Over the last few weeks Amnesia Razorfish had the opportunity to collaborate with the University of Sydney and Publicis Mojo for an innovative take on how near field communication can transform tasks in our daily lives. For this concept designed for food courts Stephen Davis created a Brand Table prototype that not only simplifies the process of displaying menus of restaurants on your phone, but also allows you to place your order and pay instantly.

Steve has a nice write-up on his website about the benefits of this approach and we were happy to see it being picked by a number of online publications including TechCrunch and Engadget.
With the wide-spread adoption of NFC at the horizon we’ll hopefully see concepts like this becoming reality soon.

The arrival of NFC technology promises to usher in a variety of new types of multi-channel customer experiences. While NFC technology is still in its infancy, our team has focused our efforts on research & development around experiences that can be enabled by this emerging platform. One of the many uses of NFC is activating mobile payment.

The Razorfish Digital Wallet is a mobile application we developed to demonstrate how customers can send and receive mobile payments over NFC. In the future, this type of consumer-to-consumer payment will become commonplace. For instance, you’ll pay your babysitter or settle a bet with a friend by simply tapping your mobile devices.

In the above video, we’ll showcase the consumer-to-consumer payment scenario along with a variety of other scenarios. NFC has arrived and we’re excited to integrate this technology in our experiences.

Check back soon as we will be posting a behind-the-scenes walkthru of the application.

The Razorfish Emerging Experiences team showed up in force for the ReMIX South conference. Luke Hamilton presented “The Interface Revolution”, a discussion about emerging tablet technologies and what they mean for consumers. He also provided best practices for creating tablet experiences and key insights on how to bring these interfaces across multiple devices. Jarrett Webb presented “An Introduction to Kinect Development” providing insight on how to get started building experiences for the Kinect hardware. Steve Dawson and Alex Nichols were “Kinecting Technologies” which recreated scenes from famous Sci-Fi movies utilizing the Kinect combined with other advanced technologies.

While not presenting at the event, the team enjoyed presentations by Albert Shum, Arturo Toledo, Rick Barraza, Josh Blake and many other experts in the fields of Kinect, Tablet/Mobile development and UX/Design.

For those who are interested, we encourage you to download the code for the Kinecting Technologies presentation. In order to run the samples, you’ll need:

• Kinect for Windows SDK
• Microsoft Speech Runtime (x86 version)
• Microsoft Speech SDK
• Kinect Language Pack

Additionally, the voice-control home automation sample requires the X10 ActiveHome Pro Hardware and the X10 ActiveHome Pro SDK.

Thanks go out to the organizers of ReMIX South for putting together a wonderful event. We’ll see you next year!

Watch the session videos here.

Mobile continues to demonstrate its growing importance with many different audiences. People are buying smartphones, texting like mad, and choosing the phone over the PC for web browsing at a surprising clip. All of this points to a need to take mobile ever more seriously. At the same time, the possibilities of mobile display advertising continue to evolve, most recently with mobile rich media formats bursting onto the scene. We’ve gathered some of the best examples of mobile rich media across a wide variety of platforms, networks, and 3rd party specialists – including the Razorfish-built iAd for JCPenney. Check it out.

A wide range of Oakley products are designed for sports fans and outdoor living people who are dependent on their equipment when practising their passion and living their dreams. Choosing the right sunglass lens makes a significant difference when sports and outdoor activities are taken seriously. To guide the consumer through this decision process, we have implemented an iPhone and iPad App which simulates realistic scenarios by using engaging 3d-panorama landscapes wrapped in an intuitive touch- and accelerometer-based interface.

The overall experience features more than 18 lens tints in spectacular environments and various weather conditions. Once the perfect lens is selected, a detailed product information is just one touch away.

Available on the AppStore for iPad and iPhone.

We took the show on the road for the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. We worked with the Microsoft Tag team to bring the RockstAR augmented reality experience to the event.

Since we were running the experience in the Microsoft booth, we decided to add some new characters – the most popular of which being Steve Ballmer:

We used the experience as a way to engage with conference attendees and demonstrate an innovative use of Microsoft Tag technology. As conference attendees had their RockstAR snapshot taken, we’d ask them to download the tag reader application to their mobile device. Afterwards, they could take a snapshot of the Microsoft Tag and retrieve their photo. We took over 300 photos at the event.

The RockstAR experience is another example of how you can use tag technology to extend an interactive in-store experience to a customers’ mobile device. Wishlists, shopping carts, mobile content delivery, product ratings & reviews and wayfinding are some of the examples of how tag technology can be used to change the way people shop in retail.

Check out our pictures from the event.

Before we left for the evening, we recorded a quick walkthrough of the Windows Phone booth and EMC (Executive Meeting Center) locations where we have touch experiences deployed to support the Windows Phone 7 Series launch event.

Members of the press and blogging community have been recording video of the experience throughout the conference. These videos have begun appearing online – here are a couple of the videos we’ve found:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-30XRO4Wxw
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDYgMGUCvj4
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYW2hL9ZTPE
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkHmmjRhgLk
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDLG9vJohjE

After a long night of celebrating the successful launch of Windows Phone 7 Series in Barcelona, we are back at the Windows Phone booth at Mobile World Congress. The crowds are still huge and the experiences are running great. Each experience is collecting touch and interaction information in the background – we are going to begin processing this information to determine how many sessions we are seeing, average session time, the most popular areas of the experience, etc. We will use this information as a guide to optimize the experience for the next event.

The Windows Phone team is showing live projected demonstrations of the device in the theatre area – these demonstrations are attracting huge crowds.

Members of the press camped out at the Windows Phone press lounge located across the plaza from Mobile World Congress. Because of the huge turnout for the announcement, much of the press watched the launch event live from the downstairs press lounge. After the show, we launched 6 experiences at this location allowing members the press to touch and interact with Windows Mobile 7 Series for the first time.

Members of the press who weren’t able to watch the event in the theatre or the press lounge huddled around screens outside in the reception area. We went live with 2 experiences at this location.

Conference attendees watching the event live at the Windows Phone booth at Mobile World Congress. We had an additional 2 experiences running at this location.

Cameras were out as the interface was unveiled for the first time. The phone interface design was kept a secret up until launch day. Preventing pictures and other leaks of information from making it to the press turned out to be a huge undertaking. The Windows Phone team went to great lengths to prevent leaks – in fact, many of the Microsoft employees working on the team never had the opportunity to see the interface until launch day. We based our experience off of some hands-on time in Redmond and videos of the experience. Our team was able to reverse-engineer the design, animation and interaction of the user interface. Accuracy was extremely important and we had to ensure the design and motion in our experience was a perfect re-creation of the experience on the actual device. We built the experience on top of the Razorfish Touch Framework. Using the framework allowed us to rapidly develop the application from scratch in under 4 weeks.

The product launch was a huge success and the Windows Phone team has been celebrating in Barcelona. The reaction from the press and blog community has been overwhelmingly positive. The conference is far from over but so far we are off to a great start!