I always download the “This Week” show, with Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller, onto my portable player and listen to it during my commute. They mentioned the “Show Off” contest on one of the last episodes and I thought it was a great opportunity to literally ‘show off’ YDreams at the Microsoft MIX09 event.

I was busy and left it for later but after a sleepless night preparing a presentation, I suddenly noticed it was the last day to submit a video, so instead of going to bed, I screen captured a couple of demos we’d made using our YVision platform, quickly edited the video on Movie Maker and sent it off.

Only after receiving an email from Dan the following day, ‘asking if the video had no audio’, did I notice that I had an extra day (I had read the deadline date after midnight, thus the date mix-up!) The good news was that I had time to find a great song in Jamendo, add it to the video and re-submit it (thanks Dan).

The honorable mention awarded the video, by our peers at MIX09, goes directly to the great team that YDreams is. Their commitment to excellence allowed me to create this video in just a couple of hours.

We’re pretty excited about this cool piece of news! We just found out that our ‘Playing in an Augmented World’ demo-mix submitted at this year’s MIX09 Showoff contest, and presented to hundreds of peers in Las Vegas, received an honorable mention!

The demo put together by YLabs (our in-house R&D lab) shows-off some real- time interaction with 3D objects using a webcam.

Again, congratulations to all involved.

Have a look as one of our YLabbies tests some YVision-based apps on Magalhães (the made-in-Portugal classmate pc) with an Intel(R) Atom(TM) N270 CPU @ 1.60GHz and an Intel(R) 945 Express chipset.

Camera-based interaction on a netbook from YDreams on Vimeo.

My last week was spent at the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin Texas. It’s a full week of events with three main subjects: interactive, film and music. It’s really a magnificent event that completely overtakes Austin, with people from all around the world presenting their work both as panelists or performing artists. I came to present my own panel on “New Interfaces for Performance” at the Austin Convention Center. Soon I realized that with simultaneous panels happening in around 20 different rooms, there’s so much going on that you just wish you could be in more than one place at a time.

Interactive is mainly dedicated to tendencies revolving around new technologies. There was a big focus on web 2.0 and social networking. It’s not a subject that particularly interests me so I looked for good alternatives. Read the rest of this entry »

The folks over at YLabs (our in-house R&D lab) wanted to show-off what our YVision platform could actually do so they put together this good-natured demo of the many ways people can interact in real-time with virtual elements in most any physical scenario.

Watch as the gang plays with something resembling a runny version of The Blob, has their minds read, volleys soapy bubbles about and oozes what reminds me of a virtual Slinky from both eyes, yet they seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves

Playing in an Augmented World from YDreams on Vimeo.

António Câmara, YDreams’ CEO, and I headed out to Vegas for some gambling and a couple of speaking engagements at the Digital Signage Expo starting on February 24th.

Day One started with the Seminar Revolutionizing Interactive Marketing in Public Spaces – the Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage Imperative. It was great to have a whole seminar dedicated to new types of interaction in Digital Signage. The list of speakers was a who’s who of the interactive world – Razorfish, Gesturetek, Total Immersion – and the discussion was lively and significant. Read the rest of this entry »

António Câmara, our CEO, will present the book tomorrow at Culturgest, in Lisbon. One of the collective plays (.txt) that was part of this project featured the technological support of YDreams (and the talented work of some YDreamers).

Very cool presentation by Ori Inbar, from Games Alfresco, on Augmented Reality.

Here.

The other day, while doing a public presentation, I came to the part where I had to explain what YDreams Life was all about. I was describing our projects division’s work as conceiving experiences by using interactivity and how these experiences can be an immensely powerful communication medium. I got to a point where I was trying to differentiate our approach from other tools and media (the web, television, others), and I ended up thinking about Disney. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in April 2008 we posted a video of our Augmented Reality mascot Flapi on YouTube, which was featured in popular tech blog Engadget, and other like-minded blogs.

Recently we upgraded our Flapi demo-video by bringing in our Creative Director’s daughter, as well as a couple of other virtual characters, to see exactly how they’d hit it off.

We’re glad to say things went well, and as you can see from the video below Flapi had no problem sharing the limelight, and the little girl seems delighted with her new playmates

Real-time interaction with augmented reality mascots from YDreams on Vimeo.

Our CEO, António Camara, also presented the Flapi demo (based on YDreams’ SimVideo AR platform) at last month’s “Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage” conference at the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas.