Virtuix have developed the Omni, an omnidirectional treadmill controller for virtual environments. Virtuix is aiming to launch a Kickstarter campaign for the Omni around the end of May or the beginning of June, and it's targeting a price of $400-600 for the device. Very cool immersive experience but as any gamer knows, the ability to crouch in a FPS is crucial..
The age of mega-viral content
Gangnam Style became world famous for its South Korean creator Psy's extreme electro-pop soundtrack, neon stylings and novel dance moves. What really made me take notice was the fact that it was the first YouTube video to top 1 BILLION views (currently at 1.5 billion at time of writing). A billion views is an almost unfathomable number but this video has (amongst many other things such as paving the way to creating mega-viral content) provided a benchmark in 21st century history for us to look back and remember the age when people who were online were collectively consuming the same content in near real-time.
Psy's new video called 'Gentleman' is another noticeable piece of online content since it has managed to secure 60 MILLION views in 2 DAYS purely because it is the next piece of content to come from Psy. 60 million views in 2 days is a ridiculous statistic and one that is often overlooked in articles elsewhere given its predecessor's success. 60 million in 2 days is mega-viral. But it will become a perfectly normal figure within the next 6 months. The rate at which content can go viral and then mega-viral is increasing as networks of people are able to share content faster and faster. Ultimately there will be a point in time where there will be one channel online, the mainstream, that plays the most viral piece of content for that day / hour / minute. We can already see the first steps of this in Twitter's #hashtag trending list.
The content delivery model is still based on the old-school method of users being fed the latest information from an authoritative source. People currently look to content-hub websites (Reddit, Buzzfeed, news websites etc) or to tastemakers for what's hot since they are considered the authority on what should be watched right now. Incredibly, some mega-memes like the Harlem Shake have even been jumped on as a direct way to make money for the man.
However that is changing as online social groups are becoming more fragmented and specialist. The opinion of a known friend is more valuable than an entertainment source and online social groups are now evolving their own tastemakers, those who are always posting the latest videos in their feeds - we all know one person like that. The fact that they still look to get their content from entertainment sources is irrelevant. What is relevant is that there is now someone, a real person, a trusted person who is filtering this content and then sharing the stuff that they think you'd like.
This TED Talk from Kevin Allocca neatly explains “Why videos go viral”. Put simply, anything new that consists of the magic three ingredients will go viral: to gain recognition it must be noticed and promoted by a select few people (tastemakers) with a large number of followers, then it must allow anyone to participate creatively in their own way, and lastly it must have complete unexpectedness.
Although that video describes how how quickly the music charts can change based what’s popular with online communities, it is also listing the founding pieces of content that were around at the time that people started to all tune into the same content together. The ancestors of mega-memes.
Very soon there will be a very strong sense of community online as a whole, and it will become comforting to all be online together, all consuming the latest content together. This will reflect humanity online; what people currently find funny, sad, interesting, shocking, and so on. This already exists but it's in various places and is very disparate - to say the Twitter community, or the Reddit community, or the Guardian online community who comment on articles is representative of humanity online is incorrect. Those are still relatively small groups of people who have been drawn together by a common interest. What still needs to happen is for people to come completely together online in one place. This is essentially a hive mind and in its early stages is one that is only used for watching Gangnam Style, but imagine a future with the power of that many people all focussing on the same thing together at the same moment in time. It'll happen once the platform for it is available, and when it does it will dwarf everything else that came before it.
Psy's new video called 'Gentleman' is another noticeable piece of online content since it has managed to secure 60 MILLION views in 2 DAYS purely because it is the next piece of content to come from Psy. 60 million views in 2 days is a ridiculous statistic and one that is often overlooked in articles elsewhere given its predecessor's success. 60 million in 2 days is mega-viral. But it will become a perfectly normal figure within the next 6 months. The rate at which content can go viral and then mega-viral is increasing as networks of people are able to share content faster and faster. Ultimately there will be a point in time where there will be one channel online, the mainstream, that plays the most viral piece of content for that day / hour / minute. We can already see the first steps of this in Twitter's #hashtag trending list.
The content delivery model is still based on the old-school method of users being fed the latest information from an authoritative source. People currently look to content-hub websites (Reddit, Buzzfeed, news websites etc) or to tastemakers for what's hot since they are considered the authority on what should be watched right now. Incredibly, some mega-memes like the Harlem Shake have even been jumped on as a direct way to make money for the man.
However that is changing as online social groups are becoming more fragmented and specialist. The opinion of a known friend is more valuable than an entertainment source and online social groups are now evolving their own tastemakers, those who are always posting the latest videos in their feeds - we all know one person like that. The fact that they still look to get their content from entertainment sources is irrelevant. What is relevant is that there is now someone, a real person, a trusted person who is filtering this content and then sharing the stuff that they think you'd like.
This TED Talk from Kevin Allocca neatly explains “Why videos go viral”. Put simply, anything new that consists of the magic three ingredients will go viral: to gain recognition it must be noticed and promoted by a select few people (tastemakers) with a large number of followers, then it must allow anyone to participate creatively in their own way, and lastly it must have complete unexpectedness.
Although that video describes how how quickly the music charts can change based what’s popular with online communities, it is also listing the founding pieces of content that were around at the time that people started to all tune into the same content together. The ancestors of mega-memes.
Very soon there will be a very strong sense of community online as a whole, and it will become comforting to all be online together, all consuming the latest content together. This will reflect humanity online; what people currently find funny, sad, interesting, shocking, and so on. This already exists but it's in various places and is very disparate - to say the Twitter community, or the Reddit community, or the Guardian online community who comment on articles is representative of humanity online is incorrect. Those are still relatively small groups of people who have been drawn together by a common interest. What still needs to happen is for people to come completely together online in one place. This is essentially a hive mind and in its early stages is one that is only used for watching Gangnam Style, but imagine a future with the power of that many people all focussing on the same thing together at the same moment in time. It'll happen once the platform for it is available, and when it does it will dwarf everything else that came before it.
Reinventing Payphones
Reinventing Payphones - NYC I/O: The Responsive City
There are 11,412 pay phones in New York City that are almost never used.
So what happens when New York City runs a competition to redesign them into something practical and that uses modern technology?
This is Control Group's winning entry.
There are 11,412 pay phones in New York City that are almost never used.
So what happens when New York City runs a competition to redesign them into something practical and that uses modern technology?
This is Control Group's winning entry.
The BMW sound designers
How do you enhance the driving experience of a popular car brand in a highly competitive market? By considering an often overlooked but integral element of the user experience, the sound design of the product.
At BMW it has become such an exact science that 14 sound artists work on creating sounds that are functional and yet pleasent to the ear.
As one of the sound artists says, "a car needs the right soundtrack for maximum driving pleasure" and he's got a point - not only do the sounds a car makes need to be of a high quality, but also the unwanted sounds need to be removed. I've often thought this after stepping out of a nice car and enjoying the clunk of the door closing - automotive sound design is very similar to user experience design for the web in the sense that if it's done right then it's pleasantly ambient.
At BMW it has become such an exact science that 14 sound artists work on creating sounds that are functional and yet pleasent to the ear.
As one of the sound artists says, "a car needs the right soundtrack for maximum driving pleasure" and he's got a point - not only do the sounds a car makes need to be of a high quality, but also the unwanted sounds need to be removed. I've often thought this after stepping out of a nice car and enjoying the clunk of the door closing - automotive sound design is very similar to user experience design for the web in the sense that if it's done right then it's pleasantly ambient.
London’s Oyster Card Tidal Flow
Excellent map animation from Oliver O’Brien that visualises the touch ins and outs of Oyster cards, London's travel cards. Originally created for the “Sense and the City” exhibition at the London Transport Museum, which ran from Summer 2011 to Spring 2012, this animation powerfully illustrates the flow of London's population towards its centre as people commute in to work.
The in/out numbers are for each 10-minute interval. For stations where the in/out numbers are roughly equal at that time, the colour is white. Red stations indicate a strong flow into the network and green stations show a predominately outward flow. The Oyster card data was supplied by Transport for London and a version of this animation was created and shown at the London Transport Museum during its "Sense and the City" exhibition in 2011/2. The video here is a screen capture of a OpenLayers map which was produced by me at UCL CASA for the exhibition. The background map is based on data from Ordnance Survey Open Data (Crown Copyright) and OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Background imagery created using Mapnik.
The in/out numbers are for each 10-minute interval. For stations where the in/out numbers are roughly equal at that time, the colour is white. Red stations indicate a strong flow into the network and green stations show a predominately outward flow. The Oyster card data was supplied by Transport for London and a version of this animation was created and shown at the London Transport Museum during its "Sense and the City" exhibition in 2011/2. The video here is a screen capture of a OpenLayers map which was produced by me at UCL CASA for the exhibition. The background map is based on data from Ordnance Survey Open Data (Crown Copyright) and OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Background imagery created using Mapnik.
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