features are great game development platforms. The main disadvantage we found is poor performance in mobile device browsers.” While Ludei believes this will improve eventually, they’ve developed the Cocoon and CocoonJS frameworks to achieve native performance on mobiles. Iker concludes “we deeply believe JavaScript and HTML5 are great for game development and multiplatform deployment”.

WebGL

WebGL is again not part of the HTML5 spec – it’s a separately specified API that allows 3D graphics to be used in <canvas>. However, for crazy eye candy it’s hard to beat. Rather than go into details, let’s just see some examples:

16. HelloRacer

HelloRacer by HelloEnjoy, a sweet drivable F-1 race car.

17. WebGL Shader — Travelling wave fronts tech demo

The travelling wave fronts tech demo is a “fine-tuned 8bit reaction-diffusion system with added traveling wave fronts and subpixel decay”. Mesmerising.

18. ROME “3 Dreams of Black”

ROME “3 Dreams of Black” is an interactive music video by Chris Milk and friends, to music by Danger Mouse, Danielle Luppi and Norah Jones.

Don’t miss their tech demos and video about the technology behind the movie.

You can learn more about WebGL, and see more amazing examples, in Dev.Opera’s “An introduction to WebGL” (and “Porting 3D graphics to the web”) by Luz Caballero. Opera is also preparing a comprehensive list of WebGL tutorials, coming “very soon”.

The future / the present

There’s a lot of amazing stuff coming to the web stack too. Let’s look at just one example – the WebRTC (Real-time communication) specification (getUserMedia). This allows you to “exchange real-time, interactive media, including audio and video”, with a major use being video chat between browsers. Opera also has experimental support for getUserMedia in developer builds for both desktop and mobile.

19. Browser-based video chat

Ericsson Labs has been working on this for a while, and has a WebKit library for download(more info and tutorial).

20. Face detection/moustache demo

Opera also has experimental support for WebRTC, and the DeviceOrientation Eventspecification, in a custom build called Opera Labs Camera and Pages. Rich Tibbett wroteNative webcam support and orientation events on using both specs, and made a demo using WebRTC that performs face detection on live video. If that isn’t awesome enough, it also allows you to add a moustache. To live video. In the browser.

Bravo, interwebs. Bravo.

Conclusion

As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, despite grouping these websites by an HTML5 technology they use, they’re all using way more than just one. While not everything is ready for adoption, there’s a lot of goodness in the HTML5 specification (and other web stack specs like SVG and WebGL) that you can use right now. Keep up to date and find out more atHTML5 Doctor, the W3C’s Planet HTML5 and on Twitter with @HTML5.

The “HTML5” buzzword has been a double-edged sword, but it’s helped the bandwagon gain momentum and made an impression on management too. Hopefully with this pile of inspiration you’ll return to the first two sites in the article, go forth and make awesome!

[via .netmagazine and @designchapel]

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Most Insane Immersive Movie Experience

Posted on December 12th, 2011 by admin

Animation, Innovation, Motion design, News, Technology

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Check out this guy’s room totally change into the movie he is watching! No SFX, no post production, no cuts, everything you see here is 100% for real. By Studio Output, FND Collective and MLF. Lovely stuff!!!

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Add value with custom QR codes

Posted on November 10th, 2011 by admin

Apps, Innovation, Interaction, Interactive, Mobile, News, Software, Technology, Web

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QR Codes are the easiest way to transform your analogue marketing into digital, and QR Codes can be the medium that connect your brand with mobile audiences out there. They represent a new communication channel that everyone can afford and they can be easily implemented alongside your current marketing activities. Their huge advantage is the low budget that is needed to enter into the space of mobile communication.

We live in times of mobile and social networks and information has never before been so available and so easily accessible. Everything is going mobile and you should consider how to prepare your future marketing strategy with mobile channels in mind.

The Smart phone market is growing faster than any other market and by 2014 mobile web usage will overtake desktop web usage. Brands and businesses are learning how to leverage their campaigns to engage with mobile audiences via QR Codes. The incredibly fast changes we see today are empowered by the communication revolution and you will either catch it or will be left out.

Example

Let’s say your local pub have regular stand up comedy shows on Thursdays and parties on Fridays. For these two days your QR Code can be linked to some different content then automatically revert to the default one. If this is a repeating event then this approach is far easier than setting up a new code or editing its link every week. Normally, the QR Code should be connected to a mobile web app to get more info about shows, events, artists, submissions.

Qrcode-platform-qrcode-generator-and-mobile-apps1-500x302

Great example how QR Codes can add value!

Tesco / HomePlus is a South Korean grocery chain and they utilized this amazing subway QR Code grocery store in Seoul in February 2011. This is very elegant and peppered with creativity and forward thinking solutions. It is simply one of the best uses of QR Codes in e-commerce in the world so far.

How QR scanning works

First, you need to go to your smart phone marketplace (Apple store, Android marketplace, Windows phone marketplace or Blackberry marketplace) and search for QR Code reader. Most of these QR Code readers are free applications. Then just open the app and start scanning. This is the list of best QR Code scanner apps.

Mobile apps

Connecting a mobile audience via QR Codes should include an optimized mobile web site. QR Codes offer a quick way to connect to your online information for people that are constantly on the move. The majority of them have now have a Smart phone and they don’t need to type a URL into the mobile browser which is a huge time saving and less error-prone way to access information. When they take the effort to take out their phone and scan the code they get all information loaded into their mobile phone browser. When the user has loaded the whole web page into the mobile phone browser they just don’t know what to do: scroll left-right or vertically to view all the content on that page, there is so much information that isn’t relevant and it takes too much bandwidth. At the end of the day this is not the most efficient way for someone to experience your brand, service or other information on a mobile phone. So, you need optimized content that is easily browsable on smart phones and that is exactly what we are providing.

Think mobile
Think how you would feel if someone gave you 100 books and magazines instead of only the publication you asked for. Using generic desktop web pages a QR Code campaign landing page is far from what smart phone users expect to find when scanning the code and in reality poor mobile experiences or connecting a QR Code to desktop web pages is still the Number One mistake made by QR Code advertisers.

Enhance mobile experience with mobile optimized landing web page
An effective landing page should engage potential customers in a positive way. Creating a branded optimized mobile web app that work across all phones and tablets can dramatically increase mobile experience and most importantly your bounce rate can be much more efficient.

Within Esponce QR Code Platform you can integrate proper mobile experience and create mobile web apps that are cross devices/OS platform optimized.

You can enhance your mobile experience with rich mobile content, prize contest, portfolio and social channel integration and custom landing page that can change the way you market your real-world promotions in mobile space. Without a properly delivered message, you can’t expect that people will take any action!

Check out the complete list of features >

How to create custom QR Code?

Designing custom QR Codes is an Art of it’s own as a designing cool and readable code is not an easy and quick thing do to. One way to enhance the black and white code is to add and overlay your graphic. With this process you can simply sign off your codes with your logotype, image, or graphic. With this QR Code platform you can do just that. You can simply integrate your logo or graphic into the QR Code and you can use live indicator to see if the Code is readable or not.

80+ gallery of custom QR Codes

Here are a few hundred custom codes generated by brands and business, government, non-profit and individuals… There is no doubt that QR Code technology has penetrated in all sectors of our daily life.

Take a look this unique 80+ gallery of custom Codes from Orange- telecommunication company to FEMA (US. Department of Homeland Security).

[Via Avivo]

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The Man Who Thought Differently, Stayed Hungry & Stayed Foolish

Posted on October 6th, 2011 by admin

Creativity, Innovation, Inspiration, News

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27.100 videos on Steve Jobs: Click here to watch videos

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Björk’s new album as a series of iPad apps

Posted on October 4th, 2011 by admin

Apps, Creativity, Innovation, Interactive, Mobile, News, Software, Technology

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The ever innovative Björk has created her album as a series of iPad apps. The result is a bundle of interactive art, entertainment and audio content that sets a benchmark in how artists can use technology. Read more here and here

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Who do you want to be today? Realtime face substitution is awesome!

Posted on September 20th, 2011 by admin

Animation, Campaign, Creativity, Innovation, Interactive, News, Software, Technology, Usability, Web

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FaceTracker is a C/C++ API for real time generic non-rigid face alignment and tracking.

Goal:
Non-rigid face alignment and tracking is a common problem in computer vision. It is the front-end to many algorithms that require registration, for example face and expression recognition. However, those working on algorithms for these higher level tasks are often unfamiliar with the tools and peculiarities regarding non-rigid registration (i.e. pure machine learning scientists, psychologists, etc.). Even those directly working on face alignment and tracking often find implementing an algorithm from published work to be a daunting task, not least because baseline code against which performance claims can be assessed does not exist. As such, the goal ofFaceTracker is to provide source code and pre-trained models that can be used out-of-the-box, for the dual purpose of:

1. Promoting the advancement of higher level inference algorithms that require registration.
2. Providing baseline code to promote quantitative improvements in face registration.

Features:
• Real time: ranging from 20-30 fps (depending on processor, compiler and use of OpenMP)
• Generic: designed to work for most people under most conditions
• No training required: a pre-trained model is provided
• Detection based initialisation: no user intervention required
• Automatic failure detection: requires no user re-initialisation
• Camera or video input

Download:
FaceTracker is available for download (for research purposes only). The library includes the C/C++ API, example code for interfacing with the API, a pre-trained model and documentation. To download it, please send an email to Jason Saragih(Jason.saragih@csiro.au).

The Tracker:
The code requires OpenCV 2.0 and the provided model was trained using the MultiPIE database. The tracker is based on a modified version of the constrained local model described in:

J. Saragih, S. Lucey and J. Cohn, “Deformable Model Fitting by Regularized Landmark Mean-Shifts”, International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)

People Using FaceTracker:
Some people are using FaceTracker to do some really cool stuff:

• FaceOSC
• A music Video!
• Face Projection
• Being John Malkovich
• pkmFace

Videos:

Follow this link to see some examples of difficult YouTube videos that were processed using FaceTracker with the pre-trained model. There was absolutely no user intervention in any of the videos.

[Via FaceTracker]

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The future of Flash

Posted on September 14th, 2011 by admin

Campaign, Innovation, Interactive, News, Software, Technology, Web

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For a number of years Flash was the most in-demand skill within the digital design industry, but with the rapid growth of new platforms, which don’t need Flash to operate, we are seeing less need for it. Over the past year at Source we have only had around 11 or 12 full-time Flash designer roles, out of around 200 jobs in total. However, we are still receiving freelance bookings from clients for Flash banner designers and coders. These are mainly from production agencies, or agencies that are at the production stage of a project. More and more though, our clients are producing projects using HTML 5, which is starting to become the default. HTML allows you to be more dynamic with your designs and coding, whilst looking and working equally well on all platforms. FWA (Favourite Website Awards) is still showcasing some of the world’s best Flash projects which continue to inspire us all, however as we know Apple’s iPhone doesn’t support flash, and Apple are currently leading the way with how the future of design will be.
Interestingly projects which involve design for kiosks, digital escalator panels, interactive bus shelters and other touch screen applications still use Flash, as it works well with ActionScript, Papervision, Away3D and augmented reality solutions.Salaries for people with Flash are no higher or lower then other types of designers or developers. Flash designers and coders can expect the following salaries:

Junior Designers/Flash Designers	£18k-£25k	£150pd- £200pd
Mid/w Designers/Flash Designers	£25k-£38k	£200pd- £250pd
Senior Designers/Flash Designers	£40k-£55k	£250pd- £325pd
Junior ActionScripters	£18k-£25k	£150pd- £180pd
Mid/w ActionScripters	£25k-£40k	£200pd- £250pd
Senior ActionScripters	£40k-£60k	£250pd- £400pd

Does Flash remain a key skill worth training in? Read on for opinions from some of the industry’s thought-leaders:

“Flash is a flexible set of tools that offer easy multimedia capabilities and entry points at all levels of ability. In our prototyping we strive to use the best tool for a certain job, not just the tool that we know best so I’d say that Flash definitely has a future but it is not the only technology around. It has the advantage of being present in one form or another on many mobile devices and as such is a valuable skill to have but it needs to form part of a portfolio of skills – I would want to see it partnered it with javascript & HTML or Qt Quick & C++.”
Alistair Wharton – Design Technology Lead – Nokia

“Given that HTML5 is pretty damn good already – I would rather not be a flash developer when it gets up to HTML8”.
Will Cole – Creative Director – Maverick Media

“Flash is still used, but sparingly it seems. Gone are the days when agencies like ourselves would deliver flash site after flash site. There is so much you can do without flash now, and there’s a big emphasis on accessibility from most clients. However, it’s still a useful tool when delivering specialist products, and I would say its a skill that’s still needed, albeit less frequently – I mean someone out there still needs to know Flash right?”
Will Pyne – Owner – Holler London

“If you’re looking for a digital design career more focussed towards advertising flash is still a useful skill set to have as it’s still the standard application for online advertising production. But, if your focus is larger scale website design flash is definitely in demise because of increased web standards and brands looking to produce SEO friendly, accessible online experiences. Add to this the emergence of mobile and tablet devices, particularly the iPad which doesn’t support flash and you’ve got some pretty big reasons for flash moving out of favour.”
Anthony Oanes – Associate Creative Director – Lbi

“Flash is still one of the ‘tools of the trade’ for any online designer and being installed on 98% of internet connected browsers it is still a valid piece of software. At Disney we are trying to reduce the heavy reliance on Flash, finding alternatives to create a more efficient, optimal and accessible multiplatform user experience. Much of Flash’s simple interactive content can be replaced by an alternative code-base such as HTML5, but it still leads the way in regard to online casual gaming, video streaming and short-form animation where it will still remain the ‘go to’ piece of software for the foreseeable future.”
James Bruce – Head of Creative – Disney EMEA

“There is no doubt that the future of flash on mobile devices has been put into perspective with the recent Apple iPad announcement. But, Flash has always had a minor slice of the digital content pie – after all, flash driven sites only account for a fraction of online sites – and this share is likely to continue to shrink. Recent projects we delivered in a subset of HTML5 have demonstrated real potential for rich web experiences – some of which are arguably more accessible (no plugin required), possibly less processor intensive and platform independent. Ultimately, if Flash were to go extinct, as a creative I would miss the flexible and intuitiveness of its script and timeline based interface.”
Yann Caloghiris – Head of Film & Video – Navyblue

“10 years ago Flash was the creative saviour of digital creatives, they could finally make pretty, interesting and interactive applications. But the digital technology has moved on. However with the arrival of HTML 5 and the number of platforms that support HTML5 instead of flash, I certainly wouldn’t call Flash a generalist digital skill set anymore. I’m not only referring to Apple’s reluctance to support flash. The biggest emerging technologies like WebTV and Mobile won’t be using flash.

Flash has already become a niche product and it will continue to have a niche market for a few years to come e.g. in some types of PC based gaming.
It will soon become a speciality like Adobe Director: perfect if that’s your game but it won’t be an ongoing requirement for advertising and marketing agency creative staff. Last year I would’ve insisted that every digital designer have some flash experience e.g. for building banners. But in a year’s time this will no longer be a required skill set for digital creatives.”
Leroyson Figueira – Digital Creative Director – Haygarth

“Flash is essential to a huge amount of digital activity – and irrelevant to much more. As an animation tool, it’s not that sophisticated. It has issues with accessibility. It tempts designers into thinking they’re movie makers, forgetting the attention span of web users. But because it does what it does so well, it going to be around a while longer. We use flash in our work because it offers such a handy mid point between the back and front ends – between the data and the eyeball. It’s been around long enough to be just about the only guaranteed cross platform and browser language. It just works – and that counts for a lot. But the big question here is ‘What happens when Steve Jobs dies?’ His feud with Adobe and refusal to include flash for the iPhone and iPad has started all this anxiety. As well as drive the demand for Android phones that have no such inhibitions.”
Matthew Maxwell – Digital Creative Director – Draft/FCB

“For the next few years there won’t be a technology with the penetration and features of Flash. As time goes on, simple Flash applications, banners and games will be built using HTML5 and Flash will be used to create mainly complex and rich applications. There is some amazing work in HTML5 largely created by Flash Developers, such as Mr Doob and Seb Lee-Delisle but HTML5 is still much less developed compared to Flash, especially from a programmer’s perspective.

Learning Flash Development is a great introduction to programming plus it’s very easy for a Flash Developer to learn other similar languages such as Javascript for HTML5, Objective C for iOS or Java for Android. Flash Development will be a valuable skill for the next few years and maybe beyond, but any good developer is not tied to one language. At Kitcatt Nohr Digitas in London and Digitas in New York, our Flash teams are starting to work in HTML5 and iOS as the skill sets are so similar.

I would say anyone getting into Flash Development now should also be coding Javascript and looking at the other new technologies that excite them like Open Frameworks or Arduino. No one knows what technologies we will be using in 3 years time but the skills that you learn as a Flash Developer equip you well to hop technologies as things evolve.” Alistair Colling – Technical Manager – Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

[Via wearesource.co.uk]

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