Engadget called it an infestation. The term infestation refers to a state of being invaded by another species. On one hand it implies an invasion, on the other hand it refers to organic stuff. It’s interesting to see our technology defined as organic because it relates with empathy, it’s more than just silicone chips – there is chemistry.

Last week, TiPb chose the word intimacy to describe the feeling of using an iPad. “If the television is a ‘lean back’ interface and the computer is a ‘sit forward’ interface, the iPad is an ‘embrace’ interface. You haven’t had a relationship with an object like this since your childhood teddy bear: you tote it around with you everywhere, you sit cuddled up with it, you take it to bed with you.”

It seems that the future of high-end digital products will bring an infestation of intimacy.

Knee-high Ferrari-Red robots are probably the last thing you’d expect to find in a serious & conservative environment like a bank. Yet there they are. Santander Group came to us about a year and a half ago asking for ‘something unexpected that people hadn’t seen before’ for their Visitors Center at ‘Ciudad Grupo Santander’, the group’s financial campus and HQ on the outskirts of Madrid.

The already awesome glass cube that is the gateway to the center and campus, has the little droids welcoming and guiding visitors to their desired destinations, but it doesn’t stop there. Digital ivory climbs the hi-res, LED paneled columns located at the entrance and further into the center a large scale model of the city that uses Augmented Reality, and a 12-meter tactile wall offers visitors an impactful and memorable way to explore the group’s history and global presence.

Enough talk, let’s meet the droids

Today at 18h00, the first of four conferences by our CEO, António Câmara is underway at Lisbon’s arts and culture center, Culturgest. The talks will revolve around his visions for future public spaces, collective intelligence, intelligent objects and future forms of communication.

The remaining conferences will take place on the 17th, 24th and 31st of March also at 18h00. Entry is free so stop by if your are curious!

More info at: http://www.culturgest.pt/actual/futuro.html

Couple of months ago I went on a field trip to visit Castelo Branco’s Environmental Center, a museum dedicated to explore the nearby International River Tagus Park (Parque Internacional do Rio Tejo).

I rode along with our Art Director and the Account Manager responsible for the project, the best tour guides one could hope for. It’s always interesting to learn how a project is born and evolves, how they nailed a particular concept or what changes they had to accommodate along the way.

Everything looked impeccable, with every application running smoothly and the industrial / interior design fitting perfectly with the environment. Our projects division is growing every year, and so is the overall quality of our interactive environments.

One of the things that I really noticed, though, were the interfaces. We’ve come a long way in designing interactive installations, and the experience we have amassed is really showing, both in programming and designing the applications.

On one hand, every installation featured a different interface, keeping things fresh and interesting for visitors, on the other hand, they were really intuitive, bringing learning curves to a minimum while featuring some neat tricks that keep users engaged.

Take the interactive table where users can learn about car tours in the region, for example. You can select and visualize different routes, and find more information about suggested points of interest. But you can also freely move the car around the map, watching it perform sharp turns and frantic racing around the map. It’s useless, yes, but still fun – and part of the experience.

I was also very curious to see how the interactive kayak would work. You hop on a real kayak, grab the paddle, and descend a section of the River tagus, projected right in front of you. You use the paddle to steer the kayak and can access multimedia information, when steering in specific directions. It works really well, and the fact that it is located in a separate room, with sound effects, scores points for immersion and learning.

There are several other installations and plenty to explore about the center, so you can either go to our website and see more pictures or, even better, go visit the center.

The last quarter of 2009 has seen some pretty cool project rollouts, ranging from works in public parks to sprucing up medieval castle keeps!

Augmented Reality scenic viewer adds the virtual to the real

The first, inaugurated in early October, involved revamping Santarém’s Portas do Sol Garden by deploying cutting edge tools such as Augmented Reality-enabled Virtual Sightseeing units to explore the pretty surrounding landscape, interactive tables and displays for learning more about the city’s rich history as well as the Roman excavation site located right in the park, and to round things off, multimedia audio-guides for making sure no stone is left unturned.

The latter project kicked off in late November and takes us further north into Portugal’s Serra da Estrela region; the city of Guarda to be more precise, where alongside a medieval castle keep equipped with 21st century multimedia technologies by YDreams, we also conceived the brand new Visitors Center, including the scenographic design and interactive tools for investigating what the city has to offer, and the interesting archaeological finds on display at the center.

A new format for learning about old relics

Visitors Center - scenography and technology by YDreams

Espaço Guimarães is the northern Portuguese city’s most recent commercial venue. Inaugurated this past November 4th, the mall has plenty to offer shopping enthusiasts, and on hand to make sure people know exactly where to go to get what they came for, are some very sleek and stylish center directories powered by YDreams technologies and designed by Gonçalo Silva Architects.

The directories’ stunning designs are complemented by YDreams intuitive interfaces. Finding what you need is quick and easy, plus each kiosk is equipped with a built-in Job Databank that lets folks looking to apply for a position at the mall, fill in an application form with the option of posing for the perfect picture to submit along with their app!

Photos courtesy of Gonçalo Silva Arqitectos Associados

Espaço Guimarães, along with Forum Barreiro and Coimbra, is the third shopping mall in Portugal that YDreams has developed directories for. Multi Mall Management, the leading commercial developer of inner-city retail spaces in Europe, oversees 16 centers in Portugal; at this rate expect to find our kiosks at every single one of them soon!

UM, which means ONE in Portuguese, is Portugal’s International Festival for Experimental Inter-media. The one of its kind festival in Portugal includes exhibitions, workshops, talks, concerts, performances and public works, with internationally renowned artists, musicians, academics, designers and architects.

It starts today and carries on till Sunday, the 15th of November. UM had its debut in 2008, and is back in 2009 for its 2nd edition. YDreams has always been a fan and supporter of the festival and is taking part this year as a commercial sponsor.

For more about UM go to: http://www.1um1.net/

Charming and historical Monsanto, dubbed ‘the most Portuguese village in all of Portugal’ has a new claim to fame: it is the first town in the country to offer visitors and tourists an outdoor audio-guide system for exploring the town’s numerous highlights.

The audio-guide system developed by YDreams, runs on GPS-enabled PDAs that feature up to 24 points of interest in Monsanto. Visitors to the village no longer need to navigate the streets with confusing paper maps; instead the system’s integrated GPS technology automatically detects points of interest that are within the visitors’ range and triggers audio narrations, and displays additional images about each one.

Monsanto Audio Guides are managed and rented out to visitors by Edeventos, a local events organization firm. The amount of information provided by the audio-guide is incomparable to using a traditional map or guidebook, plus they come in three languages and there is even a version developed especially for children.

In the meantime, YDreams is currently working on a next-gen audio-guide, which aside from incorporating GPS and compass, will also integrate augmented reality technology to liven things up even more. So globe-trekkers, stay tuned – a new reality may be right around the corner in a town or city near you.

Check out the video below for a better look at the audio-guide in action (coverage in Portuguese):

Yesterday Bruce Sterling referenced our augmented reality scenic viewer on his blog! Bruce commented that “it was Interesting to see a kiosk application. If you can call that device a kiosk.”

And of course it is so much more than an average kiosk. Dubbed a virtual sightseeing scenic viewer, the totem-like device spins 360º and features a built-in screen and webcam that captures and displays exactly what you see before you on the screen in real-time. The magic resides in the fact that it uses augmented reality to merge virtual digital elements such as video, text and images with real live points in the landscape. Imagine aiming the scenic viewer at the Bastille in Paris and being able to watch a 3D historical recreation of the angry mobs storming the fortress-prison during the French revolution! The possibilities are endless and the Virtual Sightseeing scenic viewer has the capacity to make it real.

Below a video of our first scenic viewer deployed at Pinhel Castle in central Portugal back in 2005:

Lisbon’s National Pantheon also hosts our augmented reality scenic viewer:

The Barroso EcoMuseum in Montalaegre (northern Portugal) offers visitors to the region an insight into what makes their culture special and unique. The recently inaugurated museum collection is by nature traditional, however the way they’ve chosen to convey information to visitors is not.

The picture below features a wall of regional riches that represent much about the people of Montealegre. Objects on display range from work tools and arts and crafts to musical instruments and religious relics.

A few meters from the wall stand two interactive modules that YDreams conceived and developed specifically to explore the wall of Montalegre artifacts.

All visitors do is look into the screens displaying a real-time image of the wall of artifacts beyond. Tags indicating the name of each object appear next to the item on the screen; visitors then tap the screen over their item of choice to trigger additional information in the form of text and images about the objects that interest them most.

Pretty cool huh? An interactive Food Wheel, characteristic of the region of course, follows in August so stay tuned.

YDreams will be presenting its YVision platform at HCI International 2009 in San Diego California on the 22nd of July in the conference’s “Rapid User Interface Prototyping” session.

YVision, developed in-house by YLabs, our R&D center, is an advanced programming platform that creates powerful interactive multimedia applications that combine technologies such as 3D, physics simulation, computer graphics and gesture interaction, in a stable and efficient environment.

YVision has enabled us to come up with some pretty cool apps like Playing in an Augmented World (which won an Honorable Mention at the Mix09 Showoff contest) and this one featuring promising tennis hopeful Patricia Martins in some one on one with YVision.

I recently learned that Pedro Alvares Cabral, the man who commanded the Portuguese armada that ‘happened’ upon Brazil, hailed from Belmonte – a small, charming town in north-central Portugal.

The town decided it was time they had a space exclusively dedicated to the Portuguese era of the discoveries – they called it Centro Interpretative de Belmonte. They also called on YDreams to add their special brand of creative technology to this singular museum space.

I was recently there with a film crew to get footage of the center, and not wanting to sound biased or anything, I’ve got to say that all parts involved (YDreams with all the interactive design components, conception and narrative and Pitanga Design with the scenography) did a fantastic job in recreating an unparalleled journey into the era of Portuguese discoveries, and the armada’s first encounters with the new world.

Exploring Belmonte’s Interpretive Center was a lot like a trip to a theme park with the historical contents of course – a treat for kids of all ages. The scenography combined with the design and amazing gesture-based apps made the narrative exciting and alot of fun to explore.

Some of my favorite apps include a huge screen projection that displays and plays the instruments used in popular Brazilian music genres like Samba, Bossa Nova and Chorinho. Arrows on the floor in front of the projection tell you where to step, skip or dance about to ‘magically’ turn the instruments on and off, or create your own unique combination of cool sounds.

In the room next door another interactive app recreates the vibrant pace and sounds of a traditional Brazilian market stall. Wooden paddles with special markers let you see yourself alongside the colorful fruits and vegetables native to the region in a large-sized plasma in front of you.

There is plenty to keep you informed and entertained but don’t take my word alone, pack the family and friends into a car and head over to Belmonte to see for yourself!

For a brief teaser, or if you can’t make it there anytime soon, have a look at what’s on in Belmonte in the video below.

We are forging ahead with our first major interactive project for the Spanish market, more precisely for Group Santander’s new HQ at Cuidad Financeira in Madrid.

Read more about it here.

Interesting post with plenty of visual examples by Ori Inbar, from Games Alfresco, on how Augmented Reality may be used to reinvent a number of industries .

Here.

Last week a YDreams’ team travelled to Cannes, France with one objective – show the TV and Entertainment content industry some of the coolest technology out there.

It all started on Tuesday afternoon – while the Grand Auditorium of the Palais des Congrès in Cannes filled up and waited for Sir Martin Sorrell’s keynote, everybody had the chance to interact with the virtual bubbles that filled the screen.

Later that evening we set up another interactive installation, this time at Digital Creative Party at the Carlton Hotel. The lively party was the perfect setting for our interactive waterfall, where guests could play with the water effect and splash each other.

The last event of the week consisted in the session Experience This! Content 360 Technology Showcase. Among several remarkable panellists and in front of a packed room, YDreams presented 3 real time demos that got the audience going.

The first one was our mind reader application that allowed us to add thought bubbles to our panellists for a few minutes (we found out that they all loved Cannes and thought YDreams rocked!). Our second live demo consisted in a shower of cubes, which the whole audience could play with. Last but not least we showcased SpaceDog, Audience Entertainment’s latest game, which debuted at Cannes. The audience was invited to raise and lower their arms, acting as a human joystick that guided SpaceDog safely to his Bone Planet objective.

The presentation ended with a showing of the Augmented Reality Interactive Playground featuring YDreams’ famous mascot Flapi. The audience was excited to find out that YDreams technology can mean inviting your favourite virtual character into your living room, as well as letting a real character become part of a fictional world, all of it in real time. We call it the future of television. I look forward to us making it happen sooner, rather than later.:)

( The BTEK project is particularly close to the hearts of our fellow YDreamers over in Barcelona, as well as our neighboring country For this reason we’ve decided to include the Spanish version of the text after the English.)

YDreams has been commissioned by Bizkaia Technology Park to conceive and develop interactive solutions for the BTEK Center, a scientific interpretation center set to become a landmark, on the inside as well as the outside.

The BTEK Center’s impressive building is located in Zamudio, inside the Technology Park, which rises like a jagged black crystal withstanding the harsh winters of Biscay Province. The small town of Zamudio, minutes away from downtown Bilbao, is nestled amongst verdant mountains so characteristic of the Basque Country.

The Technology Park, one of the biggest in Spain, was established in 1985 by Basque Country public institutions and designed to promote diversification in industry as well as the transfer and diffusion of technology and innovation. The future BTEK Center aims to help visitors connect with technology and science, thereby stimulating rational thinking and a more critical spirit among audiences. Read the rest of this entry »

YDreams’ CEO, António Câmara, Ivan Franco and Inês Henriques sat down with ‘Falar Global’, a program on SIC Notícias. which looks at the impact information and knowledge technologies have on our daily lives.

The interview covers a range of topics that include YDreams’ take on what we can expect from televisions of the future, as well as the company’s work in the field of augmented reality, and in transforming the objects and surfaces around us into screens people can interact with.

For more see video!

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.

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 »