I worked on a project at Cadburys World where you can get your photo moulded into chocolate. It would have been wonderfully narcissistic to have been able to eat a statuette of yourself, but due to technology limitations we had to make to with putting photos of people onto a wall of chocolatey fame and letting people buy fridge magnets and badges of their chocolate visage from the gift shop (skip to 3.50 minutes into the following video).
However at Exeter University they are trying to build a 3D chocolate printer (that is, a printer that prints out chocolate models, not a printer made out of chocolate!)
“This machine is effectively a novel 3D chocolate printer that can produce chocolate products exactly as a 3D model designed in your own computer. Imagine you could draw a 3D ‘face’ model of someone or extract it from a personal photo, send it to the 3D printer and watch it grow in front of you from chocolate.”
Apparently taste and smell emotionally affects people 75% more than any other sense. Various brands have started doing some really cool experiences using taste and smell. Thorntons made an edible billboard and during an advert for suncream Nivea pumped the smell of suntan lotion into the cinema.
This is too cool: Sixth Sense, a wearable device with a projector that “enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data”. Awesome video!
This is great. A couple in America have put RFID readers in their cats collars. When the cats go in and out of the catflap a message is generated and automatically posted up to Twitter!
“Gus used the door 19 times yesterday, enjoyed the outdoors for 11 Hrs, 39 Min and the indoors for 12 Hrs, 20 Min. about 6 hours ago from web“
I love the idea of this poster. Instead of tearing off paper tabs from the bottom you break off stakes to kill pesky vampires!
Trueblood promotional poster in New Zealand
Apparently all the stakes were actually nailed down, but it’s still a cool idea.
But what about zombies? How do we protect our brains (or our second brains)? In Texas they’ve come up with an excellent solution:
I just came across these beautiful kinetic sculptures; robots only powered by the wind:
Check out Strandbeest for more info.
For an acoustic version of this listen to Aeolian Wind Harps: musical instruments played by the wind.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency researchers have got one step closer to developing programmable matter – think the T1000 liquid metal!
A material that can ... transport particles and assemble shapes.
From the DARPA press release:
Professor David R. Liu’s Harvard team is relying on DNA base pairing as a sort of molecular Velcro to program the assembly or disassembly of “smart” materials. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Daniela Rus has created an innovative computational origami of two- and three-dimensional functional structures, through the “folding” of matter.
http://www.darpa.mil/news/2009/ProgrMatter.pdf
In the future perhaps downloadable design will become a reality for all worldy objects. Perhaps you could download the latest shoe design into your pool of matter and see it assembled before your own eyes! Imagine if you could download physical objects from the internet like food or drink – some crazy possibilities.
I guess we are a step closer now to all being turned into grey goo…
I like the idea of crowdsourcing, why use your own brain when you have access to everyone else’s!
OpenAd and CrowdSpring are becoming more and more popular with clients. Post your brief, get sent loads of ideas then pick your favourite!
Mixx has launched an interesting section of it’s site:
User-driven social media website Mixx is offering marketers a chance to trial their online ads against its top members for peer-reviewed feedback before launching ‘the big spend’.
Advertisers, such as Orange, can upload up to five creative executions in Sifter at a time, where over the course of a week, Mixx users rank the overall content on a scale of one to five.
Users also provide qualitative feedback for the ads, their likes and dislikes, while advertisers receive the data along with the gender, age and general interest snapshot of those who voted.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/902019/Mixx-sparks-dialogue-marketers-consumers/
It would be nice to think this could result in a ‘Ruby on Rails’ type development approach to advertising. 37 Signals (Ruby on Rails founders) are famed for delivering short bursts of code onto the web, which might not be completely finished, which lets their userbase define where development should head next.
Finally bragster (though not technically a crowdsourcing site) lets you setup dares with its online community. Tango did a fun bet recently turning their logo upside down.
Interesting Article from the excellent (though slightly overwhelming at times*) Brand Republic site.
Talking advertising posters could be put into development in the near future, with the development of speakers made out of paper, suitable for thin devices such as LCD screens.
Rolls of paper speakers have already been produced by a research company in Taiwan and the group’s engineers say they will be used in cars starting from next year.
Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute is planning to introduce the new technology with a three-story-high banner than can play music at an upcoming exhibition in Taipei.
The researchers aim to be able to mass produce standard poster-size speakers at $20 each.
The company hopes the technology will also attract film companies wanting to produce posters with a soundtrack or excerpts from the movie.
Bill Wilson, the Outdoor Advertising Association’s operations director, said the low cost of the speakers would make the technology attractive to media owners: “I assume media owners would be very interested if the technology allows for cost-efficient delivery.”
Wilson warned that media owners who embrace such technology would have to tackle issues such as noise levels and location.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/901234/Talking-posters-horizon-thanks-paper-speaker-breakthrough/
Would be nice to combine this with motion sensors or rfid readers for a Minority Report style experience.
For a more hi-tech version of interactive posters/shop windows see: http://www.visualplanet.biz/services/retail/shopfront.php or http://www.clearchannel.co.uk/digital/
* After having a month with my head in project delivery mode and with no time to check my rss feeds I cleared out 2000 unread messages recently!