YDreams Brasil’s latest interactivity project involves gorgeous butterflies – virtual ones that is! The Virtual Butterfly Gallery, crafted for a permanent exhibition on butterflies native to the Atlantic rain forest in Rio de Janeiro state, inaugurated this past July 30th at Quitandina Palace in Petropolis, an historical city nestled in the forested hills north of Rio de Janeiro.

The exhibition was sponsored and put together by SESC (Social Services for Merchant Commerce) a non-profit Brazilian institute founded in 1946 that caters to the social well-being of mercantile and service industry professionals and their families. SESC organizes activities related to areas such as education, health, recreation, and culture.

YDreams solutions for the exhibit include butterflies of all shapes and colors projected onto a leaf-like sculpture that react as visitors approach by fluttering about and away. Visitors are also treated to eight 32” touch screen totems that feature extensive information about the different species, as well as the chance to create their own virtual butterfly, which they can then email to friends and family.

Not long ago Cisco gave us this concept video on the future of shopping:

We’ve gone beyond the concept and are on our way to making it, and a whole lot more possible

The ‘Family Blue Park’ conceived by YDreams for Gas Natural, one of Europe’s principal energy companies, inaugurated this past April 20th at the Dolce Vita Tejo Shopping Center on the outskirts of Lisbon. The theme park is comprised of interactive technologies that engage children through a series of games and activities that foster environmental awareness and teach energy efficiency.

The venue, geared at children between the ages of 6 and 10, is packed with interactive solutions that are fun and didactic. Activities on hand include interactive quizzes and games that simulate day to day situations in the home such as choosing the right kind of light bulbs, or selecting the most effective cycle on the washing machine. Other activities include blowing on miniature fan-blades or learning to use solar panels to generate renewable energies such as solar, wind and hydro.

The ‘Family Blue Park’, located in Dolce Vita Tejo’s central plaza, is open to the public daily through May 7th from 10h00 to 22h00. The park also welcomes and schedules daily school trips from all over Portugal.

To round off the theme park’s inauguration, Gas Natural held an awards ceremony for the winners of the Enerfixe competition an online game also developed by YDreams in 2009, to promote energy consumption awareness amongst children and young adults. The initiative brings together the ten top players and close to 200 of their respective classmates.

Have a peek at the video below, courtesy of TV Energia:

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!

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:

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.

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!

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, our CEO, will present the book tomorrow at Culturgest, in Lisbon. One of the collective plays (.txt) that was part of this project featured the technological support of YDreams (and the talented work of some YDreamers).

The other day, while doing a public presentation, I came to the part where I had to explain what YDreams Life was all about. I was describing our projects division’s work as conceiving experiences by using interactivity and how these experiences can be an immensely powerful communication medium. I got to a point where I was trying to differentiate our approach from other tools and media (the web, television, others), and I ended up thinking about Disney. Read the rest of this entry »

This past summer YDreams launched an interactive applications creator called Architek, which in short is a web-based software platform that lets users create customized YDreams apps such as interactive walkways, magic books or orbits without even the faintest programming know-how.

To put their money where their mouth is, the platform production team launched an in-house Architek Design contest challenging any YDreamer to participate and come up with creative and original solutions for the apps creator.

There’s nothing like a little competition to get the creative juices flowing! People paired up into teams and really got into the project with entries ranging from personalized ‘magic’ cook books to psychedelic interactive walkways, plus the contest proved to be an excellent test bed for the product.

However, there could be only one winner – drum roll please – and the winning entry went to Team Rui Malvarez, Karina Israel and Leonel Duarte for their brilliant Cluedo-style Magic Orbit revolving around the mystery of “Who stole Arthur’s Crème Brule?”, which by the way remains unsolved

Cluedo-style Magic Orbit Took First Place



Production team anounces the winner

Razorfish’s 2008 Consumer Experience Report is a really interesting read for anyone interested in emerging trends related to digital consumer experiences. It covers subjects like social media, ubiquitous computing, gaming and ambient technologies, and is available for download right here (via How to Change the World).

If you jump to page 75 on the .pdf and read the chapter dedicated to “Beyond the Browser, Designing for the Ambient Technology Revolution”, there’s a clear link to what we define as Reality Computing and YDreams Life projects’ scope. Interactive Environments are much more that a digital consumer experience. In the same way that the CD-ROM and the Web presented new paradigms in the way we perceive and explore information, these intelligent ambients will set new standards for interaction with our surroundings, may it be in a store, a museum or even our perception of urban space.

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.

Meet the rabbit!

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.

Over the summer I spent a few days in Chicago; I knew a little about the windy city by the lake, with the impressive architecture. What I didn’t know was that Chicago has a world-renowned collection of public art, which seems to abound particularly in downtown Millennium Park.

The park pretty much doubles as an outdoor gallery and concert hall with plenty of impressive stuff on display! Day or night the place was always crawling with visitors of all ages who came for concerts at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, to laugh and pose in front of the Cloud Gate sculpture, or gawk at the massive Crown Fountain glass block towers at each end of a shallow pool, while waiting expectantly for a burst of water to spout from the mouth of the Chicagoan up on the massive screen.

Granted, Crown Fountain is pretty fantastic as is, but I couldn’t help wondering how much more immersive it would be if there was a way of displaying the grinning faces of the folks actually looking on, in real-time. Ok, call me narcissistic but yes, I would’ve gotten a kick out of having my “mug” plastered on the giant glass block, and admit it, you probably would have too.

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.

SXSW Interactive 2009 is already gearing up and we’ve got some YDreamers applying for panels. Though not as widely popular as its Music counterpart, SXSW Interactive is one of the most conceited interactive media festivals around. From March 13 to 17, Austin will be buzzing with media entrepreneurs, curious geeks, technology evangelists and any other interactive aficionado variants you’d care to make. We’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a hand by voting for our panels.

Marta Vieira has two submissions for the Mobile / Wireless category. Since her early days at the company, as an Account Manager for our Entertainment division, Marta has amassed a profuse knowledge on location-based systems and gaming, both panels propose to put some perspective into current state-of-the-art and future trends.

Ivan Franco, our Research & Development Director, is set for the New Technology / Next Generation category, where he sets to share his expertise in new interfaces, DIY concepts and his own musicianship (check out Ivan’s blog for more info).

More info and voting links below:

Inches vs Miles – What Makes Location-Based Games Fun? (Marta Vieira)

Is accurate location what makes a location-based game “real”? Or can we broaden the concept of location until it fits our idea of what a fun game design would be? In this panel experts will discuss location-based gaming, its present and possible evolution.

(click to vote)

Location-Based Applications – Dead on Arrival? (Marta Vieira)

Location based applications have long been hailed as the wireless industry’s “next killer app”. But will they disappear before they’re ever big? In this panel the experts will discuss if location is likely to emerge as a powerful genre or be used as a feature boost for applications.

(click to vote)


New Interfaces for Performance (Ivan Franco)

Realtime computation allowed new media artists to develop interactive performances but typical computer interfaces don’t offer appropriate interaction models for these contexts. In the DIY generation artists learned new techniques to build their own instruments. Novel interfaces have surfaced and this presentation is a reflection on New Interfaces for Performance.

(click to vote)