Unity - Nokia, Regents Street Xmas Lights 07

Christmas is upon us and the London shopping lights have been switched on and the frenzy has begun. This year Nokia as sponsored the Regents Street lights as part of a campaign to promote the opening of their new flagship store on the 14th December 2007.

Nokia have worked with their agency Wieden+Kennedy to bring to life this brilliant piece of Physical Space Interaction.

Unity [the Light Clusters] are designed by United Visual Artists, who have worked with the to create 14 of these 'bundles of light'.

What does it do?
well.... according to the PDF that I got from the W+K blog it:

•Interacts directly with you at the Nokia interactive window
•Changes with the ambient temperature
•Displays special performances throughout the day
•Reflects the strength and direction of the wind
•Responds to the level of crowd activity

Basically its bad-ass, and i'm so glad that big brands are becoming aware of digital campaigns beyond your desktop :) - I went to see it last night and its impressive reminded me of Usman Haque's - Sky Ear.

From the 14th December you will able to interact directly with the lights from the Nokia store's interactive window - watch this space. Their are special 'performances' on Christmas Eve - Evening, a different one for each of the twelve days, a boxing day one to mark the beginning of the sales, a count down to the start of the new year and a closing finale on the 6th January 2008.

Unity: Light Up Christmas Together
20 November 2007 - 06th January 2008
Regents Street, London, UK

UMPC - UltraMobile

Its the future.........


Products that are taking us towards this:
•Samsung's UMPC
•Asus R3 - Apparently Apple have been working with Asus on a tablet.

Smaller devices
•Nokia's N95 - With Its GPS feature (from what I have read its still a bit buggy though)

Other contenders if they GPS up:
•iPhone
•gPhone (soon to be released)
•Sony Ericsson P1i

This emerging attitude towards mobile computing has even got the guys at Nintendo thinking and has formed a part of a new business strategy focusing on more casual gamers and even non-gamers. Hinting at adding more features to the DS portable that would be useful in spots like "amusement parks" and "train stations" it even has a web browser on it.

There are many, many more devices out there that I have briefly touched upon the ones that came straight to my head. The role of these portable devices is important to the development of 'Physical Space Interaction'[Ubiquitous Computing "Ubi Comp"]. Before Physical Space Interaction fully kicks off there are a few things we need to solve/consider. It is probably worth creating another post on the subject of 'Privacy In a Ubi Comp World'.

I would love to here what you lot think about Physical Space Interaction / Ubiquitous Computing - any comment are welcome as this area is of great interest to me.

Icebrkr - Mobile Dating

Say you’re sitting in a bar and see someone you fancy across the room. Ice Brkr is a new mobile dating service that lets you send them a friendly 'hello' using just your mobile phone. If they send back a friendly reply, you go over and chat. In effect, a real world friend request.

What this means is that unlike the regular online dating services, you can actually see the person and decide if there is any physical attraction before you meet/invite, and if you get to chat you can tell if any chemistry exists.

The great thing is that you do not need to download an application to your phone it works via WAP. Ice Brkr is still in its infancy however I do recommend that give you it a go, and leave your feedback.

We are beginning to see more services like this that merge our 'online' social habits with the 'physical' via our portable digital devices. Imagine that one day in the future a tool like this will tell me if the person behind me in the queue at the Starbucks is a also a [New Orleans Jazz lover].

Click here to find out more

Nicolas Nova:Mixed digital & Physical environments [Turin 2007]

Long but interesting talk given by Nicolas Nova on Mixed digital and Physical environments. He talks about current and emerging technologies within the Ubiquitous computing arena as well as projects that he is currently working on. I especially like the 'blogject' (Blog-Object) project where objects such as Sony's Aibo could potentially automatically post to its own blog when having interactions with the environment and people. Worth while having a look if you have an hour or so free.