Our most recent project has taken us to the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar where YDreams partnered with SDI, an innovative Canadian marketing agency to put together an interactive and itinerant roadshow dubbed Koora Time. The roadshow, aimed primarily at engaging youths, kicked off on May 10, 2013 during the quarter finals of the Emir Cup.

The Koora Time Roadshow (Koora means football in Arabic) was commissioned by the Qatar Football Association and sponsored by Shell. Following the Cup, it will be activated some 20 times, throughout the country, over the next two years. The roadshow aims to promote football and physical exercise amongst Qatari youths by engaging them through football related interactive games.

The roadshow’s multiple interactive experiences challenge participants to get plenty of exercise. The applications all revolve around YDreams’ technologies complemented by Kinect consoles. A total of seven challenges, which mimic different phases of the game of football and are all interconnected, make up the Koora roadshow. The activities range from “the Locker Room” where visitors first register to participate via a QR coded bracelet, and the “Sprint”, a game where participants are pitted against two virtual opponents to see who sprints the fastest from one end of the pitch to the other, to “the Goalie”, a goalkeeping game where participants see how many balls they can block in one minute, amongst others. At the end, after an intense workout & good fun, players also get to see how many calories they have actually burned.

The Koora Time Roadshow follows other projects YDreams’ has developed for the gulf-based Canadian marketing agency. The partnership between the two companies plans to deliver future exciting projects that foster innovative marketing campaigns through the mix of YDreams’ interactive technologies and design.

Today, YDreams and Hospital de Santa Maria – Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Norte (Santa Maria Hospital – North Lisbon’s Hospital Center) present YScope – a gesture-based tool for sterile browsing of medical imaging. Watch the video below for a demonstration:

 
More detailed info about YScope: 

Surgeons are often faced with strict restrictions in the operating room when it comes to manipulating medical imaging because their hands need to be as sterile as possible. Up until now, to access and manipulate exams, doctors had to use a mouse or keyboard, which required they go through the sterilization process once more, or instruct third parties in manipulating the medical imaging for them.

As a pioneer in the area of Natural User Interfaces, YDreams joined forces with Lisbon’s Hospital de Santa Maria’s Department of Neurosurgery to develop a system capable of solving the problem of medical imaging manipulation in the operating room’s aseptic environment.

YScope is designed to fluidly integrate the use of doctor-computer devices in the operating room. The application was developed in response to the need surgeons have to manipulate medical imaging without having to touch any devices thereby allowing their hands to remain sterile, maintain a greater focus of attention and have greater response times.

Using a set of gestures designed to correspond to ergonomic conditioning, the surgeon can execute all the necessary steps required to view and manipulate medical imaging during a surgery.

Previous experimental applications with a similar objective focused exclusively on manipulating pre-selected medical imaging; YScope goes one step further by efficiently integrating with the hospital’s IT infrastructure, allowing the surgeon to search its PAC (Picture Archiving and Communication System) server and upload the desired exams.

Natural gestures enable the surgeon to upload new exams and select subsets at any time during the surgery. Selected images may be manipulated by zooming in and out, rotating them, taking measurements, adjusting the brightness and contrast, amongst other functionalities.

YScope is the result of a commercial and scientific partnership between the hospital and YDreams. Operational testing in one of the Neurosurgery block’s operating rooms at the hospital will begin shortly after the official presentation on July 27^th. Plans to extend the technology to other operating rooms and specialties are being analyzed.

Very impressive glimpse at the very close future of gesture-control systems!

“Gesture control as we know it is rudimentary at best. But a new San Francisco startup called Leap Motion has just announced a new 3D motion control system that its claims is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market—and it’s set to cost just $70.” Click here to read full article (source: Gizmodo)

Audience Entertainment (AE) ̶ co-owned by YDreams ̶ and NCM Media Networks are bringing audiences’ favorite brands to life on the big screen in select movie theaters across the U.S. this holiday season.

AE and NCM Media Networks worked together with a top travel industry brand to create a new interactive cinema audience game. The game, powered by a proprietary platform that enhances human-computer interactions and create engaging and robust applications, will be used for the first time in a national cinema ad campaign across the United States.

In the game, moviegoers are able to join a classic cartoon character in a 90-second interactive, big screen version of a wild water ride from the comfort of their movie theater seats. By moving their arms and acting together as a group, the audience creates a virtual “human joystick” to control the videogame action onscreen – zipping down the slide and retrieving objects along the way. The score will be posted at the end of the game, but no matter what the tally, the audience always wins by being among the first in the U.S. to experience the future of cinema advertising.

The new AudienceGame is being presented exclusively during NCM’s FirstLook pre-feature program in select movie theaters in major markets including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Knoxville, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washing-ton, DC.

This exciting new campaign features Audience Entertainment Group’s first-ever use of the combi-nation of live video and animated overlays in an AudienceGame.

To view the game, CLICK HERE.

In the video below, Audience Entertainment, co-owned and fueled by YDreams’ technology, brings interactive fun to Bon Jovi’s Open Air Tour 2011 in Greece:

In the video below, Audience Entertainment, co-owned and fueled by YDreams’ technology, brings interactive fun to a nightclub event in China. Simple hand gestures enable the crowd to control and maneuver the car in a Redbull-themed virtual race:

Our brood across the Atlantic have been pretty busy spreading YDreams’ interactive breed of technology & design across Brazil. The latest project involves an events booth for Bradesco Seguros (the Brazilian bank’s insurance component) at Conec, an Insurance Brokers Congress that recently took place in the bustling city of São Paulo.

Bradesco wanted to turn out the most innovative and fun booth at the event. Seems like they did just that thanks to a mix of YDreams solutions that involved Augmented Reality and gesture-based games and activities.

Take a peek at the video below:

Visitors to the Portal Terra booth at São Paulo’s Maximídia Fair, a shop window into the communication industry in all Brazil, were treated to a YDreams interactive wall whose contents they could interact with using simple gestures.

Take a look in the video below:

(The BTEK project is particularly close to the hearts of our fellow YDreamers over in Barcelona, as well as our neighboring country. Therefore the post that follows is in English and Spanish.)

Last year we announced the official kickoff of the BTEK Interpretation Center project; this past June 9th it was officially inaugurated and is now open for business! BTEK is the first technology interpretation center in the Basque Country. It is located within the Bizkaia Technology Park in Zamudio (on the outskirts of Bilbao) and after the creation of the Visitors Center at Ciudad Grupo Santander in Madrid, another major project in Spain.

YDreams conceived and delivered 24 interactive solutions and two sound environments that welcome visitors before entering the center until they reach the first hall. Ain3Team studio was responsible for the interior design and exhibition scenography.

We collaborated closely with the Elhuyar Foundation, the entity responsible for managing and overseeing the project from start to finish. We developed all contents for our interactive installations, contents that ranged from computing and consumer electronics to communications, the Internet and the social implications technological development has on product life cycles.

The significant deployment of technology and creativity involved the concerted efforts of a team of over 15 professionals, as well as artists and external studios, which after many months rendered a result we are all extremely proud of. Technologies employed included Augmented Reality, image processing and gesture based technologies, as well as effects such as 3D contents, illustrations, videos, sound and musical theme creation. In addition to this furniture to support the numerous apps had to be designed, adapted and assembled as is the case of the sci-fi ‘Gene Workshop’!

Take a look at the video below for a peek into the BTEK Technology Interpretation Center:

Al inicio del año pasado anunciábamos el comienzo de los trabajos en este proyecto. El Centro BTEK se inauguró el pasado día 9 de Junio. Para lo que es el primer centro de interpretación de la tecnología del País Vasco, ubicado en el Parque Tecnológico de Bizkaia, en Zamudio (en las afueras de Bilbao), hemos entregado 24 soluciones interactivas, además de 2 ambientes sonoros que acompañan a los visitantes desde el exterior mismo del Centro hasta la primera sala. El diseño del museo ha estado a cargo del estudio ain3Team.

En colaboración y bajo la dirección de la Fundación Elhuyar, responsable de la dirección de proyecto, fuimos responsables por todos los contenidos científicos de nuestras instalaciones, en temas como la computación, electrónica de consumo, comunicaciones, Internet, las implicaciones sociales del desarrollo tecnológico o el ciclo de vida de los productos.

El importante despliegue tecnológico y creativo ha implicado a un equipo de más de 15 profesionales, así como artistas y estudios externos, a lo largo de muchos meses, en un esfuerzo conjunto del cual estamos muy orgullosos. Se han aplicado realidad aumentada, procesamiento de imagen y tecnologías basadas en gestos, la Wii de Nintendo, contenidos 3D, ilustraciones, vídeos, efectos sonoros y temas musicales. El paquete se completa con el diseño industrial y montaje de algunas piezas de mobiliario, como la Célula (“Taller de Genes”), así como las componentes mecánicas y electrónicas de diversas soluciones.

Más info en la página de YDreams. Vídeo del Centro, cortesía de Teknopolis. PDF con fotos y descripciones de todas las soluciones.

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.

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

For obvious reasons, and a lingering hangover mood, yearly turns are usually a good time to balance and overview.

2008 was a hard year for us, but one in which we achieved fantastic progress and good results. Revenue wise it was our best year so far. We’ve also set founding stones for great initiatives that we are confident will bear fruits in 2009. Audience Entertainment, our joint-venture with BEL, is obviously one of them. Invisible Network also has an incredible potential, and sets us on the course for something truly revolutionary, especially since we’ve registered some interest in related spin-offs. Read the rest of this entry »

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.