A special thanks to all our readers! Your support, time and interest over the past year have meant alot.

Stay tuned for more – Happy 2009!

Another great piece of news, as we get to the end of 2008, Fluviário de Mora won the Best Portuguese 2008 Museum award.

Together with Teixeira Duarte (construction), Promontório (architecture) and Henrique Cayatte (design), YDreams was responsible for the only (but massive) interactive installation of the museum. We created an interactive wall featuring an interface similar to the ones we use on our yMagic line of products, but seamlessly integrated into the modules.

This past summer YDreams launched an interactive applications creator called Architek, which in short is a web-based software platform that lets users create customized YDreams apps such as interactive walkways, magic books or orbits without even the faintest programming know-how.

To put their money where their mouth is, the platform production team launched an in-house Architek Design contest challenging any YDreamer to participate and come up with creative and original solutions for the apps creator.

There’s nothing like a little competition to get the creative juices flowing! People paired up into teams and really got into the project with entries ranging from personalized ‘magic’ cook books to psychedelic interactive walkways, plus the contest proved to be an excellent test bed for the product.

However, there could be only one winner – drum roll please – and the winning entry went to Team Rui Malvarez, Karina Israel and Leonel Duarte for their brilliant Cluedo-style Magic Orbit revolving around the mystery of “Who stole Arthur’s Crème Brule?”, which by the way remains unsolved

Cluedo-style Magic Orbit Took First Place



Production team anounces the winner

We’re embarking on yet another global adventure, this time with the NY-based Brand Experience Lab (BEL), by creating Audience Entertainment – a joint-venture to deliver interactive videogames for theaters, stadiums, music venues and others, all over the world.

BEL’s work with AudienceGames is pretty well known, especially since they won a Cannes Lion with their work for Volvo which also created the “Human Joysticks” buzzword. We’ve also been busy in the last year and a half developing projects for Vodafone in Portugal, and Dove, Ades, Sony Ericsson and Coca-Cola in Brazil, which made the headlines and captured clients’ attention.

The public announcement was made some days ago, you can check the press release here.

And here is a video created by tv show Imagens de Marca which features some past projects by YDreams and BEL:

‘Lumière meets Turing’ was the theme YDreamer Fernando Nabais chose to address at one of the company’s in-house ‘Close Encounters’ – informal sessions where folks present topics that are of special interest to them but also connected to what we do here at the company.

The title of the talk evoked “What happens when you merge the vision machine (the camera) with the Turing machine (the computer)?”, an introduction to Narrative filmmaking for computational media, a class by Michael Lew at USC School of Cinema-Television | Interactive Media Division, and serves as a basis to analyse a series of art pieces and artistic motivations that emerged from this dual approach to Cinematic Art.

In Peter Greenaway´s, article “Towards a re-invention of Cinema”, the director and now New Media Artist, presents what he considers the four “tyrannies” from which Cinema will have to be released in order for a new cinema to emerge: the tyranny of the frame, of the text, of the actor and of the camera. In the same text, Greenaway, states that cinema “died on the 31st September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living-rooms of the world”. He is, of course, referring to cinema as a passive medium and opening up new venues for the effect of the introduction of interactivity, recombination and all the new characteristics that a medium in digital format can inherit.

The ‘Close Encounter’ served as an intro to YCinema, sessions where we will watch and analyze works by Abel Gance, Josef Svoboda, Peter Greenaway, Michael Naimark, Jeffrey Shaw, Lev Manovich and Brendan Dawes, among others, to trace the result of these concerns throughout the history of Cinema.