Anticipation has been building for years.

The expectation has always been that our lives will be transformed by new technologies. Everything from travel to sports and entertainment would be made new again…redefined.

And now, thanks to Delta and Madison Square Garden in partnership with Razorfish, that time has finally arrived.

Delta Air Lines’ Touch the Future of Travel and a newly refreshed yet still iconic Madison Square Garden is here.

In addition to the 11,000 square foot lounge which features select menus, multi-screen event coverage, and a clear view of professional athletes entering the arena through a glass hallway, we’ve created a unique experience for VIPs.

A personalized, curated way for travelers to discover new destinations, collecting content from around the globe and enjoying fantastic vistas that transport them into the magic of destination travel and discovery.

Delta’s Touch the Future of Travel is about unique inspiration, easier access to what you want, when you want it, and sharing travel ideas with friends…and Razorfish with Delta is making it all happen.

The saddest thing about old technical books is that by “old” what we really mean is anything published more than three years ago. We no longer burn books in civilized countries so these 3+ year old books simply take up space. We can’t throw them out. We can’t sell them on eBay. We can’t even give them away.

You can imagine how surprised we were during a recent spring cleaning in the Emerging Experiences facilities, then, to find nearly decade old books that seem remarkably relevant to the 2012 technology landscape. We found a dozen books on beginning, intermediate and advanced JavaScript which, somehow, has become a first-class development language over the past year. There were half-a-dozen books exhorting readers to pay careful attention to their CSS. We found an academic tome on Human-Computer Interaction. We even found a copy of Dietel & Dietel’s classic How To Program C++ book. On the upcoming Windows 8 platform, C++ is set up to be the language discerning developers will be using to do both game and interactive programming as managed code takes a back seat at Microsoft for the first time in ten years.

The greatest treasure we pulled out of ye olde cardboard box, however, was a stack of Flash books. Unlike the case with JavaScript and C++, we do not think Flash is making any sort of comeback. Flash is dead. What is not dead are the visual concepts those fantastic Flash developers came up with as well as the algorithms they came up with to implement those concepts.

Take for instance the New Masters of Flash series. These are first of all beautifully designed books. They are written by a slew of masters of the technology who are each given a few pages to discuss their inspirations, provide a cool concept and then show how they approached the solution. Cool concepts include animating a 3D chessboard, animated typography vis-à-vis The Matrix, creating a pointillism artistic mask for text and images, and taking a simple shadow effect to its logical extremes. The highlight of the book is probably Irene Chan’s introductory essay on feminism, art and the role of websites. It’s not something one would expect to find in a technical book and speaks to the amazing community that developed around Flash.

What particularly amazed us about these Flash books was the number of ideas we have stolen from Flash over the years in our interactive WPF and Silverlight applications. Things like naturalistic flip books, fluid dynamics emulators and parallaxing – often considered cutting edge stuff in the XAML and XNA worlds — were already old hat in the Flash world a decade ago. Even more wondrous were the vast number of concepts we found in these books that have never been implemented in either WPF or Silverlight. A slightly greater number have been done in CSS + JavaScript, but still only a fraction of what could be found in these books.

All of this is simply a way of observing, once again, that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, even in software where we often pretend that we are in constant Kurzweillian motion and slouching toward the Singularity. It is also a recognition of the essential role Flash has played in interactive media. Flash has shown us what can be done and, in many cases, we have yet to surpass what it accomplished all those years ago. Flash is dead. Long live Flash.

For the Adobe Mobile Challenge 2011 Kay Wiegand and Tobias Richter from the Berlin Razorfish office produced a Crossplatform Mobile Application with Flash Builder 4.5 for iOS, Android and BlackBerry called TOUCH N CLASH! The App was a smashing success and went on to win the highly sought-after Novelty/Innovation Prize! Read what the jury said here!

TOUCH N CLASH is powered by the Adobe RTMFP group functionality. By utilizing this technology, it was possible for us to create the necessary multiplayer communication without establishing a server/client infrastructure. On the gameplay side of things, another notable feature is the physics engine we implemented that really brings the fun of the game mechanics to life and adds a level of intensity to the overall experience. To really kick things up a notch, we tapped into the device accelerometers to control the direction of the gameballs. The unique selling point that helped us stand apart from the competition is that the game is playable with different devices together in a cross-platform experience.

The gameplay is a very simple, but VERY fun:
In the game, the colored sides of your game-field represent the other players. If a gameball appears in your game-field, you have to pass it to another player before the countdown timer runs out. To pass a gameball to another player, touch and drag it to the colored side of your game-field. To add a fun element of chaos, we added a mechanic that randomly spawns a gameball. First player to touch it gains control allowing the tide of the game to turn on a dime. You win by being the last man standing!

We’d love for you to experience this fast-paced and innovative game for yourself! Please download a copy from your appropriate marketplace below:

Download for iOS
Download for Android
Download for Blackberry

In mid-March, tens of thousands of music lovers, film fanatics and tech junkies descended on Austin, Texas for the annual SXSW festival. This year, we were honored by being invited to come and participate on a panel discussing technology and the future of the in-store experience (official panel info). It was an exciting opportunity that we hope to be asked to repeat in the future years of this prestigious festival.

Its been amazing to watch the festival’s success and attendance sky rocket during the last decade, and the expansion into the interactive industry has been a huge factor in that growth. To say attendance was high is almost laughable – the city was brimming with people, all ravenously seeking out and consuming inspiration for their passions in the forms of discussions, installations and shows. It was really a highlight in our history to be part of that momentum.

There were a lot of very engaging discussions – from Foursquare CEO, Dennis Crowley’s, keynote discussion on how their platform continues to evolve and stay relevant, to the “new buzz” around passive-location app rookies such as Highlight and even some really amazing (and fairly alarming) thoughts from Ray Kurzweil on the democratization of technology…and our imminent replacement by cyborgs. (YAY future!)

The speakers I had the pleasure of joining on the panel were Carrie Chitsey, Founder & CEO of 3Seventy, Tim Austin, CCO of TPN, and Chris Harrison, panel moderator and COO of DMX Inc. The panel focused primarily on the current landscape of retail – both in-store platforms and exterior experiences such as web and mobile/tablet. A lot of discussion was around the tech that is in the market today – QR, mobile, RFID, Augmented Reality, Multitouch – and what we saw on the horizon – NFC, 3D Video Projection, furthered AR and, most importantly, the convergence of these experiences into a connected, holistic platform.

We’ve seen amazing examples of Augmented Reality and Video Projection as jaw-dropping attraction mediums and fun, environmental experiences (think Nike’s Melo Event or RockStar), but how can we utilize this tech to drive purchasing decisions in-store or from a shopper’s living room. One of the larger advancements we saw at CES this year was in the Virtual Dressing room category and how augmented experiences like Body Metrics are impacting shoppers’ decisions while reducing return rates for online retailers at the same time.

However, while this solves ‘online’ shopping pain points for both retailers and consumers, it also creates potential potholes in the path to in-store traffic since the online experience is that much better. This then puts the heat back on brands (and us as marketers) to elevate the in-store component of our model to provide meaningful, inspiring experiences for shoppers so they actually visit the store in the first place. So what does this mean for the marketplace?

It means connecting with customers’ senses of individuality and personal connection with brands. It means empowering the sales staff with tools and theatrical platforms to engage in a higher level of customer service with shoppers. And most importantly, it means ensuring that these offerings weave together to form a cohesive story across all the touch points that form the overall journey from storefront to shopping cart. Our team recently developed a platform, code-named 5D, that connects shoppers with devices and one-of-a-kind experiences like never before.

Lastly, we also discussed the responsibilities we have as agencies, brand ambassadors and shepherds of our clients’ interests to make sure we are not just pushing tech for tech’s sake. There have been far too many failed retail experiences due to the fact that they were simply off-target from the business goals of the retailer, inappropriate for the store’s customer, fledgling technology that needed to be incubated a bit longer or all of the above. QR, for example, is so easy to implement, that every able marketer over-saturated their materials with a QR extension, delivering a poor user-end experience once the consumer actually went through the hoops of snapping the code. This has really eroded the effectiveness of QR as a connection medium and left a sour taste in most peoples’ mouths when they think of QR. Now, at a time when QR’s potential is really peaking through its ability to quickly connect platforms and personal devices, we are finding ourselves having to resell the tech all over again since it wasn’t used appropriately by so many marketers the first time. As an agency, we must always envision our experiences with attention to core business strategies, while at the same time designing consumer services that support the shopper. It is definitely our job to disrupt the marketplace with ideas, but ideas that are tactful and meaningful for brands and shoppers alike.

At the end of the day, or the panel rather, we all agreed that the point is this: products support the experiences we create. Therefore, these experiences should always support our consumers’ lifestyles as well as the business goals of our clients. They must be meaningful and magical to impact a cluttered landscape that’s piled high with shallow executions and disparate messages. Emerging technology is a powerful medium to break through all of this noise and tell compelling stories, but only if it adds value on both sides of the fence. The consumer story is the brand story these days – period -and personal devices + emerging technology is at the center of it all. We must strive to utilize new opportunities with new technology to educate and inspire the people that fuel this trillion dollar industry, but not squander business dollars and consumer energy in the process.

Click Here to Purchase/Reserve Your Copy!

Emerging Experiences has been approached before about writing books, but Kinect was the first topic we felt excited enough about to actually want to carry through with such an endeavor. We have never seen the Kinect sensor as merely a gaming device. Instead, we view it as a radical evolution in human-computer interfaces. In the same way that adding touch capabilities to a phone makes it “smart”, putting Kinects in the world is the first step in making our environments “smart”. Rather than a mere novelty, we view the Kinect as a doorway to the future. Beginning Kinect Programming with the Microsoft Kinect SDK is intended to show developers how to walk through that door.

The authors began work on Beginning Kinect Programming with several goals in mind. The primary objective was to share our knowledge of the Kinect as well as many of the techniques we have learned to build Kinect experiences. In this regard, it is of the rare books on Kinect that addresses developers rather than artists and designers. While the book is an introductory book on the Kinect, it is written for experienced developers. The code examples are in C# and leverages WPF because it is the most powerful and rich UI platform. This book provides enough information for other developers to build the sorts of Kinect experiences we build everyday on the Emerging Experiences team. We wanted to share our secrets so others can help us push the Kinect technology to its limits. After months of writing and constant rewriting to keep up with the constantly changing Kinect for Windows SDK, we feel we have met these goals. It is, if nothing else, the sort of book we wish we had when we started our first primitive experiments with the Kinect over a year ago.

Features of the book include:

• Quickly start building applications within the first 15 pages
• Complete coverage of the Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0 API
• A complete history of the Kinect
• Teaches how to manipulate Kinect images using common image processing techniques and tools
• Demonstrates unique ways to use depth data
• Teaches how to take snapshots of users
• Illustrates how to turn a user’s hands into cursors
• Details a framework for capturing poses
• Provides an introduction to gesture detection techniques, including code demonstrations of the Wave, Swipe, Button Push and more
• Presents an extensive set of fully functional games and applications as well as useful tools

Fresh out of R&D from the Razorfish Emerging Experiences team is a product code-named “5D”. 5D started out as an idea to re-invent personal shopping. Our goal was to create a retail experience platform for both consumers and sales associates that enables multi-channel sales through immersive and connected digital devices in retail environments. And the only way to do it is to seamlessly integrate five key components – devices, content, experiences, analytics and CRM with a touch of digital magic!

The team announced 5D at the 2012 NRF Convention & Expo in New York City in partnership with NEC and Microsoft. Leveraging Windows Embedded, Microsoft Surface, MS Tag, Windows Phone and Kinect for Windows we created a prototype around a fictitious brand “Razorfashion” that demonstrates how various touch points along the customer journey can attract consumers into the store, drive product engagement and arm store associates with more contextualized digital tools.

You can read the full press release here

We recently partnered with London-based technology company, Bodymetrics, to develop a means for online shoppers to buy clothes from the comfort of their couch. Whattya mean big deal? Well, did we mention that the clothes are guaranteed to fit?

Yup, thanks to BodyMetrics’ 3D body-scanning technology, which is based off of the same PrimeSense scanners and camera tech as the Microsoft Kinect, shoppers are able to have their body dimensions scanned in and saved to an online profile. Just think of it like the transport room in Star Trek … if Scotty had a bit of an online shopping problem.

Once users have created their profile and saved their body data, they can virtually try on a wide range of clothing types such as jeans, dresses, skirts and tops from tons of partner retailers. As each piece of clothing is mapped to the on-screen avatar’s body, the user is able to see the exact fit of the item thanks to a visual overlay that depicts the tight spots of the garment. No more guessing games when you buy that pair of jeans online – you get the perfect fit, every time.

The icing on the cake – retailers get to benefit from a drastic drop in their store return rates since their customers can finally purchase with confidence. That, coupled with the exponential momentum and increased basket-size of eCommerce purchases means great things for apparel companies. Plus, you don’t have to listen to some phony sales associate squawking about how fabulous you look in those jeans – just take a look for yourself!

AT&T’s Small Business division asked the Emerging Experiences Group within Razorfish to create an in-store experience as part of a 30 store pilot program to create better awareness and engagement with customers as well as provide associates more powerful sales tools. The project has been a big success and you should be able to take a spin in a store near you soon.

Occassionally we get downtime on the Emerging Experiences team — but not very much.  After a recent project we decided to play with some of the technology we have lying around.  One of our favorite toys for 2012 is the high-end projector (pick yours up for Christmas now!).  With a powerful projector you can create great interactive experiences on glass, on store windows, on mist, on water and so on.  When a projector is pointed at a flat surface, it creates the illusion of depth.  Lately we have been playing with the idea of shining a projector on surfaces that already have depth.  Next step — hooking this up to an array of Kinect sensors to see what projecting on 3D surfaces that interact with 3D depth cameras will look like.

Take the Start Screen for example—In order to finally enable OEMs to build devices that can truly be considered a “Tablet PC”, Microsoft has to provide a way for users to launch applications.  One might be tempted to think that the Start Menu in Windows 7 could be adapted to serve this purpose, but fingers are just not good at tapping on small icons or icons that are densely packed.  Making the Start Menu a full screen experience is really the only way to get enough space to create a truly usable touch-optimized experience.  We in the Emerging Experience group have known this for years as practically every single touch based application that we have built has been a full screen app.  On top of this, Microsoft’s Start Screen’s animations are extremely fluid and natural, and so to us it seems like a natural platform from which to launch our showcase applications.

To give a little background about ourselves and our applications, we are a technology agile group, which means that we use the technology that creates the best experience for our customers. Many of our apps are built using WPF but we also have apps that are built using Flash.  Obviously attempting to port our applications would not be a good strategy for the Flash apps, but even after a brief investigation, I quickly decided that attempting to port all of our WPF applications was a non-starter.  The Metro APIs are far too different and who knows if, after porting the WPF applications, I would even end up with an app that worked?  The solution, it was decided, was to leave the existing showcase applications as they were but to simply create live tiles for them so that they could be invoked.

The problem with this solution is that it is not possible to really take advantage of the Live Tile infrastructure from a Win32 app.  In a Metro-style (WinRT) application you can supply different resolution images for the tiles by altering the AppX manifest, but Win32 Applications don’t have AppX manifests.  It might seem trivial to simply create a WinRT application that upon launch invokes one of our showcase applications, and to use the WinRT app’s AppX manifest to customize the Live Tile, but unfortunately the relationship between WinRT and Win32 is significantly more complex than that.  First of all, WinRT applications can call some Win32 APIs, but it explicitly cannot create new processes—this is part Microsoft security model for WinRT apps.  On top of that, even though WinRT apps can call many Win32 APIs, many of those calls either fail outright or fail to have the desired result.  Clearly this is an area where Microsoft can do a much better job in providing documentation. 

To work around these limitations, I decided to create a WPF application that lives in the System Tray as a notification icon.  The entire purpose of this WPF application is to listen for network calls and then launch and activate the requested application.  At this point our WinRT “launcher” application was simply responsible for initiating the network call and then close itself down.

While this worked beautifully in the debugger, I was surprised to find that it did not work once the applications were freed from the debugger.  Sure, the Launcher application still made a network call to the WPF application and the WPF application still launched the showcase application, but the showcase application was never displayed.  The problem, it turns out, is that the Win32 function “SetForegroundWindow” on which my WPF application was indirectly relying behaves differently if the calling application is being debugged.  Clearly the Windows shell makes use of a facility to show the desktop when the user clicks on the Desktop tile in the Start Screen, but when I asked Microsoft about this and SetForegroundWindow,  I was essentially told that this was by design and that only the end user should control which window has focus.  I understand the wisdom of this decision, but this answer didn’t get me any closer to being able to launch our showcase applications from nice looking Live Tiles.

While I wouldn’t propose that developers do this in production applications, Windows 8 isn’t a production OS itself—and I still hold out hope that will make this whole endeavor moot by they release Windows 8.  With the disclaimer in effect, the way that I solved this problem was to create a third Windows Forms application whose sole responsibility is to run CDB, the command-line debugger, and automate it to launch and attach to the WPF application.  Because the WPF application has a debugger attached, it is now able use the SetForegroundWindow API and the entire system works as expected.  In fact, by not creating a Window in the Windows Forms application and launching CDB without a console window the entire hack is invisible to the user and everything transparently works as expected.

While there probably are other ways to achieve the same effect, this really should highlight noteworthy holes in Microsoft’s messaging and documentation.  First of all, I can understand that Metro-style apps won’t be backwards compatible on Windows 7, but this is no reason not to provide a facility to make Win32 apps forward compatible the Windows 8 Start Screen’s Live Tiles.  Also, while I understand that, generally speaking, it is not good design to allow application developers to control which application is active, at the same time there are always exceptions and this functionality should be enabled/disabled in registry settings or group policy and not be decided in a one-size-fits-all fashion.  But with this said, Windows 8 is actually proving to be a natural evolution of Windows 7 and a good platform on which to build touch-based experiences.  With all the talk Silverlight, Javascript, and strategy, it’s easy to forget that applications are only valued for creating good user experiences and that Windows 8 delivers a great user experience for a pre-Beta operating system.