Stop the presses.
Microsoft finally produce a good advert for a great product!

Credit were credit is due I think, Kinect is pretty amazing (it sold twice as fast as the iPod when launched) and since being hacked is being used for some amazing things way out of the gaming sphere.

Check out kinecthacks.net to see how people are pushing the technology.

Ever wondered how on earth some projects have been created?

If you’re a creative, designer, developer or techy working in one of the many creative disciplines then no doubt you will spend a good deal of your time researching campaigns, sites, virals, social media etc from your peers, competitors and rivals.

In my experience of working in agencies there are normally two responses to viewing other peoples work. The first and most common (if creatives and designers are involved) is unfortunately to go straight for the jugular and start pointing out flaws, describe in detail how badly it’s been executed, wonder if they didn’t have the budget to finish it or explain how you would have done it differently and obviously better.

The other response is to sit in awe, to call colleagues over, send an email and to say under your breath “I wish I’d thought of that” or “how on earth have they done that?”.

North Kingdom frequently fall into the latter category, they appear to have won just about every major award possible and now they’re giving everyone an insight into how much work they put into their projects. They’re obviously working with considerable budgets but there is no denying the amount of work and detail that is executed at every level.

If you have a bit of time to kill then I suggest you give their site a visit and have a good study of the behind the scenes.

The Minority Report gesture browsing style gets a step closer!
Students at MIT have developed DepthJS which is a web browser extension that allows any web page to interact with the Microsoft Kinect via Javascript.

Kinect + Computer Vision + Javascript = Very Cool

Get the code and more at depthjs.media.mit.edu

Have just seen this Kinect puppet prototype on the Creative Review blog. I wondered how quickly we’d see people from outside the gaming industry using this technology. Really nice application, this is going to open up a whole new world of possibilities.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly people hack systems, release drivers and a raft of open source code and share all their brilliant hard work. Oh it’s all getting very exciting out there in digital world.

Are we telling stories or are we just playing games?

So the biggest thing that I took away from Click London last year was how advertisers are having to address how they communicate to their consumers and the general public.

In the last decade the huge increase in popularity of the internet, smart phones, and gaming machines meaning there has been a complete revolution in how people communicate. In turn brands can no longer just shout messages at people they have to be much more engaging and reactive to audiences. In short brands have to be become useful to their consumers.

Lee Clow and Alex Bogusky (blog) discuss the merging worlds of gaming, computing, movies and social media and the way that advertising is being born again by becoming much more integrated and engaging.

Turning a ‘Monologue into a Dialogue’ – courtesy of Lee Clow.

A distinct lack of posts reflects how hectic the end of ’09 was, the world of marketing appeared to start to shake off the worst effects of the downturn and it has been a rather crazy few months. Hopefully 2010 will be much more positive for everyone.

Well I did expect the most desirable object of the start of 2010 to be the Google Nexus One, but already in my eyes this has been beaten by the unbelievable Parrot AR.Drone. To say that I want one is an understatement.

The AR.Drone is a helicopter that features within two augmented reality games. The helicopter is controlled via Wi-Fi by either iPhone or iPod Touch and uses the accelerometer and touchscreen as controls. The helicopter boasts a camera so that you can see what’s going on through your iPhone or iPod Touch’s display.

One word: Awesome