This week at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, we debuted our latest creation—KinectiChord: a multiuser, multisensory experience that blends physical and digital in an unexpected and delightful way. On display in the Microsoft Advertising Beach Club, this experience allows multiple users to see, hear and feel technology like never before.

At our recent Razorfish Client Summit in Las Vegas, Emerging Experiences asked our fellow fish to submit 6 seconds of creativity for our clients and partners to vote on within “The Lab”. Utilizing the Vine application, our employees around the world created 6 second shorts that expressed their creative side. We then fed specifically tagged Vine videos (#razorfishcreativity) into a unique multitouch experience for our clients and partners to vote on. Vine doesn’t have an official API, so we had to get a bit “creative” on the technology side to pull this off.

What were the results? Well, lets just say the entries were varied… From stop-motion Rubik’s Cubes, to creative mashups of Bob Lord over lunch, each entry showcased individuality and our collective creative spirit. Overall our clients loved the experience and their ability to vote on their favorites. So which fish won?

(insert drumroll here)

1st Place: Moritz Bosselmann
View Entry

2nd Place: Matisse Miller
View Entry

3rd Place: Tomoko Fushimi-Haack
View Entry

Who said it doesn’t pay to be creative? Thank you to all the fish that entered and to our clients and partners that participated in the experience.

Razorfish Emerging Experiences has opened a new lab in our San Francisco Razorfish office across from Pier 39 and the renowned Fisherman’s Wharf. Equal parts workspace and client demonstration area, the lab is invaluable for our team to design, build and test some of the most engaging and transformational experiences in the marketplace. Leveraging the success of our Atlanta Lab and its evolution over the past 5 years, the San Francisco Lab is our newest digital sandbox.

In two related articles referencing the work in our new Lab, Christopher Heine writes in Adweek that “employing the latest technology at point of sale is nothing new—for years businesses from car rental companies to Nordstrom department stores have unhooked from the wires. But the trend has gone from merely ringing up sales via mobile devices to a deeply immersive in-store experience—fully digitized but crucially featuring that face-to-face element…”

The Lab showcases 360 degree video content across multiple displays and projection surfaces, features emerging technologies such as transparent displays and multi-touch and gesture-based sensors powered by our proprietary Razorfish 5D Platform. Watch an Audi be configured in precise detail through the application that empowers Audi City or sit back and watch as data is visualized through one of our latest projects.

Physical meets digital and the customer’s journey will never be the same. Innovating Tomorrow, Today. For appointments please contact Wade Forst (wade.forst@razorfish.com), our Director of Emerging Experiences in San Francisco.

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.

At the London Investor Day, Publicis Groupe’s top executives showcased market-defining tools that have been developed to enable clients to communicate more effectively with their consumers. Included was the Razorfish Emerging Experiences group and its 5D platform. Attendees were introduced to it (pictured above) during a presentation of Audi City, a next-generation dealership built with 5D.

We got a 3D printer (%#$@%!!!!!) and I think we can all safely say we have been…distracted lately. We’ll be posting our creations, augmentations and general mad-scientist meddlings all week long. Each print becomes more and more successful (like the top I printed above) and we are soaking up all the information we can to make each one better than the last.

Some of the team members have immediately started printing toys for their families (and themselves) while others are already figuring out how to print out the missing links to the Arduino puzzles that have kept them up at night. We all knew the impact these suckers would have on the marketplace, but i can’t impress upon you all just how much more amazing these things are when you are actually behind the dreaming something up one minute and holding it in your hands the next.

Have any requests? Have any tips? Want to come play? Tweet us at @razorfishEE – OK back to printing my Biplane chasis…

From the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Razorfish Emerging Experiences group has teams around the world working on a myriad of exciting projects. We’re building our newest lab in San Francisco, working with the Audi team in Frankfurt and hopping from New York to Atlanta to Seattle, Austin and Portland. We even have someone hitting the slopes at Telluride (but we don’t think that qualifies as work). Watch this space to see how these projects unfold.

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.

At a recent 3D Vision & Kinect Hacking Meetup in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to learn about a particularly exciting advancement in orientation sensor technology. A demonstration by Michael Kosic of XYZ Interactive focused on low cost 3D positioning sensors that not only detect the x, y and z position of an object, but also roll, pitch and yaw. What’s particularly exciting about their technology is not what it can do to enable interactive experiences, but how its low cost could make these experiences ubiquitous. With positioning sensors that cost as little as a cup of coffee, you can imagine how their affordability could open the door to a wide array of experiences including interactive signage, in-vehicle controls, gaming and augmented reality applications. Simple yet precise recognition of the position of a hand in 3D space could be used for swipes, pushes and pulls—the kind of navigation we expect in a tablet or track pad. And the roll, pitch and yaw recognition opens the door to completely new, yet easily-adoptable user interfaces. It’s technology we’re already experimenting with in our labs, so stay tuned.