Saba Technology

Recently there have been videos appearing on YouTube that allow for the viewers to go beyond just sitting back and relaxing with a video stream, these videos require audience participation. That’s right, some YouTube videos are starting to have interactivity!

Ever read a ‘Choose your own Adventure’ book? Videos on YouTube are being put together in a branch form, allowing users to choose options that will display the next video a the sequence. So if you choose option 1, video 1 will play next. If you chose option 2, video 2 will play next. By having this simple option a static medium becomes a creative game, story, or whatever you can imagine.

Lets take this example for instance:

Barack, Paper, Scissors

An interactive game of Rock, Paper, Scissors that a person can play which only uses YouTube videos.

The way in which all of this is linked together is by using putting annotations in key hot spot areas throughout the video file. The annotations have links attached to them, so after clicking on them they bring you to the video with the choice you made in the previous video. By linking videos we now have created an interactive experience for the viewer!

1) Longer form content makes slow invasion of online video

2) QR code enabled phones held by 78.3% of Japanese

3) Google wants to make the web faster

4) Smartphone taking the place of the PC for younger female audience

Avego Shared TransportTM enables a new approach to commuting in which GPS, GNS, GIS, iPhone and web technologies are used to dynamically match a driver’s spare seats on a journey with a passenger’s request for transport.

Drivers receive a small fee from the passengers they transport, via an automated transaction, to help pay for the costs of the commute. This financial incentive makes the concept of sharing spare seats more attractive to drivers, thereby helping to reduce congestion and pollution on our roads.

Passenger are provided with expanded and lower-cost commuting options. They may also access real-time passenger information (RTPI), which helps to reduce their anxiety and makes carpooling or vanpooling a more convenient and reliable option.

In this way, Avego Shared Transport enables every road to have transport options and every vehicle to operate as public transport. This will help to instil a modal shift from single-occupancy vehicles to sustainable transport.

View Demo

Rubberduckzilla is a fun AR arcade style game where the user takes shape of a duck to fire lasers at buildings. http://www.rubberduckzilla.com/

levelHead is a spatial memory game by Julian Oliver.

levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors.

In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.

Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player’s spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms?

There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door. Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish. The game then begins again.

View demo

Probably handier for animators :: http://toonmonkey.com/extensions.html

Press Release Excerpt:SAN JOSE, Calif. and LONDON — June 24, 2009 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and HTC, a global designer of mobile phones, today announced that the new HTC Hero is the first Android phone to ship with support for Adobe® Flash® Platform technology. The new phone delivers a more complete Web browsing experience and provides access to a broad variety of Flash technology based content available on the Web today.

Watch “Adrian Ludwig from Adobe demos websites with Flash on the HTC Hero, the first Android smartphone with Flash”

There is always talk around how to incorporate the latest and greatest technology trends into the interactive work we do.  However, as with most things, technology for technology’s sake never results in a good experience.  As a matter of fact, if you think back to when Flash first started, it was not until the tool moved beyond 45 second flash intro movies that it really started to gather momentum and gain acceptance by others as a valid tool for developing interactive experiences and not just meaningless animation.

The same principals extend to the newer technologies like Augmented Reality or Papervision.  It’s only recently that we are starting to see executions moving beyond “cool” and into useful and enhancing.

Priority Mail Box Simulator

One of the best deals out there are the flat rate options through USPS.  For 7 bucks, so long as it fits in a box and is under 70 lbs, you can ship it for $7.  But how do you know if it’ll fit?
Priority Mail Box Simulator

Layar

The first augmented reality browser.  See real estate listings in your immediate vicinity, atms and see where hot spots are:

Layar Android Browser

Papervision Experiential Game

Papervision is more than just flipping axis, it’s about perspective and depth.  It allows you to take an experience that would only remain on a single visual plane, and add additional planes while still keeping the same core experience.  There is no better example of this than the Big and Small game.

Big and Small
The next time you’re talking about how to incorporate a particular technology into a project, think about how your project can be improved or expanded with that technology.

There is no doubt that a large part of the agency interactive work is centered around the use of Flash.  What is often lost in the conversation is an SEO strategy, as well as how to address the users without flash, or perhaps the latest version of flash.

This is starting to drastically change around the agency however, as we roll out sites rebuilds like BK.com, VW.com and new applications like OPENforum.com for AMEX.  We are spending an tremendous amount of time and effort to employ  progressive enhancement across much of our interactive work, which will ultimately result in better accessibility, consistent user experiences regardless of technology, graceful degradation and improved SEO visibility within our Flash based sites.

The following article does a good job of talking about the process of SEO and Progressive Enahancement with regards to flash sites, and how it is no longer an after thought, have a read:

http://odopod.com/blog/progressive-enhancement-adobe-flash-and-seo/

“At yesterday’s WWDC conference, Apple stationed a little bit of eye candy in the Moscone Center lobby: a 5×4 matrix of Cinema Display monitors, adorned with thousands of iPhone app icons. The twist? Whenever someone purchases an app, it pulsates.”

YouTube Direktvideo link

1) Seeing more Microsoft Tags (2D barcodes) out there, including use on a Best Buy Mobile Tour. http://tinyurl.com/oas5ts

2) Text message commentary at movies http://tinyurl.com/cdywur, similar to real-time chat at http://www.americafree.tv/

3) Adage article on games features the www.oldnavyweekly.com coupon site. http://adage.com/article?article_id=136983

4) Momentum growing around mobile coupons. http://tinyurl.com/pyphea http://tinyurl.com/qe6zcg