Excuse the pun but we pulled this rabbit out of the hat to remind everyone how much of an impact our first interactive floor projection had on the company, our partners and more importantly our clients.
Virtual Garden developed back in 2003, starred a virtual agent in the form of a cuddly bunny rabbit (who challenged audiences to a game of catch) and colourful flowers that mysteriously blossomed beneath your feet. Ultimately the app was more than an interactive floor projection; it was our foray into the world of conceptual environments.
The app, an excellent ice-breaker for most any setting was immensely popular with kids of all ages, immersing audiences in a wonderland all their own, and more importantly helping us realize the potential that lay in applying creativity, technology and design to countless venues. In sum, Virtual Garden was part of what led us to where we are now: a company dedicated to crafting interactive conceptual environments and experiences for audiences the world over.
Outside the Expo proper, next to one of the entrances, was the brilliant Digital Water Pavillion (DWP). Part of a future technological park project called Milla Digital (designed by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning), the DWT showcased an array of interactive water curtains.
By means of asking the pavilion’s staff, you could have a word of your choice appear written in the curtains.
Specially at night, when lighting played a big role, the effect was very unexpected, seamless and poetic (except for the “slippery when wet” yellow signs). Video here.
The Sub-Saharan Africa pavilion, actually an entire building that housed several countries, put on an impressive out-door show, everyday.
The entire outside wall was covered by a mosaic of 15cm square plaques. These pieces were decorated with translucent silvery vinyl and were hung from the top, as if sequins, so that they would sway with the wind creating a very convincing, and soothing, building-sized water rippling effect.
At night, though, the thing would burst into light and serve as a gigantic screen, in which the plaques acted as black-and-white pixels, each powered by a set of 4 white LEDs. Of course images could only be perceived from a relatively large distance and had a CGA-comparable pixel resolution.
Content featured a long and exciting sequence of animations and real video, intended to pass some water-related awareness message, according to those who designed it.
(Allow me to say that in front of a sun-bright thousand LEDs, environmental awareness -or any kind of awareness, for that matter- isn’t the first thing that pops into your mind. Nothing really pops into your mind. You just feel amazed, kind of happy, physically overwhelmed, and for those in the mood, a pure technological bliss.)
Apparently, design and concept (not sure about technology) were the works of German Atelier Brueckner. Project and construction from Swiss Nussli. Both with powerful portfolios.
We are really glad with our work on the Banco Best branch located on the new BES Arte & Finança Center. Another great example of applying interactivity to create a remarkable customer experience.
We are also especially happy that Banco Best is actively promoting the store with a series of cool print and online ads, like this one.
The Virtual Promoter on one of her rare break moments.
The Digital Signage Today website, part of the established NetWorld Alliance, has published an article titled Gesture-based digital signage: A new marketing future, where YDreams is referred as ‘Portugal’s gesture-based innovator’, alongside other respected global players Reactrix and GestureTek.The article mentions our work with gesture based interfaces for the Coca-Cola, Vodafone, Compal and Dove campaigns, as examples of the rising trends and, especially, the effectiveness of this new kind of marketing tool.
YDreams Virtual Grafiti is being used as an alternative media to activate and promote the Guaraná Antartica Street Festival (GAS), an event created for lovers of action sports, street art and music. The line up, which includes artists like Bad Religion and Pitty to name a few, will take place next September 6 th at Chácara do Jockey in São Paulo, Brazil.
The Graffiti gives event-goers the opportunity to paint, draw and interact with a digital wall, promoting a unique experience between the brand and campaign concept.
Before moving onto the street festival, the Virtual Graffiti will be on exhibition for experimentation at Morumbi Shopping Center in São Paulo till September 4th. The entire campaign was created by DM9DDB in partnership with B/Ferraz, the company responsible for organizing the event.
Picture this: you walk into a store and take a ticket for customer service. A462 is your number. You glance at the screen, and A391 is flashing. You look around the store, and all you see are walls that used to be white and 100 people dispersed, some sitting down, others asleep, and a vast majority chatting away on their mobile phones. What to do?
This is the worst-case scenario of a bad shopping experience. The Internet has completely changed the way we shop, and traditional retail is suffering because of that. Many companies have already taken this into consideration, and have altered their stores’ concept, to give people a reason to buy things off of the World Wide Web.
Portuguese telecommunications giant TMN is opening what Portuguese newspaper Expresso is calling “a state-of-the-art shop with distinctive experimentation.” YDreams transported the concept of an interactive playground to a ‘normal’ store, giving people a reason to get off online points-of-sale, and go to the new BlueStore to experience things first hand.
Once inside the store, people will almost be thankful (”almost” because they aren’t crazy) to have their A462 number. The store itself will keep people occupied and interested until their number is called out. There is something for everyone, like the interactive slide that uses sensors to measure speed and will make children want to run even more errands with their parents, which can be considered a minor miracle.
If renewing my passport was this fun, it wouldn’t have expired in 1996.
No need to wait for those sliding doors to part to be greeted by family, friends or the friendly driver holding up the huge sign with your name on it.
Barclays has done the next best thing. Along with YDreams, they’ve crafted an interactive walkway that welcomes passengers to Lisbon in 12 different languages. The 32-meter long walkway extends throughout most of the baggage claim section of Lisbon international airport and reveals the welcome note in a multitude of tongues as people stroll over the animated pathway.
YDreams’ interactive installation at the Portuguese pavillion in Zaragoza’s international exhibition is drawing a lot of media and public recognition. An 18-meter wide wall projection, allows visitors to ‘grab’ words that fall from the sky directly into a Guadiana River image. The public interacts by moving their hands over the screen, selecting and watching as the words splash in mix of sound and light, amounting to a better understanding of sustainable development issues.
You can read all about it in our press release and, judging from all the comments featured in the media so far, it’s a definite highlight of the whole exhibition. Even the Portuguese Republic President, Cavaco Silva, interacted with it on the inaugural day and seemed to enjoy himself.
And please do check João Vitória’s, our Zaragoza project manager and in-house illusionist, interview to SIC tv channel, which you can find right here.
“Now watch closely as I make your logo disappear!” João Vitória, Project Manager at YDreams, offering to use his incredible magical skills to make SIC’s logo disappear into thin air.
Interactivity is clearly the future. Drew Barrows, an NYU student has developed a virtual girlfriend for the Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring Show at the Tisch School of the Arts. This “girlfriend” uses INBED technology, and reacts to her “partners” every move. If he lies on his back, then she curls up onto him, if he curls up into the popular fetal position, she will join him. Although this 2D projection doesn’t speak, it interacts to people’s movements.
Could Flapi, our Internet celebrity, eventually turn into a walking and talking boyfriend? If this existed when I was a kid, then my imaginary friend who lived in the attic could be seen, heard and interacted with, and I might not have been labelled as a lonely only child - just a nerd.
Few things are more characteristically Portuguese than the famed Calçada Portuguesa or Portuguese pavement. A joy to behold, there is nothing more picturesque than a stroll along our highly recognizable sidewalks, so long as you aren’t wearing stilettos.
With this in mind, YDreams and OMG Digital made sure the very first thing visitors set foot upon when entering Portugal, was exactly that – a virtual Calçada Portuguesa - created for Nissan, and aimed at promoting the brand’s recent launch of the Nissan Qashqai.
The 34-meter walkway extends along most of Lisbon’s baggage claim area and surprises visitors by unraveling some very cool images of the Nissan Qashqai as they stroll over the virtual pavement, without the embarrassing risk of anyone getting their heels caught in the cracks of the pavement!
I´m very sad this week because the cutest project that I’ve ever worked on in my entire life … just finished. I literally shed a few tears once it was over because I don´t quite know how to explain my feelings about it. Maybe the child inside of me will miss the sensation of Happiness every time I saw the people interacting in front of the screen, taking pictures of the giant Coke bottle (with real coke inside … imagine the smell) or just laughing along with the TV Coke commercial.
The Happiness Factory from Coca-Cola was such a pleasure and a job perfectly done. Everything was perfect. Of course there were endless nights running tests and some nervousness, but from the very start, when we were invited to be a part of the it, we could see that this would be “The Project”, here in Brazil. One month of hard and pleasurable work.
I would like to congratulate every YDreamer involved. Capeta, Renan, Caetano and Daniel Prado, as well as the people at Gringo (our partner ad agency) and Coca-Cola, thank you for making my dream come true.
Recently, Engadget, a web magazine with daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics, picked up on our Flapi YouTube video, which gave viewers a look into what goes on at YLabs, our in-house R&D lab.
There’s more where Flapi came from, so we thought we’d share a clip about an augmented reality experiment involving foamy virtual bubbles. We stumbling upon the technology about a year back and at the time weren’t quite sure what to do with it.
YLabbies try out Virtual Bubbles
Below take a quick peak at how the creative use of an ingenuous lab experiment gave way to a fun interactive experience for movie-goers in São Paulo, Brazil:
Interactive Cinema Experience at São Paulo Movie Theaters
Following other YDreams’ products with AR, such as the Virtual Sightseeing Scenic Viewer and augmented books, SimVideo extends the possibilities of these technology applications by providing a large set of tracking, simulation and composition functionalities with very low hardware requirements, due to a very powerful proprietary platform.
With this technology we envision applications such as real time competition with F1 drivers during a Grand Prix Tv transmission, the re-enactment of famous movies, performing alongside or replacing ones favourite actors (imagine Woody Allen´s Broadway Danny Rose inverted) and an enormous variety of augmented reality applications.
With SimVideo, video feeds that are either live or pre-recorded can gain new levels of interest through the addition of an individual layer of contextualized interactivity.
SimVideo implements static and dynamic occlusion, static and dynamic shadow casting, collision detection and physics.
Related experiences have demonstrated real characters interacting with virtual objects, new developments already undertaken in SimVideo are leading to virtual characters affecting and controlling real world objects. Soon one will be able to see Flapi turning real lights on and off and other real world objects controlled by virtual characters.
The main idea is merging real and virtual life in a seamless universe that tends to become one.
For many people interactive branding is still only about the Web.
It’s true that the Internet is full of exciting new possibilities, like viral marketing or the social media channels. But outside the two dimensional web there is a real world full of interactive possibilities.
The creative use of technology and new interfaces are changing the way people can be digitally approached in the physical realm. Intelligent Billboards, Digital Signage or Interactive Catalogs, controlled by gestures or multi-touch systems, are some of the solutions that we are starting to see on the streets, stores and public spaces that are part of our daily routine.
If the Internet was a milestone in the development of Permission Marketing, this new tangible interactivity allows us to go even further. You don’t force people to touch an interactive shop window or play a game at a cinema venue. So the challenge is on for marketers, copywriters and art directors, to create engaging content that people choose to activate. The result is a dynamic dialogue between the consumer and the brand. And this dialogue takes place within the physical world, making it even more remarkable than interacting on the virtual world of the web.
It is exciting to think that we can integrate some of these new tools with what web 2.0 has to offer. Particularly, the power that consumers are developing in defining the terms and conditions by which they want to be approached by brands, which will hopefully grow online and offline.
Imagine, for instance, having an online store’s characteristics in the physical world. Innovative interfaces would allow you to instantly compare items, browse suggested related articles based on datamining and other people’s suggestions. Clients could even write and leave reviews for others. Products and brands risk being more vulnerable, but quality standards would sure go up - and in the end we’d all benefit.
Microsoft Techdays, one of the biggest tech-events in Portugal, is underway at the Lisbon Congress Center from the 11th to the 14th of March. The four-day event is aimed at “IT professionals, programmers and students” in related fields and is expected to draw over 2000 visitors.
YDreams will be on hand with their ubiquitous Magic Book, a yWalk (interactive floor projection) and one of their latest developments yFaces, an augmented reality-based app that manages to positively surprise users everywhere.
YDreamer Pedro Matos will be participating in a key-note speech about Virtual Coast, a prototype developed by the creative technology provider that runs on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform, and will be used by IGP (the Portuguese Geographic Institute) to develop a series of next-generation geographical applications. Antão Almada, from YLabs, the company’s R&D unit, will also give a talk about “building support infra-structures and applications for events such as Techdays” tomorrow at 17:15 in Room A7.
Techdays 2008, March 11th - 14th Venue: Lisbon Congress Center (Centro de Congressos de Lisboa) Portugal
At YDreams we have a great team of graphic designers, interface designers, flash designers, industrial designers, web designers and illustrators. That’s a lot of designers, that’s a lot of talent. But we want more, and now we are looking for an interior designer.
As YDreams becomes more and more a deviser and producer of immersive interactive spaces, either for showrooms, stores, fair booths, museums, exhibitions or others, having a full-fledged interior designer among our ranks is now essential. So, creative, open-minded, interested people, just follow this link and tell us why we want you to work with us.
Campus Party Brazil 2008 opened last week expecting 30 thousand visitors. Yesterday, the event closed its doors accounting for an incredible figure of 50 thousand people throttling around YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo!, Intel, CAIXA - Caixa Econômica Federal, Telefónica, Limão, Windows Live, and many other exhibition stands.
Both interactive games were a huge success: the Poupançudos game (CAIXA) had nearly 7,000 players (including the minister of culture Gilberto Gil), and Intel’s game was played by 4,700 people. Our 3 Bluetooth men went around with the Bluetooth appliances in a backpack.
CAIXA - YBillboard and people waiting in line to play Poupançudos game
The 2008 record breaking 28th edition of the FITUR, one of the world’s biggest tourism fairs, took place in Madrid between the 30th of January and 3rd of February. The 170 country strong fair boasts some impressive numbers, with its 879 stands sheltering over 13.000 different exhibitors across 150.000 m2 of exhibition area. Some 9.000 accredited news reporters from 60 different countries and a total of 250.000 participants (150.000 professionals) crowded 12 huge pavilions for 5 days.
YDreams Med was on hand as the interactive installations provider for the Consorcio de Turismo de Madrid stand, the tourism agency for Spain’s capital region.
8 different Magic Books were set up on 42” plasmas while a 4 m wide plasma-wall hosted yLabs’ newest installation - yFaces (yes, the ‘cartoon thing’ used for the first time at Microsoft Innovation Day in Brussels). The application had speech and thought balloons with phrases promoting the region, popping up over people’s heads.
The stand was a huge success, with all the main institutional players being encouraged to explore the yFaces plasma-wall by the stand’s reps. This installation really proved to be their golden baby. Later on in the day more good news with the Consorico de Turismo de Madrid stand taking first prize for FITUR’s “most innovative and functional” space at the venue, and Portugal’s stand the prize for best stand in the countries category.
Check out this short clip (1:39) courtesy of Internet TV station Libertad Digital about the Madrid stand, where YDreams’ magic is featured in the main spotlight.
Just a reminder to all you art aficionados that ARCO 2008 is right around the corner. This year’s edition of the contemporary art fair, starring Brazil as the special guest nation, is underway in Madrid from February 13th - 18th. But take note, it only opens to the general public from the 15th onwards.
The place is huge and covers everything from historical vanguard art to modern masters, contemporary classics and high-tech art using the latest advances and techniques in painting, sculpting, installations, photography, video and new media.
In the past I’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff at ARCO. Last year I remember coming across a Fogscreen projection from the Finnish company that partnered up with us last May for ECSITE Lisbon 2007.
At ARCO, art and new media technologies come together in some really spectacular ways. Overall the ARCO puts on a good show for art and tech aficionados alike - an excellent suggestion for a weekend escapade, I’d say.
YDreams Brazil has took part too, at Limão (
