Adidas have created an in-store digital experience to showcase their 8,000+ shoe range. It can be deployed to allow almost any retailer to sell the entire Adidas product range without having to be a flagship store in a major city, which is a huge win for all sorts of retailers big and small.
The experience is defined by a large footwear wall, made of multiple LCD touch screens that use facial recognition to detect a customers gender on approach to the wall. The adiVerse virtual footwear wall then customises the product experience for that gender, and helps guide them to the perfect shoe, or alternatively, let’s them browse the entire range of products, with each rendered in real-time 3D (hence the Intel partnership).
While there are a few things left to be desired with the adiVerse Virtual Footwear Wall, its a great step in the right direction that helps blur the line between instore and online experiences. I’m looking forward to finding out a little more about this as the concept store rolls out…
Thefutureof theuser interface design is here!Navigatingthroughthe visualizationofdataon atouch screen. Produced by Digimind and the Cité des Sciences Museum, in partnership with Pikko and Intactil Design. Enjoy the Video!
Australian website EveryMap is a local report website that allows people to share what is happening or has happened locally.
Users of EveryMap can submit reports on anything from upcoming local events, local news, problems that need fixing to their favourite bars and restaurants. Submitted reports are then added to a Google Map.
It is possible to search the reports posted to the map by category and by time. EveryMap includes a very useful timeline function that allows you to adjust the reports shown on the map by a starting and closing date.
Here’s a great example of how the worlds of social media and TV are merging.
Last time we looked at ScreenReach, they had some impressive tech in the works that would allow you to interact with any screen from a mobile phone. Now the UK-based startup is ready to get that technology into the hands of users with an app that it hopes will change the way audiences interact with TV.
Screach is the name of the iPhone app due for launch within the next two weeks. Here’s how it works: imagine you’re watching a TV talent show like America’s Got Talent or The X Factor. The TV show announces a Screach code. You open the app on your phone, enter the code and the app becomes a voting panel. You can now vote for your favourite act and then see in real time how the rest of the audience around the country is voting.
As the video below shows, this could transform TV gameshows too, allowing not only for realtime participation but also instant rewards, such as money off vouchers that can be redeemed with the app.
Screach is based on ScreenReach’s open platform, meaning anyone can develop for it. While the startup is in talks with a number of broadcasters about integrating the app into their programmes, the app is likely to launch without any such deals in place. However, users will be able to try it out with unofficial test codes. These will, for example, allow users in the UK to place their own “vote” for acts on The X Factor, seeing in realtime how other users vote.
There’s real potential here and we can’t wait to get our hands on the app soon. This video explains how it works.
Better Means is an innovative project management platform promoting transparency and equality among companies.
We’ve covered project management platforms before on TNW, but this latest offering, Better Means, is a whole new ball game. See this introductory video for a quick overview:
Basing the platform on a system of equality, Better Means allows teams to collaborate on projects in a fair, honest environment. A democratic voting system ensures everyone who wants to contribute to a project is able to have their voice heard. Contributors outside of the core team can also vote and comment on projects, allowing the wider community opinion to be heard, whilst not affecting the progression of projects.
See this more in-depth video for a walk-through of the main functions:
The transparent, open-source nature of the platform would work perfectly for volunteer-based organizations, but core team member Adele Burnes also had this to say about the most suitable groups:
The groups/companies that we are targeting are startup social enterprises however we recognize that this web app could have wide applicability. The reality is that it is a technological platform with a new way of working together and therefore more open minded tech oriented groups will find it easier to adopt
The options available for companies really make this a flexible platform. Adele mentions the optional credits system in the second video I’ve included, which is a democratic way for team members to vote on compensation amounts for those who contribute to a project. Companies who want to control compensation in their own way can simply ignore this feature.
And while the team at Better Means promotes openness and transparency, private options are available as well. For companies who are happy to keep all projects and members completely public, signing up is free, but for those wanting private options, pricing varies from $25 to $200 per month, depending on how many private workstreams and members you need.
Better Means is truly a new way of working within a team, and organizing projects. Adele sums up the best aspects of the platform here:
What we find particularly exciting about the platform is how open and decentralized it is. The Bettermeans platform allows individuals from all over the country and even world to form teams/companies that can collaborate together online towards a shared goal
For groups interesting in testing the waters of openness and transparency (or those already doing so), this is a great way to promote collaborate, democratic decision making and cut out the traditional hierarchy of business. Sign up here to test it out.
Booking flights became so much easier when it all shifted online, but it hasn’t changed in years. You put in your preferred dates and times and you get a long list of options. Oftentimes those listings can be a pain as you browse through all of your options. Oh the burden of choice. Hipmunk tries to make flight search easier with a visual interface.
As usual, you enter your origin and destination but instead of plain HTML tables, you get something like the above, and you can sort the options from least to greatest amount of agony. Rectangle lengths represent flight times and are color-coded by airline. Flights with the same take off and arrival times, but priced higher are hidden to help you narrow down quicker.
Hipmunk is still in the early stages, but a quick search shows a lot of promise.
For this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, the music channel collaborated with Twitter and the good folks at Stamen to track social media activity throughout the event. The MTV VMA Twitter Tracker ranks the participating artists based on the amount of Tweets per minute. The application offers three different views on the incoming Tweets, All Activity, Top 4 and Single Artist. The user can tweet directly from the Flash based application to support his favorite artist.
The application is solely focused in the amount of Tweets does not go into more detail about location or sentiment. I think these attributes would have been interesting to include and could also provide more insights into what’s happening on stage.
Geoff McGhee has been producer at nytimes.com, head of multimedia at Le Monde and now John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. These years at San Francisco are being productive, as we can see on this fantastic documentary about data visualization on the media.
This is a data-heavy visualization. Each submitted idea is a dot, and the concentric rings are a timeline expanding outward from July 2010 to today. The dot colors represent the idea categories (Create Power, Connect Power and Use Power). The size of the dot represents how many votes each idea has received and the additional halo around a dot represents the number of comments left by others on that idea. I can’t tell, but I hope they use the values to calculate the “area” of each dot and not it’s “diameter”!
“…our data visualization teams have put their design skills to work on GE’s new “ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid.” Backed by $200 million in venture capital funds from GE and its partners, the goal is to find the best ideas from researchers and entrepreneurs that will help accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies. But it can be a daunting task plowing through the more than 1,400 submissions to-date (and growing). So, as you can see in the data visualization, the entries have been represented graphically, with the circles representing clickable ideas.”
Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak — the real-life version of the film’s eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface. Is this how tomorrow’s computers will be controlled?
