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”.

This is the challenge set forth by EnerFixe to over 300 schools in the north of Portugal and so far more than 2000 students have chosen to participate!

During 2008 Union Fenosa, an integrated energy operator, challenged YDreams to create a fun, innovative and educational game about energy efficiency. The goal was to reach students between the ages of 8 and 14 and teach them basic day-to-day actions that can lower energy consumption and reduce carbon emissions.

Working alongside BlueShark (a Lisbon-based game-design studio), we developed a point and click game concept. With the help of Union Fenosa’s Familia Blue, the gamer leads the avatar through several scenarios to detect appliances, light switches, air-conditioners and other objects and then make energy efficient choices, which will ultimately affect the electricity bill at the end of the month.

The design concept, created by Spanish designer Antonio Coca, was adapted to fit the game giving Enerfixe a really cool and distinguished look. We than added a fun and hip sound design by YDreams’ very own Nuno Pereira to set the right mood.

And that’s it!!! It really was that easy, because everyone pulled together by pitching ideas, choosing scenarios, defining game behaviors and essentially enjoying themselves.

The game was published online a week ago, and the results are awesome: more than 2,000 players have registered from 110 schools and over 5,500 games (and counting) have been played!

So, I dare you to beat the current best score! You can try it out at: www.enerfixe.com.pt

Just register and start playing. And remember you really can help planet Earth by reducing your daily carbon emissions.

EnerFixe on YouTube

This past year many cords were cut. With prices going down, CPU power going up together with battery life, people now prefer mobility to an old-school desktop. For the first time, global notebook sales exceeded the ones of desktops. But, even these are now challenged by the netbooks and the smartphones.

The affordable PC was attempted in 1999 by Oracle but it didn’t succeed. Later the OLPC idea by Nicholas Negroponte, prompted a few companies to retry the concept but, this time, a portable one. Asus was the first one to deliver and started a revolution with its eeePC.

The smartphone has also been around for a while but with little success. In this case, it was Apple that started the revolution with the iPhone. It succeeded in creating an interesting device and getting developers’ attention, making available hundreds of applications at its AppStore. Something that Nokia failed to achieve with the Symbian operating system. Others are now trying to follow Apple’s footsteps, like Google with the Android and Palm with the Pre.

2008 was a very interesting and inspiring year but, what does the future reserve for us? Mike Elgan, from Computer World, predicts that “it’s the end of the whole desktop-or-mobile concept, and the beginning of everywhere and anywhere computing”. I agree with him and the technology needed is already available. The big question is how users will interact with these devices. Keyboards and mice are out of the question. It will be based on gestures, voice, multi-touch, and so forth. Displays will have to be placed in unexpected places.

The gesture-based interaction, multi-touch and thin TV trends at the latest CES are a sign that everything is “falling into place”.

And YDreams plans to surf the next big wave of innovation…

Antão Almada
Director, Strategic Software Development

(Maria la Palma made me write this post…)

In the beginning we sat on wooden chairs – the kind you find in most public schools. The Häagen-Dazs years were still to come, as we sweated out the summers and froze through the winters for lack of central air-con. During the monsoon season water occasionally dripped through the ceiling.

Back then, in our old building, the overcrowded YDreams “sala principal” (main room) was half empty. YDreams, then Ideias Interactivas, was yet to be registered officially but we were already working on the company’s first project, the gig that gave us a head start and kept us financially afloat from day one.

It was called “Canal Mapas”, a Lisbon and Oporto map channel produced for Telecel. YDreams not only delivered a web version (which was all the rage back then) for their online portal, NETC, but also and more importantly a mobile version.

Although a big challenge for a new company like YDreams, web map channels were nothing new at the time. Mobile ones, on the other hand, were almost unheard of. YDreams truly pioneered the field by producing not only WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), but also PDA versions of “Canal Mapas”. So innovative was the solution that, in three months time, Motorola gave our work a 5-star rating in the mobile sector, from a very select global group of leading companies. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve uploaded some new cases to our YDreams Life portfolio that illustrate well the company’s scope and vision. Among them the latest Virtual Sightseeing scenic viewer atop Lisbon’s Pantheon, and our Audience Games section profiling our work in that particular arena.

In the meanwhile we continue to work on our new website, which we hope to have online a few short months. Keep an eye out.

Android, the mobile phone software platform / operating system being developed by Open Handset Alliance (comprising of Google, Intel, Motorola and others), has recently announced the winners of the Android Developer Challenge.

The contest was launched by Google and provided 10 million dollars in awards for the developers of mobile applications to be used with the Android. (Let’s not forget the raging success of iPhone’s App Store, which adds much appeal to the iPhone and a nice income source for Apple).

Each one of the top ten winners got 275,000 dollars for the work and creativity they put onto their apps. Most of them incorporate location-based information of some sort, with some focusing more on social networking, marketing or gaming.

Among many intersting apps, there’s Compare Everywhere that allows you got to a physical store and enjoy all the price comparison, product review and alternate store locator that you can have online. The ecology minded have Ecorio, which let’s you calculate and assess your carbon footprint on the go; and the avid social networkers who actually do turn off Facebook / Hi5 / Twitter to go out at night, can use Wertago to find recommended locations. Full list here.

Thought I’d a round-up on interesting things recently posted by YDreamers on our internal mail forums.

Intellectual property has been a hot issue this week, as it becomes more and more relevant to YDreams’ strategy, starting with William Patry’s announcement that he was going to shut down his excellent blog about Copyright issues. IBM’s thorough IP strategy (as this example well illustrates) was also on the discussion table.

With a couple of upcoming YDreams projects related with interactive urban furniture and environments, we couldn’t help noticing REACTIVATE!!, a really interesting looking exhibition, dealing with the concept of Instant Urbanism. (via we make money not art)

We don’t do robots, but that doesn’t mean we don’t find them cool.

Data visualization is such an interesting area, especially when working with interfaces and information design, with results that go from annoying garble to stunning functionality. Take a look at this article about the ‘most interesting modern approaches to data visualization‘, some really great trends here.

To round things off, a well-polished (and funny) look at the ‘Unfulfilled Promises of Virtual Reality‘, all the way up to Augmented Reality.

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.

*(adapted from here)

The Wall Street Journal looks 10 years ahead and imagines how technology will change the way we shop, learn, entertain ourselves, get news, protect our privacy and connect with friends. The long article is structured in seven sections, each written by a different WSJ staff writer:

• How we shop
• How we play games
• How we watch movies and TV
• How we make and keep friends
• How we search online
• How we get news
• How we protect our privacy

Full article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120119369144313747.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

Blendtec is a great example of the viral video ad phenomenon. Reportedly starting with around 50 dollars, these blender manufacturers created buzz and hype all throughout the web, establishing their product as a synonym of high-quality blending in a fun and appealing way.

The concept of the Will It Blend? videos was quite simple: Blendtec’s CEO wears a lab coat and proceeds to blend anything to test the company’s machine. Marbles, golf balls, even the iPhone was blended.

The videos were a big success and began spreading around the Internet carried by one of the top advertisers in the world: the people. People were even keen to suggest items to blend. Blendtec’s videos and product were then pushed to the mainstream, with appearances on Jay Leno and the Today Show. All they needed was some basic video equipment and a great idea. Of course, some smart online PR strategy doesn’t hurt either.

There are other examples of course, one of my favourites is Draftfcb/paris’ funny spoof on second life, now counting more than half a million views on YouTube.

Neverthless, in these kind of campaigns some problems are bound to occur, and Blendtec found this out the hard way when they tried to blend Chuck Norris: