International news and current affairs channel, France 24, did a special Portugal day, where YDreams was featured as a success company story.
Besides the usual interviews, you can also glimpse a bit of life at the office, which includes scooters, an RC Helicopter and quasi-Olympic table tennis expertise.
You can read and watch the story here:
Or here, if you’d rather watch it in French.
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!
Outside the Expo proper, next to one of the entrances, was the brilliant Digital Water Pavillion (DWP). Part of a future technological park project called Milla Digital (designed by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning), the DWT showcased an array of interactive water curtains.
By means of asking the pavilion’s staff, you could have a word of your choice appear written in the curtains.
Specially at night, when lighting played a big role, the effect was very unexpected, seamless and poetic (except for the “slippery when wet” yellow signs). Video here.
Find the complete credits here.
The Sub-Saharan Africa pavilion, actually an entire building that housed several countries, put on an impressive out-door show, everyday.
The entire outside wall was covered by a mosaic of 15cm square plaques. These pieces were decorated with translucent silvery vinyl and were hung from the top, as if sequins, so that they would sway with the wind creating a very convincing, and soothing, building-sized water rippling effect.
At night, though, the thing would burst into light and serve as a gigantic screen, in which the plaques acted as black-and-white pixels, each powered by a set of 4 white LEDs. Of course images could only be perceived from a relatively large distance and had a CGA-comparable pixel resolution.
Content featured a long and exciting sequence of animations and real video, intended to pass some water-related awareness message, according to those who designed it.
(Allow me to say that in front of a sun-bright thousand LEDs, environmental awareness -or any kind of awareness, for that matter- isn’t the first thing that pops into your mind. Nothing really pops into your mind. You just feel amazed, kind of happy, physically overwhelmed, and for those in the mood, a pure technological bliss.)
Video here.
Apparently, design and concept (not sure about technology) were the works of German Atelier Brueckner. Project and construction from Swiss Nussli. Both with powerful portfolios.
Besides heading one of the company’s most ambitious projects – the development of new interactive surfaces – Inês Henriques is now also a prized author.
Inês was recently distinguished with the notable Rudolfs Medal from the Water Environment Federation (WEF), an international not-for-profit technical and educational water quality organization, for a paper she co-authored focusing on the effects of shock loads of several organic and inorganic industrial chemicals which could disrupt the operation and performance of biological treatment systems if discharged in shock pulse patterns.
The award will be presented at ceremonies during the WEF’s 81st annual technical exhibition and conference – next month in Chicago, Illinois. For more information, visit www.weftec.org.
Kudos to you Inês!
Monica Souza, from the YDreams São Paulo office, is the ultimate multi-tasker. Not only is she an account manager, she is also responsible for all of YDreams’ public relations and marketing in Brazil… which is only the fifth biggest country in the world… but who’s measuring?
Monica looks extremely happy in her pink surroundings *(N.B) in this picture, and with good reason. She coordinated the interactive cross media Coca-Cola campaign which was an enormous triumph and success.
YDreams Brasil continues to flourish. To add a cherry on top of Monica’s achievements, the São Paulo office will soon have their own showroom to display all of YDreams’ goodies!
* Note: Pink mobile phones, pink computer, pink nail polish and coincidentally, Madonna’s wearing pink on her Confessions on a Dance Floor album cover!
Darius Mahdjoubi, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, believes that YDreams is a “gazelle” type company: one that, after years of consistent development of intellectual property and products, will grow “explosively” in the global market. Darius will actually follow our development in the coming years to verify his research hypothesis.
YDreams founders are determined to contribute towards Darius’ research success. Like many “gazelle” companies before us (most historic tech companies were once “gazelles”), we have a strong vision, superb research and international class products and project development. YDreams intends to be the world leader in the creation of unique interactive objects and environments. References such as NOKIA, Vodafone, Adidas, Nike, Coca-Cola and Portugal Telecom in over fifteen countries have provided YDreams with the required credibility to claim such leadership.
A few months ago we realized we needed the help of a senior manager to take YDreams to the next level. We could not be happier with the person that is now our new Chief Operating Officer: Victor Centeno. Victor brings a wealth of management and marketing experiences from his tenures at companies such as Johnson and Johnson and Diageo in several countries. He will be instrumental in setting the environment for the success of the new YDreams products that will be launched in May 2008.
Not long ago YDreams had to suffer through cramped Portuguese offices located in Lisbon and Caparica. Today we are very happy with our new headquarters located on the campus of the New University of Lisbon in Caparica. The 2000 square meter building houses all YDreams divisions and displays most of our past and current work. YDreamers are also able to use the facility to support extra-curricular activities: our rock band will have a studio; we will have locker rooms for our surfers, bikers, tennis, basketball and football players. There will be also a bio-agricultural field for those inclined to cultivate it.
YDreams has entered a new era.
*[editorial featured on the fourth edition of our quarterly Newsletter]
YDreams’ Flapi movie has been recently featured on popular tech blog - Engadget, so I thought I’d give you a little insight into our latest Augmented Reality project.
Following other YDreams’ products with AR, such as the Virtual Sightseeing Scenic Viewer and augmented books, SimVideo extends the possibilities of these technology applications by providing a large set of tracking, simulation and composition functionalities with very low hardware requirements, due to a very powerful proprietary platform.
With this technology we envision applications such as real time competition with F1 drivers during a Grand Prix Tv transmission, the re-enactment of famous movies, performing alongside or replacing ones favourite actors (imagine Woody Allen´s Broadway Danny Rose inverted) and an enormous variety of augmented reality applications.
With SimVideo, video feeds that are either live or pre-recorded can gain new levels of interest through the addition of an individual layer of contextualized interactivity.
SimVideo implements static and dynamic occlusion, static and dynamic shadow casting, collision detection and physics.
Related experiences have demonstrated real characters interacting with virtual objects, new developments already undertaken in SimVideo are leading to virtual characters affecting and controlling real world objects. Soon one will be able to see Flapi turning real lights on and off and other real world objects controlled by virtual characters.
The main idea is merging real and virtual life in a seamless universe that tends to become one.
And if you haven’t seen the video:
The first video illustrating our interactive work for Coca-Cola’s Brazillian Happiness Factory campaign has hit YouTube, this one featuring an Interactive Floor Projection where Kissy Puppies are drawn to people. (Expect more Coca-Cola videos and info soon)
The Sea Monsters Interactive Exhibition for Lisbon’s Oceanarium movie has also been made available recently:
Watch out also for Filipe Freitas (a Portuguese Computer Science student at University of Aveiro), who wrote a detailed description of Microsoft’s TechDays event, complete with some videos of the installations we had at the show, like this one:
Some “moving out” moments as we get ready to move to our brand new headquarters:
Boxes emporium at Alcântara’s Offices, 10 am:
On the other side of the river, at Caparica’s main room, YDreamers finish playing a real life game of Sokoban:
And then they celebrate!
Production room finds some lost bottles amidst the moving and also celebrates! In sepia tone!
By then YLabs is also celebrating the discovery of a new revolutionary technology (their daily routine) and the fact that they have figured out how to seal up the moving boxes
People at Alcantara’s offices open up umbrellas, defying bad luck and paying tribute to all the floods they have been subjected to during the last year
In the meanwhile, someone forgot to tell the HW department that they should be engaging in silly celebration and phototaking, so they stare in disbelief at their PC screens when celebration pictures start circulating on the internal mailing lists
And speaking of silliness, someone found out that thinking out of the box is really the way to go
Looks like companies are catching onto the idea that people really enjoy interacting with on-screen content and information through simple hand gestures or natural body movements, minus the hassle of mice, keyboards or complicated controllers. It’s all the rage, and many companies are creating products that mimic the experience as recently witnessed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
We’ve been creating natural interfaces for computing and entertainment experiences that work with gesture-based controls for some time now, only we call it Reality Computing – user interfaces that are natural, intuitive and instinctive. We pretty much made it our guiding principal.
We won’t say we set the trend, but we definitely realized things were headed this way early on in the game.
Video: Reality Computing in action, VIVO Campaign at Cirque du Soleil in Brazil
this is an idea for a possible YDreams tshirt. would you wear one?
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This morning I gave one more invited talk, this time at Politécnico de Setúbal in the context of an entrepreneurship seminar. The theme of my presentation was “you dream. we make it”.
They have a nice auditorium at Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais (ESCE) and the audience was around 50-70 people. I am sure most of them, especially students, are now thinking about starting their own businesses (or sending their CVs to us 
). Besides being an important MKT/PR component, these kinds of seminars can be seen as part of our social responsibility, inspiring young people to take risks, be creative, aim for the stars and run away from a mediocre & dull life.
I also liked the talk of Machado Rodrigues, Doctor at Hospital Pulido Valente, presenting a set of humanitarian activities his team has been developing in Angola. Another form of entrepreneurship: saving lives, and bringing hope where misery and disbelief rule.
A brand new 3,300 m2 bookstore, Byblos, opens later today, in Lisbon’s Amoreiras Square. Besides 150.000 books, Byblos offers customers five didactic and recreational based interactive solutions conceived by YDreams.
A yStores Shop Window won’t let you miss the store when walking by on the street. Accessible from the street, this interactive touch sensitive interface enables customers to access Byblos-related content anytime of day or night. Inside Byblos, you’ll find an yMagic Book by the auditorium with the scheduled activities.
A specific area designed for kids includes the yLight - a magic lantern whose light source is used to drop the pieces of a thematic virtual puzzle into place; the yWalk – an interactive walkway representing a virtual garden; and a virtual board game - aTrivial Pursuit’ style board game based on kids’ literature.
Congratulations to all YDreamers involved in this successful project!
For more info on this project go to www.ydreams.com.
Wellcome to .yd, a blog about YDreams, YDreamers and all things YDreams (which we hope is plenty to keep you interested). We hope you enjoy your time here, have fun.
For more information about the company, visit:
Enquiries and opinions are welcome at:
pr(at)ydreams.com
