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 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.

Last month, WIRED magazine published an article entitled “A Thousand Points of Infrared Light” which highlights the effect that Kinect has had in transforming the way that we interact with digital experiences. Timed around the announcement of the official Kinect SDK, the article focuses initially on how this revolutionary device allowed researchers in robotics to take their experiences out of the lab with little cost (the Microsoft Kinect is an add on peripheral that costs $150).

It’s a great read on the subject on how a company can embrace the “hacker” community, thereby supporting innovation well beyond a products’ intended use. The first couple of weeks of Microsoft’s stance on Kinect hacks was uncertain, however Microsoft soon embraced the community.

WIRED researched the thousands of Kinect hacks in the wild and invited a handful of researchers, visual artists and technicians to be included in the magazine. We were excited to be included. Check out the iPad version of the magazine to see video of our DaVinci Kinect experience.

Thanks again to WIRED for the props and we look forward to sharing more experiences with everyone in the near future.

Back in November 2010, we posted a video of a little Microsoft Kinect app we called “DaVinci Kinect.” It’s a prototype we originally built for Microsoft Surface that blurs the lines between the physical and virtual world.

But as soon as we got our hands on the Kinect hardware, we updated the app to take advantage of the new platform and interactions –  as well as extended the technology to recognize hand/figure gestures. With our latest iteration, hand gestures are used to create objects and control the physics of the environment.  The user’s hands appear in the interface which allows one to literally grab objects out of thin air and move them in the environment. Additional gestures allow folks to affect gravity, magnetism and attraction.

After the blog was posted, we received a ton of attention from the likes of Gizmodo and Engadget. And now, we have an opportunity to demo the app at E3!  We’ve been working on a version for the Microsoft Surface v2 as well, so we’ve integrated the new graphics, interactions and a fun little homage to Mr. Lucas.

We’ll post footage of the event next week. Hope to see you there!

This year, Razorfish sent several of our people to MIX 11, the annual Microsoft sponsored conference in Las Vegas for developers and designers.

So much happened during our week at MIX  that it is difficult to summarize it all thematically.   There were announcements and sessions on several major topics: IE9, HTML5, ASP.NET MVC 3, Silverlight 5, Windows Phone Mango release, and the Kinect SDK. In addition, there were also appearances from MS Surface v2, Windows Azure, oData and Sharepoint as well as a remarkable set of UX presentations.

The word on everyone’s lips seemed to be fragmentation, whether in reference to the expected HTML5 compatibility issues between future browsers (which the emphasis on the IE9 “native” browser experience only exacerbated) or to the greater array of Microsoft development technologies fighting for developers’ attentions.

What the four Razorfish attendees at MIX saw, on the contrary, were patterns of evolution.  The much ballyhooed struggles between the Windows Team and the Development Team inside Microsoft for the future of HTML5 and Silverlight indicate to us that Microsoft can still respond to a rapidly changing worldwide technology ecosystem.  When a product is struggling in the niche it was doing fine in a year ago, it can be refitted to survive in a new niche. Such is the case with Silverlight, originally intended as a Flash-killer.  Silverlight developers never truly adopted the original Flash-killer strategy and instead used Silverlight to develop more sophisticated and interesting line-of-business applications.  The problem is that LOB applications do not really belong on the web.  They belong behind firewalls.  The lack of casual games written in Silverlight likely affected the ability of Silverlight to force downloads and gain browser share.  So instead, the strengths of Silverlight are being moved to the desktop as well as specialized platforms such as Windows Phone, the XBOX (?), and possibly Windows vNext.

WPF, which was once the pre-eminent desktop development platform, is in turn becoming a specialized tool for NUI development for multi-touch, Surface and Kinect.  The announcement of the Kinect SDK itself demonstrates Microsoft’s continuing ability to innovate and surprise.  It is, in the best sense of the term, a fortuitous mutation.

This all leaves HTML5 as the preferred technology for the web.  We of course see the early signs of browser compatibility issues. At the same time, though, we have each been through this before and survived. The extra gyrations developers will have to go through will, in the end, provide the illusion consumers desire – that the same application can run similarly on any operating system and any device.  As one MIX speaker put it, “The technology you use impresses no one.  The experience you create with it is everything.”

Speaking of devices, we are excited to see that the WP7 team is not only going for parity with other smart phones but is firing warning shots across their bows with the much touted Mango release.  Features we’re used to like multitasking are being expanded beyond current implementations with updating live tiles and “Live Agents” which allow for more full-featured multitasking.

There was naturally some complaining about the placement of various keynotes and sessions.  With the multiple announcements and cross-blocking sessions, isn’t there a danger that individual messages will get drowned out in the general cacophony?  We find that the panoply of conflicting viewpoints is one of the chief charms of MIX. Microsoft is not Apple.  To borrow from Isaiah Berlin’s famous title, Apple is the hedgehog that does one thing well; Microsoft is the fox that explores all avenues and experiences.  The great strength of Microsoft is its ability to challenge developers and create new harmonies out of these encounters. Should MIX ever be split up into different web, Silverlight, Windows Phone and UX conferences, we would all be poorer for it since all we would ever get would be our own opinions reflected back on ourselves – an echo chamber effect that will only serve to make us all deaf.

The overall quality of all sessions and boot camps were extremely high this year.  In the past, we have been happy with a 60% success rate on talks.  This year roughly 85% of the talks rang our internal bells. Certain sessions deserve a special shout out, however.

While all the UX lightning talks were extraordinary,  August de los Reyes’s 21st Century Design (10’ 45”) talk took it to a different level.  In the live session, the slide deck itself was the star with the brilliant August narrating it much as Peter Jones was the voice of the book in the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy television series.

Despite its inauspicious title, Ivan Tashev’s talk Audio for Kinect revealed what a truly remarkable device the Kinect really is. We honestly didn’t understand half of the technical stuff and we became queasy when formulas started flying across the screen. What we learned, though, was that only a fragment of the Kinect’s full audio capability is currently being used.  Dr. Tashev demonstrated the ability of the Kinect’s audio algorithms to pick out two separate speakers, one reading Chinese and the other reading Korean, and separate them into different channels.  All of this cool functionality will, moreover, be handed over to developers when the Kinect SDK beta is released at the end of spring.

Finally, we cannot say enough good things about Luis Cabrera and his willingness to demonstrate the Surface 2 at work in A Whole NUI World. Razorfish, of course, has a special affinity for anything Surface. What was outstanding in this presentation was not only the beauty and power of the new Surface devices but also the amount of thought that has gone into the tooling. Kudos to the Surface team, they’re reaching for a goal that is more than just a new technology but a new way for people to interact with computers and each other.

By the end of MIX, we were all quite exhausted mentally and physically. It may take us a full year – until the next MIX – to finish ingesting everything that we learned and experienced at MIX11.

So long, Microsoft, and thanks for all the Kinects.

The Consumer Electronics Show was back for 2011 and our team was on the ground in Las Vegas. We have a number of initiatives going on at CES this year.

First, our team was involved in the Microsoft Surface 2.0 launch. We’ve been working with the Surface team for a few months on the next generation of Surface. We’ve been porting our applications to run on the latest version. We can proudly announce that we are Surface 2.0 ready and we look forward to supporting the new platform and bringing the solution to our clients. The Microsoft Surface announcement caught the media by surprise – it’s been over 3 years since the original Surface was announced. The new device is faster, leaner and costs less than the previous version of Surface. We’ll have an in-detail analysis of Microsoft Surface 2.0 posted on the blog shortly.

Second, we were involved in the launch of another experience for one of our clients. We created a solution that will be experienced by millions of consumers in the market. Unfortunately our involvement must remain confidential so we can’t go into too many details. Let’s just say it was definitely one of those opportunities that we could not pass up!

We took the opportunity to explore the trade show floor in an effort to educate ourselves on the latest technology offerings. We hope to bring some of these technologies to our clients in 2011. Here are some of the technologies that we’ve got our eye on.

Tablets

2011 has been declared the “year of the tablet”. There were certainly no shortage of tablets at CES. In fact, about 80 new tablet form-factor devices were announced at CES this year.

From a hardware perspective, tablets are getting thinner, lighter and more powerful thanks to innovation around chip technology from companies like Intel, ARM, nVidia and Qualcomm. There are a variety of new form-factors hitting the market. The Eee Pad Transformer tablet can be docked in a base which transforms the device into a traditional laptop form-factor. The Dell Inspiron Duo tablet features a reversible screen to accomplish the same thing.

There were a variety of different screen sizes available. One of the interesting debates between amongst members of our team was around the usefulness of the small screen tablets. These “tweener” devices feature screens between the size of a typical phone and an iPad. The smaller size means they are more portable than an iPad, however they still can’t fit in your pocket and they can’t make phone calls.

One of the most impressive devices was the BlackBerry Playbook. The device features a brilliant user interface which makes use of NUI design principals – direct interaction of content through the use of gestures. In addition, the performance of the device was exceptional. We can’t wait to start developing for this platform.

For the first time, we had the opportunity to see the new Android Honeycomb tablet OS. The exerience is decidedly Android retaining much of the same design language. Improvements have been made to the user interface to take into account the additional tablet real-estate. In all honesty, we were slightly disappointed with the user interface. We were hoping for something game-changing from Google and instead, they delivered an experience that was transitional, not transformational.

One of the major disappointments was the lack of direction from Microsoft on tablet devices. We were crossing our fingers for an announcement around a tablet operating system that was lightweight and provided an exceptional user experience similar to what is being provided on Windows Phone 7 platform. And we wanted this platform soon.

Microsoft did acknowledge they are behind in the space. Right now, their story is positioning Windows 8 as the solution for tablets by supporting system-on-a-chip architecture. By supporting this hardware platform, Microsoft will be able to deliver Windows experiences on tablet devices while taking into account battery life and OS performance.

Unfortunately, no announcements were made around the Windows 8 user interface. Delivering an exceptional tablet UI will be essential to their strategy. It is likely Microsoft will adopt the “Metro” design language currently being used for Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft Surface 2.0.

Gesture Control and Natural Interaction

With the release and success of Xbox Kinect, the gesture control market is heating up. Much like the original iPhone brought touch interaction into the mainstream by putting millions of devices in the hands of consumers, Xbox Kinect will do the same for gesture control. The way we interact with computers is fundamentally changing and we are getting in on the ground floor.

We’ve taken the opportunity to develop for the Kinect platform, however we were looking for a commercial-grade solution to bring to our clients. Enter PrimeSense.

PrimeSense licenses their technology to Microsoft for use in the Xbox Kinect, therefore they seemed like the perfect partner to deliver the hardware and software to support commercialized gesture control solutions. We are actively working with PrimeSense to develop for their platform. Their OpenNI initiative hopes to create a framework for standardization of natural interface development across devices.

We see gesture control technology being used in an in-home setting and also in retail environments. This technology can be utilized to create at-home shopping experiences which combine natural interaction and augmented reality. Imagine being able to virtually try on clothes from the comfort of your own home. Or order a pizza with a flick of the wrist from the comfort of your couch.

We have been champions of the use of interactive experiences in the retail environment and we have the statistics to prove it. To date, the majority of our experiences have utilized touch. This technology provides a new user interaction paradigm and offers an entirely new world of possibilities in the retail space.

Touch Screens

Touch screen technology is evolving rapidly. Devices are becoming larger, cheaper and more reliable. Exciting new form-factors and multi-touch hardware will help us deliver new experiences to our clients in 2011.

3M Touch Systems has exciting new hardware and form-factors hitting the market which utilize their massively multi-touch projected capacitive technology. This technology provides extremely stable multi-touch that supports a large amount of touch points. 3M is brining 23” and 32” screen sizes to the market. In additional, the screens can be integrated into a multi-device array to build large size touch wall and table experiences.

We also had some hands-on time with systems from PQ Labs and Multitouch.fi. Both vendors offer touch solutions that are unique and exceptional. We look forward to working with these companies in the future.

Display Technology

Displays are getting thinner, lighter and more energy efficient. 3D technology is also evolving quickly. Much like last year, 3D display technology was everywhere. The most impressive innovation in the 3D TV space comes from LG. They demonstrated how their 3D technology has been standardized – every TV on display in their booth could utilize the same pair of glasses to deliver an exceptional 3D experience. They also demonstrated flicker-less 3D which produced a better 3D picture than we’ve seen on any other consumer device.

The glasses-less 3D technology was a disappointment. There isn’t enough discernable depth with the current iteration of the technology. Certainly this will change over time, however the promise of ditching the glasses has yet to be fulfilled. We wouldn’t be surprised if this changes in 2011.

In-Car Technology

Ford had the major innovations in the automotive space. The Ford Focus Electric vehicle was announced along with an update to the MyFord Touch interface. The interface features a number of enhancements including the ability to visualize your destination and alert the driver if there isn’t adequate charge in the vehicle’s battery. In addition, an efficiency coach monitors your driving habits to advise changes to your driving style and an “Emotive Display” visualizes butterflies when you are driving in a way that adds range to your vehicle.

MyFord Mobile was also announced. The app allows you to locate charging stations, unlock doors and find the location of the vehicle. In addition, the app goes social with driving behavior monitoring – achievements are awarded once certain milestones are met. These achievements can be shared on Facebook.

The first experience is located on the main stage, featuring a 24″ Multi-Touch display allowing users to interact with the car configuration and an additional 65″ display with synchronized high-definition 3d-rendering in real-time to garner even more attention. The complex configuration scenario is wrapped in a simple and easy-to-use interface. The application is based on Windows 7 and the Razorfish Touch Framework.

The second configurator runs on Microsoft Surface and is based on the Audi A4 configurator. The multi-user environment allows individuals to place physical tokens on the table and configure their favorite A1 in a collaborative way. The extravagant competition kit adds exciting new possibilities to spice up the user’s virtual car.

Both configurators can be seen live at Geneva Motor Show until March 14, 2010.

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.