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?

So hats off to Canadian paint firm Rona for spotting an opportunity and taking it (whether it is all above board is another matter entirely!). In this video you can see that they’ve cheekily piggy-backed on the recent Apple iPod Nano adverts – adapting it for their own gains. Very clever.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What did seriously impress however was this years Observation Round video. Each year we produce a ‘homemade’ video for this particular round which are often hastily mashed together at the 11th hour. Robert Ball and Tim Brown left the motley crew in awe in the pub as they played their stunning animated video featuring The Partners staff partaking in varying sporting pursuits.

Here’s the video that had us all rolling on the floor.

Just please don’t ask to see any of the photos…

This is a project I did last year for the 2008 D&AD student awards. The brief asked if MTV were a virus, how would it behave? We decided to use the general public as virus carriers and created an exponential chain reaction…

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘Media artist Toshio Iwai and Yamaha have collaborated to design a new digital musical instrument for the 21st century, TENORI-ON. A 16×16 matrix of LED switches allows everyone to play music intuitively, creating a “visible music” interface.’

Anyway, it’s expensive, £700 quid, but there is a downloadable pdf to make a paper version in these hard times, and you’ll have to make the noises yourself… I digress, while trying to be vaguely design  related.

So changing the subject slightly, Toshio Iwai turns out to be a pretty interesting and talented bloke, ‘Iwai is the first internationally-recognized gallery artist also to have led the creation of several successful commercial video game projects. This cross-disciplinary ability typifies Iwai’s career’. Turns out he is the designer of Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS. There’s an interesting interview with him here over at pixelsurgeon:

PS: I met with some people from Yamaha recently and they talked with me about the challenge of designing new instruments because the standard piano, the violin and so on are so established.

TI: Yes, traditional instruments such as piano and violin have been improved and made sophisticated by many people for a long time. I think it is very difficult to create a brand new instrument in this modern age, but I believe it is worthwhile to challenge this. Even ones like the piano and violin used to be completely new instruments. I am impressed by the fact that these new instruments fascinated many musicians and audiences, and new music and culture saw the light. [Read on]

Anyway, so back to the music, here’s a video of Little Boots playing Hot Chip’s Ready For the Floor on a Tenori-On… which is almost as good as the soulwax remix.

Click here to view the embedded video.