I stumbled upon a fantastic traveling installation this weekend. Camper Obscura is a project that aims to engage many people from local and wider communities in and around Devonport, in order to explore their relationship to their surroundings through the use of Photography.

As the name might suggest Camper Obscura is in fact a giant Camera Obscura on wheels. The blue ‘periscope’ on the top is in fact a lens and mirror set up which projects light into a blacked out rear cabin. Viewers are then encouraged to hold up a large white viewing board where the image comes to life in front of them. What you immediately experience is the detached view of a scene that you would usually only get from a still photograph.

It’s really quite captivating. Even when viewing the mundane surroundings of Spitalfields market, the details of the scene suddenly become of interest where they would usually be overlooked if walking by on the street. You feel completely removed from the scene even though you are sitting right in the middle of it.

The project – commissioned by Devonport Regeneration Community Partnership – was initially intended to be used in the Devonport area, but now travels around the country. Unfortunately my camera couldn’t pick up the projection as the light levels are so low in the back of the van, if you want to see it you will have to see it for real.

You can get in touch with the founders of the project here.

In what can only be described as “showing off”, the guys and gals at Google have once again brought another technical tour-de-force music video to our attention, this time in collaboration with the hottest band around (and in the studio right now); the Arcade Fire.

The Wilderness Downtown is an interactive interpretation of the Arcade Fire’s song ‘We Used To Wait’ built using cutting edge web technologies such as HTML5, choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing and (deep breath), 3D canvas rendering to create a bespoke and unusual music video.

Quite what the point is, is, not entirely clear, but it is pretty cool looking nonetheless. Give it a go yourselves and watch your street bloom into a forest-scape.

The Wilderness Downtown

Wayne & Garth Spotted

Alongside the part of my phone that actually makes calls (the old fashioned bit), my Google Maps app is probably one of my most used. It’s become indispensable in the same way that being able to text once was. What would we do without it!

Modern spoils aside, the success of Google’s mapping technology may partly be down to its adaptiveness. As with all good web services, the Google Maps API has spawned a mass of location based mash-ups. Google, for example, recently partnered with We Are What We Do to create the wonderfully rich Historypin. It’s all too easy to forget about the history that surrounds us here at The Partners HQ, but a quick post code look up perfectly placed archived and geo-tagged photos from over 100 years ago. To refer to images like this in isolation is one thing, to see them in context and contrast with our modern surroundings (places we inhabit everyday without considering the past) can completely transform our sense of place. Today, Berg London announced Dimensions. Born out of a series of workshops with the BBC, this set of mash-ups forces us to reconsider our surroundings by overlaying historical, political, and environmental data on to our own neighbourhoods. With these filters and layers applied, mapping becomes less about wayfinding, and more about changing perceptions of our sense of place; both of our own locality, and of others’.

With Google’s Street View, the mental images and memories of our surroundings are at once put to test, and the sheer volume of imagery captured by Google’s roaming cars across the world must represent one of the most significant image archives in existence. It provides us with an almost complete panoramic view of the urban environment, albeit one recorded in 1/100th of a second. For the virtual tourist, or the freeze frame voyeur, street view offers a world of exploration like never before. Last year, Art Fag City bought together snapshots of some of the more weird and wonderful findings. Our treasured Daily Mail more recently got in on the act with the story of a seemingly dead girl laying in the street.

Thank god last year’s AR craze has seemed to have died down, when every brand seemed desperate to get a piece of the emperor’s new clothes. This highly ironic video summed it up perfectly. Why do something that could be much better achieved without the added layer of a webcam? Context, of course, is key. ART + COM showed that there were practical and meaningful applications for the technology when they bought dinosaurs out of their skeletons and bursting into life at Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. And with dedicated hardware in gaming consoles, the opportunities still seem genuinely engaging. Oh to be a kid today!

Of course mobile and augmented technologies are a match made in heaven. Amsterdam’s Layar first launched on Android some years ago now, but the potential still seems to be slowly unfolding, and marketers are quicker now to spot an opportunity. While The Rolling Stone’s take on the Layar app for their Exile On Main Street album may have been overly literal, it’s interesting to think how we can begin to engage an audience not just online, but in the real world too. Over in Japan, where adoption of new technologies is often quicker than anywhere else, the Sekai Camera app spawned an ‘Air tagging‘ phenomenon. Surely it’s just a matter of time before this spreads. Let’s just hope users can learn to leave data behind that actually enriches our surroundings, and resist the kind of comments you’re likely to find in a shoreditch pub toilet.

Yesterday I received a notification from Google informing me I was now being tracked by Latitude. I’d opted in for this some time ago, only to be disappointed to find very few of my friends had shared my enthusiasm. Sharing your location with Google (search now factors in your location) is one thing, sharing it with your friends, it seems, is another.

The social aspect of location awareness is, however growing fast. And while Foursquare’s success may be in part down to its reward schemes and gaming aspects (ultimately, its competitive nature), the check-in concept now seems to be spreading beyond the merely physical, with more & more start ups like Gomiso allowing us to ‘check-in’ to movies and tv shows. It’s yet another way of allowing us digital natives to define ourselves not just by where we hang out, but also by what we consume. In 2010, privacy, and personal space appear outdated concepts, while the commodification of the personal reigns supreme.

If anyone can popularise the concept of location in the social space, it’s Facebook. Sure enough, Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed rumours that Facebook will soon be adding location to its services. Facebook might just show Google how it should be done here. Friends & followers, are you with me?

This music video is such a joy to watch, taking a ‘mini-swipe’ at the ad boys. It’s by Los Angeles rock band OkGo (produced by Syyn Labs) who are famous for their cleverly choreographed music videos. The premise is nothing new, but they’ve taken it to another level in sheer scale, you can’t help but be dazzled by it.  Next, I’ll rant about T-Mobile and social media…

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m impressed with the number of apps out there, but unlike some, I just can’t muster the enthusiasm to trawl through the lists until I find something that I like the look of, want to download and then actually play with for more than five minutes. I am somewhat app-athetic <boom boom> when it comes to apps.

Instead I prefer to swan around the studio pestering everyone to tell me what apps I should/shouldn’t have on my iPhone. Having done this fairly recently I thought I would quickly post a list of the top recommendations – from the folk at TP – so that you can also benefit from my app-athy.

So, in no particular order (although No.1 did actually obtain the most recommendations from the fattie food-junkies housed here)…

1. Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals – does what it says on the tin. Quick recipes with accompanying shopping lists so you know what to buy.

Our wee Jack, who’s renowned for her intolerance of swear words in blogs, made her own personal recommendation for this “My fav was called Tuna and Tomato Rigatoni, it was f*cking amazing! Also good that I’ve tried so far was Veg Jalfrezi, magic! Prawn and Pea Risotto, brilliant! Tonight I’m having the Cauliflower and Cheese Risotto… I’ll let you know how I get on.”

I think it’s fair to say she’s a fan.

2. My Fitness Pal - OK, so we’re all food-junkies but some of us like to think our bodies are temples too. <Warning – can potentially make you calorie-counting stinking bore – like me now. sob>

Our Miranda, the half-marathon running whizz-kid made this recommendation “You plug in your age, height, weight, how much you exercise, how much weight you want to lose etc. It then tells you your calorie limit per day. All you have to do then is keep a diary of what you eat (it does all the boring calorie calculations for you) and this wonderful app then tells you to stop eating like a glutton and get off your arse. It even provides little charts to tell you this. For free!”

3. Moodagent – I’ve yet to download this but I’m actually quite excited to.

Our gadget-daddy and all over tech-pimp Kev recommended this one “Neat little app that makes playlists for you based on your iPhone/iPod touch library. The app presents you with 5 sliders: sensual, tender, joy, aggressive, tempo, which you can pull and push, depending on your mood – and some how, as if by magic, it makes new playlists. Crikey knows how it works it out but the mixes are pretty good and you can save them to use when you aren’t using the app.”

4. My Pantone - yeah, yeah, yeah, what’d you expect? There ARE a lot of designers here after all…

Our guru and design-deity Greg Q made this (gushing) recommendation “Pantone  - £5 and never used… But I know I will one day!!!”

Thanks Greg. Errrr…

5. Eliss – A ‘classic’ game on the iPhone apparently. Looks very unsophisticated in its design however I’m lead to believe it’s ROCK hard.

Once again, daddy of tech-cool Kev made this recommendation “This was one of the first apps when the app store launched, yet it still feels fresh and it’s still blooming hard. The principle of eliss is simple. Resize the coloured dots, either by merging them or by dividing them, whilst avoiding different colour dots. What at first seems like a two fingered treat (steady…), soon turns into a 6 fingered freak out, holding and moving dots together at a frantic speed. Don’t let its cute retro graphics and ‘plinky-plonky’ music lead you into a false sense of security – this game is very, very, hard but very addictive.”

6. TuneIn Radio – enables you to listen to (and record!) over 30,000 radio stations – As long as it’s got Radio 4 this blogger will be a happy lass. (plus it’s got a very sweet icon)

Another verbose and lengthy recommendation. This time from our Nick E “Internet radio – simple, looks good”

Nice one Nick. Nice one.

7. Dropbox - AT LAST! I finally have an app that allows me to store docs on my iPhone. Didn’t realise quite what I was missing until now.

Our lovely Tim brought this wonder to my attention with his recommendation “Saving files to and from iPhone is something they should have implemented in the first place. So this is nice and handy. Saving PDFs, movies, music etc, to your phone without having to go thru’ the painful mediocrity of iTunes.”

That’s it for now I’m afraid. There are more, but quite frankly the ol’ app-athy (ok, ok, I’ll stop) is starting to set in and I need to get back to staring out of the window. Do leave your comments and recommendations for any of your favourite apps and save me making the effort to find more myself. Thanks.

I probably should also note that all of these apps are available from the iTunes app store through your iPhone/iTouch or computer. Or click here to go to Apple’s website store.

Helen.

Ever since Jobs and Co. created the iPhone, there has been intense speculation that Apple were going to re-invent the Newton, with all kind of rumours about what the device would be and what it would be capable of.

For those of you that have been living in a bunker, the iPad is what Apple describes as a bridge between the world of the smartphone and the laptop — a third ‘mobile’ space that sits between the two. Indeed, at first glance, the iPad looks nothing more than a giant iPhone — it features the same glass multi-touch display (albeit a huge one at 9 1/2 inches), the same buttons – it can even run the same applications.

So many are wondering, well, what’s the difference; “Why do I need one of these shiny new toys when I have an iPhone and a laptop?… I was expecting an all-singing and dancing device that could read my thoughts and intiate command for me on the impulse of a brain wave! …This isn’t the JesusPad I wanted!” Yes, many of these points are true. But what people are forgetting to remember is that content is king, and just like the iPhone and the iPod before it, if the content is good, (in the case of the iPod; huge libaries of mp3′s versus a cd, and the iPhone with the app store full of entertainment and usefulness), then it will be a must-have product.

So let’s look at the killer app, and with a screen this size, it has to be publishing — anything from books to newspapers and magazines. Both Sony and Amazon (with the Kindle) have made significant inroads in to this new area with eBook readers: devices that are like carrying whole libaries in the space of a paperback. But these devices look a generation old compared to the user experience of the iPad – gimicky it may look, but simply turning and flicking a page on the iPad instantly feels more real. The printed book is all good and well, but it’s in the magazine and newspaper area where this product will excel. Take a look at this digital version of the Sports Illustrated magazine and try to say to yourself that you’d rather have a traditional magazine:

It’s been forecast for many years that the ‘death of print’ cometh. Maybe with the iPad and devices like it, we’re at the beginning to this new era. This fuzing of new-media and traditional print publishing into a new and interactive form is going to be exciting for both consumers and designers alike, hopefully reigniting what is a shrinking industry. Take a look at this concept video for a product called Mag+ by Bonnier R&D and their digital design partners BERG – it shows off the potential experience for what a product like the iPad can deliver:

No doubt the iPad will open the flood gates to millions of copycat tablet computers, all hoping to do the same thing. Will I be getting one? Well, I’ve always said; never buy the first gen of any Apple product; but if content as rich as this comes out, I might have to change my mind.

This companion application is based on the branding and identity work that we undertook for the gallery and allows you to search for paintings tagged under a series of themes. The application contains over 250 works and includes video, audio, zoomable hi-resolution images and image galleries from the likes of Leonardo, Renoir, Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

The application, called Love Art: National Gallery London is available now and is completely free – just like admission to the National Gallery itself. Go check it out.

Identity and branding by The Partners

So you might have heard of and seen one of these Yamaha TENORI-ON machines (in fact Nathan blogged about Little Boot’s rendition of Hot Chip’s Ready for the floor a while back now) the new instrument that mixes musical beats and lightshow into one neat product, but have you actually had the chance to play on one? Seeming they cost just shy of £900, I’m guessing that you haven’t and that you probably won’t be able to afford one either. But fear not, André Michelle has created this cool flash version called ToneMatrix that you can tap away on to your hearts content. Ace. Check it out!

Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen (OSKA) architects is responsible for the design of the new ‘whatcom museum’. Located in Bellingham, Washington State, the concept behind museum’s modern design is to bring as much activity as there is on the inside of the building, to the outside. The project is still in progress, but the focus of the new art and history institution will be a 36-foot-tall, 180-foot-long translucent wall, known as ‘the lightcatcher’, which will act as a backdrop to the building’s central courtyard. The installation of this wall is meant to encourage the public to participate and engage in activities surrounding the museum. [designboom]