Arcade Fire

The Wilderness Downtown

This week Arcade Fire launched the interactive video The Wilderness Downtown, based on their track We Used To Wait. Enter a street address (they suggest the address where you grew up), and a set of windows, with content synchronized to the song, delivers a mix of video, interactive pieces, and footage of your street address — animated and augmented. It’s pretty amazing — both technically and creatively.

What’s even more remarkable is that it’s a Chrome Experiment — done entirely in HTML5 — without any Flash. Google’s page on the project details the specific technologies and techniques used. Creative Review posts a great deal of background information.

What I found most interesting was how the concept developed. It was Aaron Koblin who first had the idea of an interactive film to showcase Google Chrome, rather than the band or their label instigating it. (If you’re not familiar with Aaron, you should absolutely check out his work on his website and sandbox. Most relevant to the Arcade Fire project was his involvement on Radiohead’s open source House of Cards project, for which he was the director of technology.)

It’s a great example of new technologies and experimentation driving creativity. And very encouraging to see a band like Arcade Fire regularly supporting such efforts… Digital versions of their songs feature Synchronized Artwork. And they’ve done several sites, including Neon Bible (which is an interesting experiment at getting a viewer to interact throughout a song) and Black Mirror.

The Wilderness Downtown

The Wilderness Downtown

Neon Bible

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Augmented City

Get your 3D glasses back out — there’s more red-blue goodness ahead! Keiichi Matsuda, who created Domestic Robocop, has a new project: Augmented City.

The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organize; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.

It’s a interesting vision — or perhaps a warning — a mix of the real and the virtual. The 3D UIs are crazy, but fun. And I thought the virtual detritus scattered everywhere (are they uncategorized digital junk like left-over geo-tagged twitter posts?) was a great touch. 

Actually, the piece made me think of my last post, and the need to put away our digital devices from time to time. A warning of what could happen if we don’t.

Link via BldgBlog.

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Slowing Down

There’s been a lot of press over the past month or two about the possible dangers of multitasking, and how it can hurt our ability to focus and remember. But it was only last night, driving home from work, and not distracted by all the other web pages fighting for my attention, that I really “got” the story. Listening to this interview with Matt Richtel, the journalist who has been reporting this topic for the NYTimes, I was able to  gave some attention to the topic.

Much of the research is still on-going, some of the findings are pretty interesting:

• Every time you check your email [on a mobile device?] you experience stress.
• Checking our devices reduces the degree to which we’re engaged in the world around us.
• It’s important for us to take breaks from our devices in order to be physically healthy.
• By being constantly interrupted, or drawn to our devices, we have less time to process the day’s input, let our minds wander, and to think creatively.
• Even small things, like hyperlinks in text, reduces our focus on what we’re reading, and decreases comprehension.
• And, from much earlier research, people can only really focus on one task at a time. (The specific example he gave was that we can’t listen to more than one conversation at a time, but generalizes to: multitasking is ineffective.)

Individually, most of these aren’t really surprising — we kinda know them already. But the idea that there may be brain-chemistry explanations for them, potentially with long-term mental-health implications, is the big deal. He uses food as an analogy — both food and technology nourish us and are essential, but overindulging can be unhealthy. Some technologies are akin to “brussels sprouts” while others are more like “cookies.”

After hearing the story I started to think about my iPad. Lots has been written about how the iPad, with less emphasis on multitasking and multiple simultaneous windows, encourages greater concentration and focus. It’s much easier to, for example, read a book, or watch a video on an iPad because it’s harder to quickly jump to another app. It may not be the ideal environment for power-users, but the result is a calmer experience.

The story also reminded me of when, in “The September Issue,” Vogue creative director Grace Coddington tells of working with photographer Norman Parkinson. His advice to her: “Always keep your eyes open, keep watching because whatever you see out the window can inspire you.”

So… my immediate resolutions: remove distracting apps from my iPhone (goodbye We Rule), stop checking my phone so frequently for new messages, try, as much as possible, to use my iPad instead of my laptop, and… slow down. We’ll see how it goes.

In the spirit of calming down (and to give this post at least one image) check out Oblique Strategies for the iPhone.

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BBVA ATMs

Redesigning the ATM experience is a recurring UI design favorite. They’re something we all use, and we all have thoughts about how they can be made better.

A couple years ago, Physical Interface published an in-depth article about Pentagram’s redesign of the Wells Fargo ATM. It was a fascinating view into a very challenging task — revealing a lot of complex, and often conflicting, requirements.

Unfortunately, most ATMs seem to end up as Frankenstein-like solutions as they try to resolve all the design requirements. Khoi Vinh recently posted about how the industrial design of ATMs almost encourages theft. And, in the US, complex ADA rules have a huge impact on design.

This past May, IDEO published a video showing their redesign for Spanish bank BBVA’s ATMs, and it’s pretty interesting. Their approach seems much more user-centered — and the results are a big improvement from  typical ATMs. Quoting from the video, the themes that drove their design were: 90° rotation enhances privacy, all-in-one slot forces simplicity, full touch screen supports intuitive interactions, personalization boosts flexibility, virtual to real transitions materialize tangibility, and large screen leaves room for delight.

The result is an elegant mix of product and UI design, with some quite beautiful moments. I particularly like the animation, during a withdrawal, showing the transition of cash from the virtual to the physical.

It’s unclear, though, if this is just a design vision project. Will installation and regulatory requirements require changes to the design? It’ll be interesting to see what happens as the projects moves into deployment.

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3D Everywhere!

Barneys Co-op

Yesterday I received a Barneys Co-op catalog in the mail — in which all of the photos were shot in 3D. Because they used the red-blue anaglyph method, they also included a pair of glasses. It may be an old-fashioned technology for 3D, but it’s still pretty fun. (You can also see the 3D catalog on their website.) So, I figured it was a sign for me to post some of the 3D links I’ve been collecting lately.

A couple months ago Robyn released a 3D music video online for her song Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do. What’s cool is that the video takes real-time twitter feeds and incorporates the text into the video. It’s a pretty low-touch interactivity, but nicely done. This piece was created by Blip Boutique and Stopp Web, with typography by Jakob Nylund.

Robyn, Killing Me

Robyn, Killing Me

Insane, and of pretty dubious utility, is this 3D bookmarklet. (By Yusuke Kawasaki.) It turns a regular web page into a 3D version of it. Sorry, no real interactivity here, but it’s crazy enough to be very cool.

Did you know that Google Street View can display in 3D? Just right-click within a view and select “3d mode on.”

Google Street View in 3D

I think my favorite 3D site, so far, is Snowdin. Made by Cole + McVoy as a holiday site in 2008, it’s got all sorts of cute games and surprises. And, the 3D is interactive! So, for example, if you jump in the ski game, the character rises up. Very charming.

Snowdin

Snowdin

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Inkling

Just released for the iPad, Inkling looks fantastic. It’s designed as an e-textbook reader — and has beautiful layout and typography. It’s also got support for a wide range of multimedia content such as movies, 3D, and quizzes. But I think its real killer-feature is the way it can integrate your social network into the reading experience. You can embed notes within the pages, share them with others, even follow them as streams. It makes books feel social and alive.

My gripe with Inkling is that it’s a closed ecosystem — you can only read books that you purchase through the Inkling store. Wouldn’t it be way-cooler if Inkling was a wrapper that you could use to read e-books purchased from Amazon and the Apple iBookstore, too? That way you could use all the social features in, for example, a cookbook or travel guide.

Inkling is a free app and comes with a demo version of The Elements of Style. Give it a try.

Link via Daring Fireball.

Interesting scroll bar detail.

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