Bill Buxton will be in Lisbon from the 16th to the 18th of May for the User Experience Lisbon (UXLX) conference as one of its guest speakers. On May 17th at 3 p.m. the Canadian computer scientist and designer, will also be coming to the Faculty of Science (New Lisbon University) campus, where YDreams is coincidentally headquarted, to give a talk on The Nature of Natural User Interaction.

Mr. Buxton is currently a Principal researcher at Microsoft Research and is known internationally for being one of the pioneers in the human–computer interaction field, which YDreams often incorporates into its interactivity projects! Hearing him speak will be a real treat!

More info here: http://citi.di.fct.unl.pt/seminar/seminar.php?id=198&bio=1169

YVision, our proprietary tech platform, now runs on all major browsers! Brief video below shows Beta version with real-time, 3D interaction, being tested:

VicTour is YLabs’s final proof-of-concept resulting from its latest software research project CHAMELEON. During the development process the project generated other examples already published such as FlyAR and the “mother of all depth sensing demos”, long before the whole Kinect frenzy. This depth sensing demo was distinguished with the first Auggie award (the Augmented Reality Oscars) at the Augmented Reality Event 2010.

CHAMELEON emerged from the strong belief that the research and development of next-generation intelligent interaction devices is expected to rely on integrative efforts across several research fields. The main objective of this project was therefore to explore and implement architectures and practical design methodologies for embodied intelligent interaction, with a focus on affective and cognitive computation models, as well as autonomous adaptation and learning of system components and parameters over dynamic multimodal and multi-user environments. Read the rest of this entry »

Digital Signage Expo 2009 is just around the corner. Underway from the 24th to the 26th of February at the Las Vegas Convention Center, this year’s expo is as much about the exhibition floor as it is about educational sessions focusing on interactive technology, self-service and digital signage.

Opening day, February 24th, will offer expo-goers a mobile and gesture-based digital signage summit entitled “Revolutionizing Interactive Marketing in Public Places: The Mobile and Gestural Imperative”. Experts from Avenue A/Razorfish, GestureTek and our very own António Câmara (YDreams CEO) and Marta Vieira (YDreams USA’s Director of Business Development & Operations) among others, will look at big brand successful case studies, and discuss new ways to engage audiences.

António Câmara will integrate the panel of speakers kicking off the conference with Part I of Generating Brand Power with Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage, and later on in the day Marta Vieira will expand on YDreams’ experience creating interactive solutions, design limitations encountered, and overcoming those obstacles to afford audiences ‘super-experiences’ in New Content Models for Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage.

Sounds like a great line up with plenty of promising content for interactive tech enthusiasts everywhere.

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