The video powered by YDreams’ technology:

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.

Ynvisible (YDreams’ first spinout company) in collaboration with Enfucell and IDTechEx, produced close to 1600 interactive badges to distribute to participants and attendees at the upcoming Printed Electronics USA 2011 tradeshow.

Ynvisible's Interactive Badge for the Printed Electronics Tradeshow

The badges contain three interactive graphic layers, activated by the push of a button. Each layer, designed specifically for the event, conveys IDTechEx’s marketing messages. Technologically, the interactive badges are a hybrid solution, based on a combination of printed electronics  ̶  Ynvisible’s electrochromics-based interactive graphics and Enfucell’s SoftBattery®  ̶  and traditional electronics, namely the printed circuit boards, buttons and wiring. Designers from Ynvisible and IDTechEx jointly designed the interactive badges, with the final assembly of badges carried out by Ynvisible.

“The combination of established color printing and printed interactive graphics brings new levels of interaction and communication power to everyday items. Consumers who enjoy the interactivity of on-line content and services will now increasingly start to find such features also in printed products”, said Jani-Mikael Kuusisto, Chief Business Development Officer for Ynvisible.

IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA 2011 conference and tradeshow is the biggest event in the world on the topic. This year’s tradeshow will be the largest Printed Electronics exhibition to date, with 105 exhibiting companies already confirmed. The tradeshow is on from November 30th to December 1st, 2011 at the Santa Clara Convention Centre.

Following Portugal and Switzerland, the Sensorium (a sensorial experience initially developed by YDreams for L’Oreal Portugal’s Luxury division, and launched in November 2010) roll-out continues. Another interactive gondola was just installed in Stockholm at Åhlens, Sweden’s largest department store!

Forum Sintra, located on the outskirts of Lisbon, is the 12th and most recent Multimall Management shopping center in Portugal. The center, which opened its doors to the public in April 2011, wanted to offer shoppers an innovative attraction that would appeal especially to younger audiences, and help foster enjoyable memories and positive connections between guests and the center.

After brainstorming with client Multimall, creative technologies specialist YDreams proposed a giant-sized interactive virtual aquarium they dubbed Fixelândia, for the enjoyment of the center’s guests. (Note: the name is a play on words because in Portuguese fixe means cool, but also sounds like the word ‘fish’)

The experience, unique to Forum Sintra, gives guests the chance to create and thoroughly customize their own virtual pet fish. Two touch consoles, located at each end of the giant virtual aquarium, comprised of fifteen 40” monitors, invite shoppers to customize their pets. Guests use the touch screens to create their new friend from scratch – they decide on the shape of the body and fins, as well as the color of its eyes and stripes. The variables available enable guests to create up to 30.000 distinct fish, so the risk that any two fish will be identical is minimal! After determining what their new pet will look like, guests get to name it and release it into Fixelândia!

Creating their new pet fish is only half the fun; to make sure they grow into happy, healthy Guppies, the fish need to be fed and visited, a task that can only be accomplished by checking in at the touch consoles at Forum Sintra. The more you visit your virtual pet fish, the bigger and happier it grows, and the more you are able to further customize it by adding new features. In addition, a dedicated website (http://www.fixelandia.net) is also available so that guests can regularly check up on their pet fish from home to see how it’s doing.

CTT (Correios de Portugal), the Portuguese postal service, commissioned YDreams to develop several interactive solutions to boost customer involvement and autonomy at its new HQ flagship store in Parque das Nações in Lisbon.

The flagship store, inaugurated September 12th, 2011 at its new Lisbon headquarters in Parque das Nações, features YDreams’ interactive solutions, developed and designed to offer appealing interactive platforms that promote and advertise CTT’s products and services, and foster customer involvement and promote autonomy. Guests to the new store are now able to use the latest technologies to purchase products (i.e. stamps, envelops and books) issue money transfers, customize their own postage stamps and browse CTT’s extensive financial products portfolio.

YDreams’ solutions include six large touch screens dispersed throughout the store that double as digital signage informing customers of the various product lines (postal services, telecommunications, etc.) available at the store. A sophisticated back office platform uploads dynamic content onto the tactile touch screens, which display in addition to product information and promo campaigns, recreational yet practical options such as taking one’s picture in loco and using it to create customized postal stamps, or using Augmented Reality technology to visualize envelopes and boxes in their actual size and shape.

Elsewhere in the store customers can interact with a Multi-touch table to explore CTT’s financial products such as international money transfers and certificates of deposit in greater detail. Furthermore, using the potential of multi-touch technology, users can simulate long-term savings investments and view a variety of financial product sheets that they can be forwarded to their email accounts.

Finally to round off the CTT high-tech flagship store experience, YDreams has also created a series of interactive projections featuring randomly generated contents, which are projected onto the store window display, further contributing towards drawing the attention of passersby, promoting the new venue as well as its campaigns and services.

All YDreams’ interactive apps were designed and selected to harmoniously blend into the architectural project for the venue, which was conceived by S3 Arquitectos, a Lisbon based-firm.

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:

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 »