Take a look behind the scenes of the Lab at the ARIA in Las Vegas. A true manifestation of what we do in the Emerging Experiences group, the Lab set-up brings to life the ideas behind this year’s Client Summit theme, Convergence. To learn more about the ideas that drive our passions, read more about what Razorfish’s Global CEO, Bob Lord and Global CTO, Ray Velez have to say in their new book.
During a two day prototyping session at Razorfish’s Frankfurt office last summer, our team built an NFC-enabled gumball machine that was filled with apps, music, games and other fun content. And to help celebrate the new Galaxy SIII Mini, it was recently showcased at Samsung’s Flagship Store here in Frankfurt. Now, after a short pit stop to make a few tweaks and improvements, we’re taking it to Mobile World Congress next week. If you happen to be in Barcelona, be sure to stop by the NFC & Mobile Money Pavilion (Hall 7) to check it out.
After weeks of hard work, sleepless nights and countless cups of coffee, we unveiled the latest iteration of our groundbreaking 5D Retail Experience Platform at Retail’s Big Show: The National Federation of Retail’s 102nd Annual Convention & EXPO. We had fun showing off how 5D can customize, personalize and seamlessly synchronize the shopping experience, the biggest hits being the co-shopping feature and our synchronized transparent displays. We’re preparing a post focusing on some of the emerging trends in retail, but wanted to share some of the highlights from the two day event. If you weren’t able to make it in person, you can check out the experience here: emergingexperiences.com/5D. And be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for all the latest news and events coming from the Razorfish Emerging Experiences Group.
Creating the next big thing in retail is no easy task, but when you get to work with some amazing technology, it can be a lot of fun. Pictured above, Razorfish Emerging Experiences Associate Director Ryan Kellogg is seen hooking up our brand new transparent displays.
Some of the amazing brands that received a hands-on demonstration included Macy’s (pictured above with CEO Terry Lundgren on the far right), Ralph Lauren, Lowes, Walmart, Tesco, Toys“R”Us, Estée Lauder, Louis Vuitton, Loreal, UNIQLO, H&M, Levi’s, Wells Fargo, Staples, Total Wine, Swarovski, Gucci and Moods of Norway… just to name a few.
We presented the 5D platform to dozens of international delegations, including this one from Brazil (which had to be translated in real-time).
Our experience was one of the most popular at the event and was visited frequently by the media, including American Public Media’s Marketplace (seen above with Razorfish Emerging Experiences Vice President Jonathan Hull).
And when it was all over, we had the fun task of tearing it all down (which was a lot faster than putting it all up).
Get your hands on the 5D experience by embarking on a unique shopping journey that utilizes a variety of platforms and technologies, including a first of it’s kind, seamlessly-synchronized transparent interactive display wall. It’s located in the Microsoft booth (1005) on Level 3. And to see more of 5D in action, head on over to emergingexperiences.com/5D.
Our lab is buzzing with activity as the team prepares for the National Retail Federation’s 102nd Annual Convention & EXPO in New York. On display will be the latest iteration of Razorfish 5D— the world’s first cross-device, cross-OS, connected retail platform. Launched at last year’s NRF convention, 5D has already been launched in several markets and was used to create Audi City London, a one-of-a-kind immersive virtual showroom. This year we’re showing how our platform can power customized, personalized and seamlessly synchronized shopping experiences. We threw in some augmented reality and a bunch of transparent displays as well.
Our team will be demonstrating the 5D experience in booth #1005 on Level 3 of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. If you can’t make the show, be sure to follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates.
Most Contagious, that is.
We’re excited to announce that Audi City London has claimed Contagious Magazine’s Most Contagious Retail Award at a ceremony today in London. This experience was a year-long collaborative effort between Audi and a wide range of partners, and was launched near Piccadilly Circus just ahead of the summer Olympics. It is delivered by one of the most technologically advanced retail environments ever created and features a variety of multi-touch displays for configuring your Audi from millions of possible combinations. Once you’ve created your personalized Audi at this groundbreaking dealership, you can toss it onto one of the floor-to-ceiling digital “powerwalls” to visualize and explore your configuration at a true 1:1 scale. Audi City London is a true dealership of the future and an effort we were proud to be part of.
Photo: Gaurav Singh
When we’re playing in our Lab, we’re always looking for creative ways to push the limits of technology. Some of our projects are just for fun, and others, like London’s Audi City, completely reinvent the way people shop. We were even thinking about digital wallets before they were cool. So when we set out to create the Razorfish 5D platform, our goal was to design a powerful and highly immersive way for brands to connect with consumers—before, during and after the shopping experience. In our latest video, we show how our 5D platform seamlessly connects a variety of digital devices to better attract consumers into the store, drive product engagement and arm store associates with more contextualized digital tools. The end result is a fun and personal experience, the way shopping should be.
With Microsoft’s Build 2012 over and Surface now available for purchase, it seems like the only thing Microsoft developers can talk about is building Windows 8 store apps. Creating Windows apps that can be monetized using the same wildly successful revenue sharing model that Apple pioneered is compelling. However, in the rush to cash in on this new frontier it’s easy for developers to lose sight of the fact that Windows 8 is far more than the addition of a new shell and a new application model.
As a product, Windows has been continuously developed for over fifteen years (which is far longer than Apple has been using the revenue sharing monetization model), but this time Microsoft has built some great technologies that have received far less attention.
The first that comes to mind is DirectX. When most developers think of DirectX they typically think of 3D applications and games, and while DirectX is a great platform for building 3D applications and games, it is capable of doing much more. In Windows 7, Microsoft added Direct2D to the DirectX family of technologies, and as you would expect Direct2D finally adds the ability to execute drawing commands against a 2D surface. In many ways Direct2D is being setup to take the place of GDI, and because it is built on top of Direct3D and DXGI it is also hardware-accelerated and runs on the GPU. Microsoft has also added DirectWrite, which now provides developers a way to layout and render high quality text while making full use of the GPU. Before DirectWrite developers either had to use GDI or rig their own system to render text; now with DirectWrite, developers have access to a rich API that supports layout, international text, and sub-pixel anti-aliasing that integrated easily into the rest of their application whether they are using GDI or DirectX.
Even though DirectX is an amazing API and has only grown in capabilities over the years, there are still numerous applications that don’t use DirectX. Most of these applications use GDI (a much older technology ) to paint to the screen, and yet other applications use other rendering libraries like WPF. It used to be the case that once a developer chooses a core rendering technology to build an app, it was impractical to leverage any other rendering technology. Fortunately Microsoft has built a new technology into Windows 8 called Direct Composition that does away with this limitation. At its core, Direct Composition is simply a bitmap compositing engine. By using Direct Composition it is now possible to use WPF to build the bulk of your application, and to sprinkle in some DirectX code to give your app that extra sparkle that would otherwise be too difficult or which would run too slowly if attempted using WPF. Additionally, because Direct Composition is baked deep into Windows 8 it is possible to compose applications and effects that are generated from code running in separate processes, which opens up a whole new front in software engineering.
While certainly not the last hidden technology in Windows 8, the last I’ll cover is Direct Manipulation. Most developers are extremely comfortable in the world of mouse driven user interfaces—we all understand the concepts of click, hover, right click, move, etc. But the world of touch driven user interfaces is largely uncharted by many developers and most will find that it is far more complicated and difficult than the mouse driven world. In a touch user interface, there may be one, two, five, or no touches on the screen. The user may be pinching to zoom or he or she may just want to move an object but by using two fingers instead of one. Of course it would be possible for developers to build state machines that were able to process and interpret these user gestures and to continue to build their touch based application, but it turns out that building these state machines is not an easy task. Fortunately Microsoft has done the hard work and has included the Direct Manipulation technology in Windows 8. Direct Manipulation is essentially just a touch input state machine that frees developers from the details of interpreting user input. Instead, by using Direct Manipulation, developers can be notified when a user is engaging in a common gesture like pinching, sliding, or rotating. In fact much of the Direct Manipulation API is the same as what you would find in WPF or in WinRT Xaml, and it is my guess that the WinRT Xaml stack is actually built on top of Direct Manipulation.
There are of course many other new technologies that Microsoft has created for Windows 8 and still more existing technologies that Microsoft has improved. The Windows Store app model opens up entirely new markets for Microsoft developers, but let’s not forget that Windows 8 is still a great platform for building desktop apps.
At the same time the //Build/ conference was going down in Redmond, Washington, I was next door in Seattle for the Seattle Interactive Conference (SIC://). Besides a fondness for forward slashes, these two conferences shared a common interest in the future of technology. //Build approached this topic from the software side while SIC:// did it from the design and agency side. The Kinect for Windows technology, interestingly, was present at both events.
I was invited to SIC:// in order to represent EE on a panel about Natural User Interfaces. It was an amazing panel that included David Kung from Oblong, Matt von Trott from Assembly Ltd, Scott Snibbe from Snibbe Interactive and John Gaeta of FLOAT Hybrid. Our conversation about what NUI means today was preceded by an amazing fifteen minute talk by Oscar Murillo that showed off many K4W techniques in a holodeck-like demo. You can read more about the panel here and here. It was expertly moderated by Steve Clayton of Microsoft.
What made the event fascinating for me was the time I got to spend with the other panelists before our talk and after. There was a clear trajectory in our backgrounds. John is involved in the motion picture industry and helped design many of the futuristic movies (like The Matrix) that have inspired the rest of us to work with bleeding-edge interface technology. Dave’s company brought forward advanced academic research to actually realize Minority Report (one of Oblong’s founders helped design the gestural interface Tom Cruise uses in the movie). Microsoft turned gestural interfaces into a consumer technology. Matt, Scott and I are using it for retail and marketing which will help fund and expand the proliferation of gestural sensors. Our collective goal is to create technology that anticipates and responds to our desires rather than simply frustrating us on most days.
We want to use technology, when it comes down to it, to hide the presence of technology in our everyday lives.
Today Christopher Heine of AdWeek published “Razorfish’s Atlanta Lab Focuses on In-Store Digital” highlighting the Emerging Experiences Lab as a multi-faceted innovative space equipped to continue tackling the changing retail landscape.
Regarding a recent report, Heine concludes:
Bottom line, retailers need to do more than simply slap digital elements into their locations… they need to create seriously-planned interactive customer experiences.
Razorfish’s Emerging Experiences lab is a mind-blowing candy store stocked with seamlessly connected technologies that facilitate the creation of magic moments for guests. It provides an immersive physical space that clients can leverage to strategize, implement, prototype, and employ these interactive experiences for their customers.
From concept to completion, the Emerging Experience Practice is a one-stop shop for clients looking to collaborate with a team of committed, enthusiastic specialists to ultimately create custom solutions that are grounded in the reality of business. The Lab is a unifying space not only for emerging technologies, but also for designers, developers, strategists, and stakeholders too.
In the Lab, all of the walls come down. Traditional barriers between agency and client as well as client and customer are removed. Technology recedes in and out of view through the cycle of creation as it integrates with thoughtful experience touch points.
The results of this one-of-a-kind mix? Solutions that are sustainable and occur as a natural result of discoveries during the envisioning process.
It’s always so exciting when a client visits the Lab for the first time. By experiencing the possibilities in a physical space, the client is inspired by this type of thinking and how it relates to their business. Subconsciously, authentic consumer experiences begin to occur.
The sensory nature of the Lab helps foster the most compelling and innovative ideas possible. It is something that can not be achieved by observing a focus group or relying on evolving data.
It’s brainstorming at its finest. And prototyping at its fastest.
Clients can experience their customers’ point of view in a way that was once never possible.
Razorfish is committed. Our team members are committed. All of the chips are in and the Lab is situated as a crucial space to help our clients realize and understand the needs of today’s customers.