Francis and the Lights

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Can You Serve: Interactive billboard

Tweet Can You Serve is an eight part reality TV show dealing with customer service. To promote their second season, the show set up a machine containing over ten thousand $1 coins which gives a tip for every like their page gets.

Opened mouth - Volkswagen Golf R, the fastest Volkswagen ever

Tweet That's the kind of ambient idea I love! Imagine you're walking in the street and you see a guy with this mouth:




It's quite surprising isn't it? If you're a curious person you'd get to read this on the back of his shirt:


And at this moment you understand that all this is just an advertising stunt to promote the power of the Volkswagen Golf R, the fastest Volkswagen ever!

Oh, and here's the little accesory that made them look like dummies:

Mazda MX-5 + DJ Seb and DJ Reggie in Ibiza

Tweet DJ Seb Fontaine and Radio 1 DJ Reggie Yates get behind the wheel of a Mazda MX-5 in Ibiza, for a road trip to defy convention. It's a nice way of showing the car and certainly makes me want to go to Ibiza! It's part of a competition inviting people to ‘Express their Spirit’ on Facebook at http://bit.ly/spirit-mazda to win extraordinary once in a lifetime prizes which are pretty cool.

B-Reel Mind Tricks: Brain Powered Slot Cars

Tweet I love the Arduino board and we’ve been working on some very cool projects with it. So now that I’ve confessed my love, check out an experiment the guys at B-Reel have just completed using the Arduino board, Scalextric slot cars, Mindwave headset and some neat code to wrap it all together!
B-Reel Performs Mind Tricks, basically. And these mind tricks just happen to let your brain power a slot car set, or if you took it further, you could control almost anything. So B-Reel creative director Riccardo Giraldi setup a Scalextric slot car track and then replaced one of the hand controllers with a cable to the Arduino board, which in turn connects to the computer, which has a Neurosky Mindwave headset connected. (read more about the setup here).
A neat script lets the Arduino board tap into the readings from the Mindwave headset, allowing the user to control the car with their mind! I seriously love it. More and more the physical, tangible digital world will become the battleground for great campaigns, and you will have already started to see this trend in its infancy over the last 12 months… I’m ordering a Mindwave headset now! VIA

Multi Touch Experience Cube

Tweet Here is a pretty cool trade show installation called the “Multi-Touch Experience Cube”. At first glance it’s a passive visual experience, but once users interact with any of the 23 LCD displays the room comes to life with the LED roof and visual effects mapped to user interactions. The LCD’s make up a 14m+ touch wall, and allow multiple users to interact simultaneously with any of the screens in the cube. Users can display and interact their content on one screen, or spread them across the entire digital installation. Thanks Patrick! Created by Sensory-Minds.

3D Augmented Reality Video With Kinect + iPad

Tweet Here is an interesting augmented reality 3D Video Experiment. It uses an Xbox Kinect to map the video data, then uses the String Augmented Reality SDK to display what looks and feels like 3D video on the iPad, activated by a QR code. Pretty cool yeah?
Well, if they’d mapped the person being recorded with 2-3 Kinect’s the video quality would have been a whole lot better, and you’d have been able to walk a complete 360 degree path around the QR code seeing seamless 3D video… I suspect we’ll see that demo shortly!

Hugo Boss: Head Tracking YouTube Experience

Tweet Here is a different kind of YouTube experience from Hugo Boss for the new fragrance “HUGO Just Different”. The YouTube experience is created around an interactive film called “KINO” that essentially has 3 variations that can be instantly engaged at any time. Playing on the idea of seeing things differently, users control the the film through simple head movements that are picked up via their webcam and the sites realtime head-tracking technology, with each movement seamlessly integrating rich new layers of colour or motion into the film. You can shift between the movie, story or theatrical versions of the black and white film at will.
I’m not really sure what to make of it. It’s dark yet illuminating all the same. But above all, it certainly is Just Different. And I guess that’s what Hugo Boss was going for! Try here http://www.youtube.com/hugobosstv

Toyota Prius Projects: Mind Controlled Bike

Tweet Toyota’s Prius Projects site has been around for a while now, and recently they’ve developed a few very cool projects, including a mind controlled bike from Parlee! Hot of the heels of B-Reel’s mind controlled slot cars, is this hand built Prius x Parlee bike that is controlled through an iPhone App, which in turn, is controlled via a neuroheadset to let your mind change the gears, while the app plots things like GPS coordinates and performance data to remember how you were travelling at that moment in time, so that next time you ride that same road, it will auto adjust the bike settings for you, and even shift your gears!

Volkswagen’s Augmented Reality App

Tweet Volkswagen are promoting the big come back of their Golf Cabriolet with an augmented reality app. The French agency behind this concept is Paris based Agency.V. who have created a world first with this AR car showroom app for the iPad2, iPhone and Android.
Once you’ve downloaded the app it lets you explore the vehicle and play with it’s features; you can open the soft-top roof, rotate the car, check the vehicle’s details, change the body colour or the style of the rims. You can even take a picture of yourself with the virtual car and share each step of this experience through your social networks. While this isn’t ground breaking, it’s great to see VW experimenting with new ways to promote their cars. Keep up the good work! What do you guys think? It’s available from the French iTunes Store for iPhone, iPad 2 and also for Android which is cool.

Ibiza Parties: RFID Facebook Integration

Tweet With access to RFID technology and integration with social API’s becoming more mainstream, we will be seeing more and more experiential installations just like this, and no doubt, heavily populated in these kinds of party locations around the world!
This is a great new example from the Ushuaïa Beach Hotel in Ibiza, a world first for the hotel industry, created by the guys at Dorst & Lesser, who were responsible for the Renault Motor Show RFID installation. The hotel has numerous RFID points that activate different things, some are simply hotel area based status updates, while others auto-post photos taken in real-time with each RFID wristband swipe. I’m looking forward to seeing where RFID goes in 2012 and beyond…

Aides: Private parts making music (NSFW)

Tweet Aides is a non-profit organization fighting against Aids. They’re known for their risky campaigns, this one is a good example of it! (Probably) not safe for work!

Human rights watch: Burma installation

Tweet Wow! Why didn’t we see this amazing campaign earlier? A huge installation was set up in Grand Central Station in New York in order to raise awareness for the political prisoners in Burma. Obviously an idea like this one was awarded at the 2011 Cannes Lions.

McDonald’s: Ice Cold

Tweet McDonald’s and Cossetten, Vancouver have created a remarkable piece of artwork. They put 4,000 Canadian dollars in a seven-foot tall ice sculpture. The coins were shaped into McDonald’s famous Golden Arch and people were given the chance to get one of the dollars to buy a drink at the McDonald’s.

STA Travel: Move, Learn and Eat

Tweet There has been a lot of buzz around the following videos. But we know now, the videos have been made for STA Travel. It is one of the two largest travel organizations for students and young people. “3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage.”And apparently all done without the help of a big crew or agency, thrifty production just like STA Travel’s offers.