YDreams Lego-branded virtual aquarium (video below) will be on show at the Intel stand (D7) at Earl’s Court Screen Media Expo 2012 in London May 16th and 17th. If you get the chance stop on by, pay us a visit and customize your own virtual pet fish 
Two Brazilian bloggers recently gave us some pretty cool detailed descriptions of their experience at the recently inaugurated Cervejaria Bohemia, (powered by YDreams latest technologies) in historic Petropolis in Rio de Janeiro state.
The posts, both in Portuguese, include plenty of pics. (thanks for the posts guys) Check them out if you can!
Rio com Ela: http://www.riocomela.com.br/index.php/2012/05/05/yes-nos-temos-museu-da-cerveja/
Papo de Bar: http://www.papodebar.com/bohemia-reabre-sua-fabrica-em-petropolis/#.T6uUsbRbtvI.facebook
Bill Buxton will be in Lisbon from the 16th to the 18th of May for the User Experience Lisbon (UXLX) conference as one of its guest speakers. On May 17th at 3 p.m. the Canadian computer scientist and designer, will also be coming to the Faculty of Science (New Lisbon University) campus, where YDreams is coincidentally headquarted, to give a talk on The Nature of Natural User Interaction.
Mr. Buxton is currently a Principal researcher at Microsoft Research and is known internationally for being one of the pioneers in the human–computer interaction field, which YDreams often incorporates into its interactivity projects! Hearing him speak will be a real treat!
More info here: http://citi.di.fct.unl.pt/seminar/seminar.php?id=198&bio=1169
During the first semester of 2012, YDreams, through its offices in Rio and São Paulo, has been launching some pretty impressive projects for some very impactful brands. The first, Rio’s Light Energy Museum (Museu Light da Energia) was followed shortly by “Senna Emotion“ an interactive exhibition dedicated to iconic Formula One champion Aryton Senna. The latest and most recent, the Cervejaria Bohemia (Bohemia Brewery) experience in the historic city of Petropolis in Rio de Janeiro state, officially opened its doors to the general public this past May 5th, 2012.
The project, which has become a milestone for YDreams both in Brazil and around the world, features the company’s creative technologies as the driving force behind an innovative project – the first of its kind in Latin America – that offers visitors a unique voyage into the art, culture and history of beer brewing at the recently refurbished brewery.
AmBev, a subsidiary of global brewing company Anheuser-Busch InBev, and the biggest brewery in Latin America, Rio de Janeiro State government and Petropolis Municipality, recently joined forces to reopen Cervejaria Bohemia in historic Petropolis. The renovated brewery, deactivated in 1998, will, in addition to resuming beer production, offers visitors an immersive Bohemia experience guaranteed to satisfy even the most demanding beer connoisseur.
“YDreams, in collaboration with São Paulo-based Criacitta, who were responsible for the center’s scenography, has created a technological state of the art project, where the objective is to offer visitors an immersive and unforgettable experience”, explains Karina Israel, YDreams Brasil’s Executive Director, “with the Cervejaria Bohemia center, technology is but the means to an end, and not the end in itself; here technology is used ultimately to enhance the visitor experience and increase Bohemia brand recall”.
Throughout the entire center YDreams used environmental intelligence as the cornerstone for Cervejaria Bohemia’s technological conception; access points embedded into the natural environment, simple, intuitive, easy to use interfaces, real-time, adaptable content, visitor recognition and the ability to share visitor experiences, photos and videos directly on social media networks are what make a visit to the center the ultimate beer brewing experience.
Numerous impactful technologies, designed to blur the boundary between the real and the virtual, were deployed at the Cervejaria Bohemia center. Listed below are some of Cervejaria Bohemia’s highlights:
Ynvisible, YDreams’ first spinout company that develops and markets interactive solutions for everyday printed items, will take part in DRUPA 2012, the World’s largest printing fair, at Messe Dusseldorf, in Germany. Visitors to the event can find the Ynvisible booth at Stand 70C25 in Hall 7.
About Drupa
Drupa is the largest printing equipment exhibition in the world, held every four years at Messe Düsseldorf in Germany. The last edition, in 2008, counted 390,044 visitors, plus 1,953 exhibitors from 54 countries, covering a total of 17.9 hectares of space.
Find out more at: http://www.drupa.com/
The Portuguese Minister of Science and Education Nuno Crato, and other dignitaries were on location in Monte de Santa Luzia, a region where quartz was once mined, on the outskirts of Viseu (a city in north central Portugal) this past Monday, April 30th, 2012, to inaugurate the first museum dedicated exclusively to Quartz.
The exploratory space was 100% conceptualized, managed and developed by YDreams, who planned and designed interactive technologies for the educational environment in accordance with script content developed by Professor Galopim de Carvalho, a renowned Portuguese Geologist.
The exhibit consists of six distinct stages: Quartz in Monte de Santa Luzia, the Earth as a Source of Quartz, the Kingdom of Quartz, the ‘Properties of Minerals’ Lab, a Showcase of Quartz samples, and Practical Applications for Quartz. The permanent museum project required a marriage of complex educational content and immersive interactive technologies that have resulted in a compelling and smoothly operational experience for visitors of all ages.
Below, some images of the museum on inauguration day:
Nuno Crato and Professor Galopim de Carvalho interact with touch kiosk
RTP1 news crew on location for official inauguration
Below, a glimpse at YDreams’ interactive apps for the Senna Emotion exhibition, which opened to the public yesterday in São Paulo, Brazil. (in Portuguese).
“Senna Emotion” – YDreams’ interactive exhibition about Brazilian race car driver Aryton Senna, in collaboration with Instituto Aryton Senna, that takes visitors on an exciting journey through the Formula One champion’s life and career achievements.
The exhibition opens to the public in São Paulo, Brazil’s Estação República Metro station on May 1st and runs till June 3rd, 2012. It then moves to Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Histórico Nacional (Natural History Museum) from June 16th to July 16th and closes in Curitiba at the Cultural Sistema Fiep from August 1st to the 31st.
Enjoy, and we’d love to hear what you thought of it.
Today, we are celebrating the 12th World Intellectual Property Day! This year’s theme is “Visionary Innovators” and because visionary innovation is such a huge part of our DNA, special thanks go out to all the YDreams’ collaborators whose inventions have so contributed to shaping the company into what it is
SIGA (Santander Interactive Guest Assistants) designed and engineered by YDreams for the Visitors’ Center at Ciudad Grupo Santander, outside Madrid, is shortlisted for the Condé Nast Traveller Innovation & Design awards 2012 in the 8th category “Communications Technology”!
Until May 1st you can vote for the SIGA’s and your other favorites online:
http://www.cntraveller.com/magazine/innovation-and-design/
YDreams’, along with Nueveojos, the audiovisual creative studio responsible for the app and content design, created these intuitive & easy to use interfaces that make browsing exhibition content at Museu de les Ciències Naturals de Barcelona (also know as Museu Blau) fun and memorable. Below, the video:
Fixelândia, as the project was dubbed, is a virtual aquarium deployed at the end of 2011 at Forum Sintra, a shopping mall on the outskirts of Lisbon. Guests to the center get to create and customize their own virtual pet fish, which are then ‘released’ into their new home at the mall
Yesterday, the project was distinguished with a Silver award in the ‘Special/Digital Format’ category in the 1st edition of Portugal’s ‘Prémios de Criatividade M&P’ (M&P Creativity Awards).
Below, the video of Fixelândia in action!
A brand new didactic venue in the heart of Rio, where interactive solutions serve as gateways for exploring electrical systems and their relationship with our day-to-day
Today, it is harder than ever to imagine life without electrical energy. Most of the things that make our lives so comfortable rely on it! Most of us however, probably don’t really understand how electricity works, how it’s produced and how it actually reaches our homes. Furthermore, today, it is crucial that we learn to use energy in more conscious and sustainable ways.
The upside to all this is that thanks to YDreams’ creative mix of technology and design, the whole electrical process can be explained in a fun, entertaining and hands-on manner (without losing touch with its more noble didactic purpose) at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Light da Energia (Light Energy Museum).
Over the years YDreams has amassed extensive experience conceiving and developing solutions for science centers and museums that use technology to get the message across interactively, resulting in a fun and effective learning process for all involved. So for Rio’s Museu Light da Energia, YDreams deployed solutions such as projections, where to explore content, visitors simply touch the table, floor or wall surface, interactive puzzles that educate visitors on the dangers and risks of electricity if handling improperly, energy efficiency games, interactive kiosks for teaching people how to understand their electricity bill and gesture-based catalogs with important information about the various sources of electrical energy, its future possible uses and how it is transmitted.
In the past YDreams has applied its technology and design to similar projects in Portugal and Spain. In 2010 and 11, they rolled out the itinerant Família Blue theme park dedicated to teaching school children about energy efficiency, and earlier, in 2007, the jazzy EGF roadshow, which traveled throughout Portugal helped foster awareness and teach people about the waste management process.
Click HERE to view coverage of the museum inauguration by Rede Globo TV in Brasil!
Check out the video below, of young and old, having good fun interacting with our virtual aquarium at last month’s Lego World 2012:
We were excited to hear that on a March 6th visit to the Brazilian pavilion at CeBIT 2012, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and German Chancellor Angela Merkel sat down to try out the Alphabet Table, an augmented reality educational game, conceived and developed by YDreams for Positivo Informática, one of Brazil’s largest computer and educational technology manufacturers.
As you can see in the photo below, Dilma and Angela actually completed an activity using the didactic tool to better understand and experience what the innovative Alphabet table has to offer young learners.
The Educational Alphabet Table, which was also awarded a Gold in the Informatics category by IDEA/Brasil in August 2011, an organization endorsed by the Industrial Designers Society of America, works by combining colorful animations, video and sound to create an interactive environment. The table features a webcam, 32 inch LCD screen and Augmented Reality markers that represent characters in the story. The 2D markers are captured by the camera and transformed into real-time 3D images, which can be treated as “virtual marionettes” on an LCD screen. The educational game, which can be played by up to six students at a time, is ideal for promoting collaboration, exchanging knowledge, and teaching children and students with special needs their “ABC’s”.
At the end of last year, the editorial team at Condé Nast Traveller Magazine drew up long lists in the following 10 categories – Aviation, Communications Technology, Culture, Gourmet, Infrastructure, Leisure, Sustainability, Retail, Style on the Move, Transport.
We were thrilled to find out that YDreams’ Santander Interactive Guest Assistants (SIGA) project for Ciudad Grupo Santander, on the outskirts of Madrid, was short-listed for this year’s Communications Technology category of the Conde Nast Traveller Innovation and Design Awards.
The long lists put together by the magazine’s editorial team were then sent to an illustrious panel of judges which includes Sir Nicholas Serota of Tate; Paul Thompson, Rector of London’s Royal College of Art; David Rowan, Editor of Wired magazine, to name a few.
Condé Nast Traveller magazine’s Innovation and Design Awards has become a fixture in their editorial calendar and are now in their sixth year. Past winners have included such design luminaries as Norman Foster; Zaha Hadid; John Pawson, Ross Lovegrove; David Chipperfield; Jack Dorsey, Jonathan Ive, Heston Blumenthal; Tom Dixon; Christopher Bailey; Thomas Heatherwick; Miuccia Prada; Yotam Ottolenghi and Alan Yau amongst others.
In 2011, the award for the Communications Technology category went to ‘Square Inc’ an iPhone application payment platform created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that allowed anyone to process credit cards payments on the go.
The shortlists across all 10 categories will be published in the Innovation and Design supplement inserted into the May 2012 issue of Condé Nast Traveller on sale April 12, and available online with pictures at http://www.cntraveller.com.
Lego World is a building site like no other. Thousands of children of all ages are invited to play, test and experiment with millions of Lego bricks. The sky is the limit and imaginations are encouraged to run wild.
This year, we are thrilled to announce that YDreams will also be there thanks to Intel’s interest in piloting our interactive Virtual Aquarium at its Lego World booth!
Intel, whose technology is used in Lego Digital Signage as well as other Lego products, has showcased its technology in past editions of Lego World. This year Intel invited YDreams to adapt and bring a Lego World version of its Virtual Aquarium (first developed and deployed for shopping centers Forum Sintra (Portugal) and Marmara Forum (Turkey) in 2011) to exhibit at the Intel booth at this year’s event.
The Lego-adapted Virtual Aquarium at the Intel booth will enable Lego executives to test the concept by demonstrating to guests how innovative technologies may be used to promote the classic Lego building brick and simultaneously offer Lego fans new creative and memorable digital experiences.
The experience, will offer guests to Lego World 2012 the chance to create and thoroughly customize virtual pet fish based on Lego building bricks. A touch console, located alongside the virtual aquarium, comprised of nine 46” monitors, will invite guests to create their new friend from scratch – they decide on the shape and color of the Lego brick that will determine the fish’s body and fins, as well as the color of its eyes and stripes. The variables available will enable guests to create a multitude of distinct fish, so the risk that any two fish will be identical is minimal! Once guests finish creating their Lego fish, they release it into the Virtual Aquarium, sit back and watch as their new friend explores its new environment.
Lego World 2012 opens February 16th and runs till February 19th at Bella Center, Scandinavia’s largest exhibition and conference center, located in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The EU recently considered Speed-FX, an R&D project developed by YDreams and Barcelona’s Universidad Pompeo Fabra for UK-based Filmlight, as one of the 15 key success stories in recent years.
Millions of people saw the 2011 Academy Award winning film, The King’s Speech but few people know that this box office hit was made possible, at least in part, by a groundbreaking R&D project funded by the European Commission.
In 2002, startup Filmlight carefully targeted EU funding and teamed up with then startup YDreams and Universidad Pompeo Fabra (UPF) to revolutionize the world of cinema post-production. The resulting R&D project, dubbed Speed-FX, provided the basis for FilmLight to develop a more efficient, flexible and cheaper system for cinema post-production than anything previously available.
Between mid 2002 and mid 2004, experts at YDreams and UPF provided Filmlight with the technical research and development input needed to produce the new required application that became known as Baselight, and ensure that the new open architecture system would be entirely reliable. The impact of this development was to bring post-production within the reach and the budget of far more users than ever before, and propel FilmLight to recognized industry leadership.
While FilmLight’s founders had the vision and commitment to spearhead the project, it would not have been possible without YDreams’ and UPF’s R&D capabilities and of course EU co-funding. The EU funded 2.1 million euro of the 3.5 million euro SpeedFX project. As a result FilmLight was able to out-compete more established players and establish itself as a clear market leader, quickly achieving sales that dwarfed the initial project cost.
The SpeedFX project further contributed to FilmLight’s winning a highly prestigious UK accolade – the 2006 Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade. In addition to this, in 2010, it won four Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Scientific and Technical Awards. The SpeedFX project’s vision was, without a doubt, an important part of FilmLight’s dramatic rise to international success.
We recently launched our Digital-out-of-home (DOOH) website. The site highlights our most successful solutions – solutions we have integrated into our projects over the years, and have been paramount to shaping interactivity paradigms.
These solutions, with a special emphasis on Natural User Interfaces and Augmented Reality, include screens, kiosks, billboards, wall, floor and ceiling projections and many others.
For a better look at our solutions, as well as practical applications for each one, visit http://www.ydreams.com/products/
Our YVision team has been pretty busy these last few months replacing some of the engines to make sure YVision is executable on as many platforms as possible. The work’s paid off! This latest release brings better support for Silverlight 5 and mobile devices in the near future.
Check out the features for the latest release:
This release is only for Windows but we hope to have the Mac OS X release soon. We are working on optimizing the ‘build process’ so we can have simultaneous and more frequent releases in the future.
Go to our download page to get this latest version. We hope you have as much fun trying it out as we did developing it!
For more information about the company, visit:
Enquiries and opinions are welcome at:
pr(at)ydreams.com
