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.

In early October, the Emerging Experiences practice’s San Francisco office brought our Razorfish 5D retail platform to Oracle OpenWorld. Within this global event was the first ever Customer Experience Summit. This event gathered industry leaders together to discuss strategies for driving customer-centric initiatives while interacting with some of the most future-forward experiences and minds.

Emerging Experiences set up our Razorfish 5D retail experience in beautiful Union Square park. We demonstrated how a seamless customer journey can cross over touch tables, gestural sensors, digital screens, tablets and mobile apps to transform the retail experience.

The 5D installation for Oracle CX showed how each element of the contemporary brick-and-mortar store can be enhanced and streamlined. Digital displays, smartphones and HD touch tables communicated with each other to provide infinite shelves as well as an immersive experience to tell the stories behind the store brands.

Tablet software provided store associates with the opportunity to not only help shoppers select items, but even interact with their customer’s smartphones. The 5D retail experience also demonstrated how virtual dressing rooms with augmented reality can enhance the retail experience. Each of these touch-points in turn generates massive amounts of data about the sales process.

Sharing our retail story with the attendees at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit was both extremely rewarding and entertaining. We look forward to returning next year.

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.

We’re excited by the launch of a revolutionary showroom experience for a premiere automotive brand. After a year of collaboration between Audi and a wide range of partners, Audi City has launched near Piccadilly Circus in London, ahead of the 2012 Olympics.

Audi City London is a groundbreaking dealership experience delivered by one of the most technologically advanced retail environments ever created. The digital environment features multi-touch displays for configuring your Audi vehicle from millions of possible combinations. Your personalized car is visualized in photorealistic 3D using real-time render technology, making the Audi City vehicle configurator the most advanced in the world. After personalizing your Audi, you can toss your vehicle onto one of the floor-to-ceiling digital “powerwalls” to visualize your car configuration in life-size scale. From here, you can use gestures to interact with your personalized vehicle, exploring every angle and detail in high resolution using Kinect technology.

A purely digital showroom can’t deliver on the tactile experience of buying a car. Therefore, a store associate can save your configuration on a RFID-enabled USB stick and guide you into a personal consultation area that features a variety of tactile objects. These objects help the customers get hands-on with the materials of the vehicle including car exterior color and finish options and interior upholstery options. Each of these tangible objects are digitally-tagged through RFID technology. You can bring bring any of these physical objects over to the configurator experience and the corresponding exterior paint finishes and interior options will automatically update your vehicle configuration.

When purchasing a car, the customer journey occurs across multiple channels. In order to integrate and simplify the car buying process, we’ve allowed customers to retrieve their online car configurations in the showroom environment. In addition, any car configuration made in the showroom is synchronized to your personal USB stick. Simply pop in the USB stick at home and the web-based configurator is automatically launched with the exact car configuration you created in the showroom. This allows Audi to deliver a “start anywhere, end anywhere” buying cycle for the customer, which has proven elusive for retailers.

Not only is Audi City a premier showroom environment, the dealership concept represents a fundamental shift in retail strategy for the brand. This new small-footprint retail format brings Audi closer to their customers, not only geographically but also emotionally. The smaller-footprint concept will launch in metropolitan environments and reach a younger urban and digitally-enabled demographic. After hours, the environment will serve as a cultural center in the larger community by playing host to readings, round-table discussions and art exhibitions.

“Audi City combines the best of two worlds – digital product presentation and personal contact with the dealer” says Peter Schwarzenbauer, Member of the Board of Management at Audi. “People are placing greater emphasis than ever before on a direct and personal bond of trust with their vehicle brand – especially in respect of the increasing variety of products and available information. Thus, with Audi City we are creating a one-stop-shop for experiencing our brand. It is right in the midst of our customers’ lives, yet seamlessly connected to the online range offered by the four rings.”

Audi announced at the London launch that 20 showrooms in other major international cities will follow by 2015.

Near field technology has been around for a couple of years now, but will it finally have its breakthrough later this year when the new iPhone comes out? A good reason for us to take another closer look at the technology.

Introducing Digital-Gum-Goods.

This is an NFC-enabled Gum Machine we have built at Razorfish that is packed with all sorts of digital goodies: Apps, movies, songs, ebooks, as well as other exclusive and location-based content that can be pushed to a phone. Simply enter a coin and turn the lever – then follow the animation and tap your smartphone next to the release chute.

Tadaaaa!

The project was realized in a 2 day prototyping session at Razorfish’s Frankfurt office. In terms of hardware, we used a Samsung Galaxy Tab, an NFC shield, a simple reed switch and two Arduino microcontrollers – all nicely fitted into an original Gum Machine metal base.

This is an example of how NFC Technology can provide a missing link between the physical and the digital by bringing the best of both worlds together.

Want to keep updated? We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas about the blurring line between the physical and digital worlds. Be invited to join the conversation on facebook.

Download Presskit | High-resolution images for print available on request.

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.

There are few things sadder than a pile of old technical books. They live on dusty bookshelves and in torn cardboard boxes as testament to the many things we never accomplished in our lives. Some cover fads that came and went before we even had time to peruse their contents. Others cover supposedly essential topics we turned out to be able to program perfectly well without – topics like algebra, geometry and software methodology.

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.