Convergence Culture

I started out thinking of doing this exploration on internet TV. It has been an interesting journey which has lead into the convergence culture. MIT has a Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) that explores the ways the business landscape is changing in response to the growing integration of content and brands across media platforms and the increasingly prominent roles that consumers are playing in shaping the flow of media.
You can access their weblog where it discusses current topics such as: Encouraged by the success of Heroes 360, an expansive transmedia campaign to enable viewer interaction with Heroes (via an "interactive" graphic novel, an ARGesque campaign, and so on), NBC is expanding their 360-approach to television to another of their biggest hits... The Office.
In addition to making extra content available on digital platforms, "The Office 360" will allow online users of NBC's Web site to create their own branches of the comedy's fictional Dunder-Mifflin paper company with different challenges to complete. The branches could be integrated into a network episode of the show.
And
The show Bones was launching a particularly interesting storyline and running a series of ads that this week's mystery would provide viewers the chance to begin solving the case before the show ever aired. The primary characters involved in this particular case would have their own MySpace pages that would contain some relative information and which would allow viewers the chance to start investigating the case prior to the show's beginning.
Society is becoming very internet savvy and we are sophisticated. We are now bored with just static websites. If you have a clever video you can have your five minutes of fame. Youtube.com is a good example of that.
Another new video-sharing site, LiveLeak, based in London, has positioned itself as a source for reality-based fare like footage of Iraq battle scenes and grisly accidents. Last week, popular clips on the site included one of an agitated man in Muslim dress on a fast-moving treadmill and video of an American A-20 aircraft bombing Taliban forces in Afghanistan.
The possibilities for success are greater today with the media platforms available today. Reality TV shows have helped to foster appreciation for the common man not just big screen movie stars.
I know a race car driver who started a little podcast on his website. http://www.ronnava.com/ It became so popular he now has major sponsors and has become heavily involved with the ASA.

Artificial Intelligence and Flash (New Media)

I found some interesting websites related to AI and Flash. AI is used in many Flash games, but now it is being used to make "avatars" or "intelligent" animated characters for cell phones, ebay listings, chat rooms, inclusion on web pages and many other uses.
Site Pal uses the avatars as translators and for advertising applications. At The John Lennon Project they are recreating John Lennon's personality using AI and his visage using Flash.
At Personalityforge.com you can join a free community where you can create and program your own chat bot which will interact with other community members. Make sure to look to the right column of the main page and enter the Hall of Fame to chat with some interesting characters.

Personality Forge also contains a fun article on an
AI robot who looks like Einstein. I think there is a good possibility that Artificial Intelligence and Flash avatars could become integrated into household appliances, monitoring systems (such as security systems) and other robotic devices. The avatars could assist users operate the systems, but could also personalize and humanize users' experiences with the devices.

communicatorworld.com

communicatorworld.com is an Agency that is only 5 years old.
They work for some top brand company's. They try to release websites
that have energy for their clients. I think they do a great job with their use of flash in their website.
Everything flows and give you energy.

A Handful of Start-up Ideas

The web is so interesting. I put in New Media Multimedia into the Google box and of course came up with a whole enormous list of pages to look... I wanted to go someplace new and interesting - the first few pages I looked at were pretty dull.... But then I hit upon this site...

EyeJot: Video Email
And I thought - wow - video email could be pretty cool. Especially since it said you could use it just like regular email. It s not like video conferencing. You make your video and send it. The receiver opens it whenever they want to....
Eyejot is a company that hopes to merge email with video chat. They provide a free application that lets you send video to anyone as long as you have a webcam. The files can be added to MySpace or viewed on an Apple video ipod. It works with any web browser, including mobile phones. Unlike video conferencing which must take place all at one time, video email can be sent and viewed at anytime. The only special software required is Adobe Flash.
Eyejot is just a start-up company so hopefully they can expand their product without being swallowed or put out of business by the big guys (ie Google).
Anyway they had some links to news articles on their page and I ended up checking a few out... which led me to ...

Vringo.com: Video Greetings
This may be the next gimmick on the new wave of technology. Similar to phone ringtones you might soon be able to buy the movie clip of your choice to use as your video phone greeting. Video greetings could be a much more personable expression of who you are.
Video greetings - could be fun. Instead of just expressing yourself with your musical taste - what better to express yourself with than a clip from your favorite movie? A whole new money making scheme could unfold. The ringtone market has slowed down considerably... the video clip market would swoop in and stir things up again. Ok to tell you the truth when I was reading about Vringo I thought I was reading about eyejot... oops - they just had a photo on the page... OK... so I returned to the original eyejot site and checked out some blogs... They had a real nice one all about themselves - which unfortunately several people had commented on - saying that eyejot was too difficult that you should try Freegabmail instead. So what the heck - we are cruisin the web here - let go check them out.

Freegabmail: Video Email Gabfests
Ewww - totally twitchy site... but you can jump right in (if you have a webcam) and make a video to send to all your friends (or whomever you like). All they need to have is Flash installed on their computers and they can view your video work of art/live conversation. No signing up - just shoot and go for it. This product is compatible with most email clients or webmail services. Anyway they had a link to a Q&A page which - thank goodness - was not twitchy like the opening page. Gab Mail Q&A It had a lot of useful information on it. Basically right now there are two types of service. GabMail and GabJam. GabMail can be sent to however many people you want - just like regular email. The messages and video can be forwarded and they are threaded together.
GabJam takes it to another level. Once it is started, anyone who receives the email will be able to see every video that is on it right now and every video that is added later. It can go between thousands of people. Become an enormous thread of video mail/information. Sounds pretty crazy and unwieldy to me. Maybe it will be the wave that crashes over me.
Anyway - I will say that it is sort of unfortunate for the eyejot folks that they had that blog that will lead people to other/possibly better software... beware the internet...

Design Exploration

I found a couple of sites that I thought were really good examples of design, even though they are quite different. The first is http://www.michelinman.com/forward, a fun site by Michelin. They took their old mascot and created a fun site in which the design elements further the design goals. The whole site uses the rounded white circles of the Michelin Man himself as a consistent motif. The site also is primarily white and green, with nature sounds in the background (birds, water), aligning Michelin with conservation and environmentally-friendly products.

It's a very relaxed, mellow site. Even the cars racing in the background sound like waves against the shore. The structures are futuristic, placing the company firmly in the future, but warm instead of cool. They also found a few different places to mention the amount of fuel the country would save if everyone drove on Michelin tires (2.6 billion gallons a year). You can link to pages to buy tires or learn about them, but you can also just play around with great graphics and sounds. I could care less about tire brands but maybe I will look for Michelins next time I need tires. :)

The second site I reviewed is http://aisforapple.net. This is an multimedia interactive net art project. It uses music, photos, graphics, and spoken words to create an ambience and a commentary on randomness, good and evil, god, psychoanalysis etc. The artists use a lot of black and white on a large white background to isolate and highlight their work. There are some things that move when you roll over them but the primary interactivity is the path you choose. Each selection you make changes your future selections, kind of like life. You generally can't go back using the Back button either. I thought this was a great philosophical/art site in which all the elements contributed to the overall effect and message.

SFMOMA - art and the internet.

My final blog submittal is about a web site for San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, or SFMOMA for short. This is a site sponsored by the museum that has been designed by Intel. It explores multimedia art and the internet.

The site is visually very attractive, with lots of wonderful flash effects. There are many links, and you could spend a lot of time exploring all of the possibilities. My computer is a little "sick" and I need to take it to the computer doctor, so not all of it worked for me. But the basic site worked just fine, and the flash effects were well done, so I thought it deserved a place in our class blog.

The site gives many hints on navigation. Among some of the many flash effects, the main button has random, small, flashing red squares moving around it. After a couple of minutes a few of them begin to "pop" and become black. It is an invitation to roll over them. They each open a window to a quote from a famous personality - just a little diversion if you care to try it. This main button can be dragged around the site. (It tells you how to do it.) There are no scroll bars - you just position your mouse either near the top or near the bottom of columns. Rows of patterns will slide and enlarge as you mouse over them - then text will appear from the rows and expand into links. There are nine links that pop out as you roll over the main mouse button. All of this text looks extruded. The type in the columns is nice and large. Karl might have a bone to pick with how they present the column type as there are no margins, but I liked the way it looked. Polly

Three-dimensional printers +

Three-dimensional printers have been seen in industrial design shops for about a decade. They are used to test part designs for cars, airplanes and other products before they are sent to manufacturing. Once well over $100,000 each, such machines can now be had for $15,000. In the next two years, prices are expected to fall further, putting the printers in reach of small offices and even corner copy stores.
The next frontier will be the home. One company that wants to be the first to deliver a 3-D printer for consumers is Desktop Factory, started by IdeaLab, a technology incubator here. The company will start selling its first printer for $4,995 this year.
Three-dimensional printers, often called rapid prototypers, assemble objects out of an array of specks of material, just as traditional printers create images out of dots of ink or toner. They build models in a stack of very thin layers, each created by a liquid or powdered plastic that can be hardened in small spots by precisely applied heat, light or chemicals.
Colleges and high schools are buying them for design classes. Dental labs are using them to shape crowns and bridges. Doctors print models from CT scans to help plan complex surgery. Architects are printing three-dimensional models of their designs. And the Army Corps of Engineers used the technology to build a topographical map of New Orleans to help plan reconstruction.


Recently Craighead Research Group at Corenll University reported their next “nano” breakthrough. They created a so-called “Nano-Lamp” - a microscopic collection of light-emitting fibers with dimensions of only a few hundred nanometers.
According to the research article published in “Nano Letters”, the scientists were able to create one of the smallest manmade source of light that world has ever seen. The light-emitting spots on the fibers measure less than 250 nm in diameter which makes this light source smaller than the wavelength of light that they emit - 600nm. The fibers are made from a polymer with ruthenium-based molecules using a complex technique called - electrospinning - when a small droplet of polymer solution is placed on a metal needle tip followed by application of a high voltage between the tip and gold electrodes in a silicon base placed a few millimeters away.
A light-emitting nanofiber spans gold electrodes that are 500 nm apart and ruthenium-based molecules embedded in the fiber light up when exposed to an electric field of 3-4 V. An interesting fact is that when researches applied a high voltage of 100 volts, the orange light was bright enough to be seen by a human eye in the dark.



The design process for vSPLASH:

DesignXperts (DX) sell websites direct as well as through their resellers.

DX handles the sales, payments, contracts etc.
After the sales process is over, DX Sales rep passes on the account to the Design Support group rep.
The Design Support group rep takes all details from the customer like the logo, homepage structure, links, reference sites, preferred colors etc.
The Design Support group rep then enters this information into the project tool provided by vSplash

DX assigns a project manager at its end for all interactions with vSplash

vSplash then takes over the design process and builds a custom layout for the website and presents the information back into the tool.

The entire communication process between vSplash and DX is managed through the tool. Of course, other channels of communication are also open between both the partners and the project managers on both the sides regularly interact to enhance the relationship and the business.

Once the custom layout is approved by the customer, the DX rep messages it into the tool.

The vSplash designers then start building the complete site.

The due date for the site is presented back in the tool so that the DX rep knows the status of the project at all times.

Once the design work is complete, it is presented back into the tool.

DX then presents it to the customer and hosts it on approval.

The project is closed in the tool.

The project managers at both ends can see the project status of all projects from the dashboard. This gives a complete production pipeline snapshot.

ryandesignstudio process
One of the questions we often get is "How do you come up with the designs for my site?" or "How do I know you will design something that I will like?". Well, I'll try to clarify that here by going through the design process.
The first thing we do when contracted to come up with a new site design is to send the client a questionnaire with a number of detailed questions. These questions range from "Do you have an existing site/logo/marketing material?" to "What is your target market?". Essentially we are looking for not only an idea of what the client pictures in their mind for the new site, but also what their store is selling and to whom. The more information the client provides up front, the closer our initial concepts are to what they envision.One of the advantages of hiring a professional designer, whether it be for a web site or a new home, is that we are trained to take someone's vision and turn it into something tangible. Once we receive the information from the client, we look at their existing graphics, their target market, their competition, their products and their thoughts on what they want the site to look like. We then take that information and translate it in to some initial design concepts in image format, usually just the 'home' page of the site. This gives the client the overall feel for what the site could look like. The initial two concepts we provide are usually pretty different, with one concept being exactly what the client asks for, but also one that is 'outside the box' so that they won't get tunnel vision and see only one possible solution.We always ask that the client be brutally honest with their feedback, as it is much easier to revise a concept if we know exactly what they love/hate about it. About 90% of the time we are pretty close to what the client wants with the first concepts, but sometimes it take a few rounds to get to the point where they are 100% happy. We simply adjust the concepts based on the client's feedback, or if we are completely off base, we start from scratch. We don't actually start the implementation of the design until the client fully approves the design concept, as it is much easier (and less expensive) to change the concept in image format as opposed to changing code on a working site.
Once the design is approved, we start implementing the design into X-Cart. This is where we will also work with the client on the 'interior' pages of the site - category, product detail, cart, checkout and static pages all use the same basic framework of the design, but are arranged differently depending on the client's preferences. We use a highly modified version of X-Cart, so the checkout and category pages in particular are completely different than the default X-Cart templates.
When hiring a designer (even if it isn't us!) there is never such a thing as too much information. Here is a simple checklist of things that are helpful for a designer when creating a new image for your site:
- Existing site/logo/marketing material- Color palates you prefer- Other web sites you like/dislike and why- Navigation structure you would like to use, both for products and non-product pages- Who your closes competitors are- Who your target market is- An idea of what kinds of products you are selling- The 'feeling' you are trying to convey to your customers- Your company philosophy/story/personality- What features you want to use on the site (bestsellers, newsletters, featured products, etc)- Any other details that make your company unique

New Media Exploration - Technology

A Mind Reading Interface now available.

Immersion still the future of Multimedia.

This blog entry is indirectly related to my final project:

Visitors from the 9th Dimension.

Once in a dream, I saw humanity as a pure energy life form of only conscious thought. We had evolved into an interconnected collective comprised of free individual thought and we existed forever in Oneness. You'll say, well,... that's the (promise of an) Afterlife, or a sequence from the Matrix. Maybe that's true, I don't know. (Check out previous link, it has a cool Flash movie of the Matrix and its characters).
This is where Faith and Science touch asymptotically.

String Theory, predicts existence of Parallel Universes, or real dimensions beyond the four (L, W, D, & T) of Space-Time, and may be proven valid after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland becomes operational, in 2007. Think about it, we create thoughts from feelings and emotions in the four dimensional world. But where do thoughts go? They influence and become part of our mind. Our mind surrounds us and stretches out beyond the four dimensions of the material universe we know. As human evolution continues, our infinite minds would tear free from the shell that it once inhabited. It is my hope that we reach this point even though it may take millions of years, or maybe never...

I saw in my dream that the beings of light energy had total transformation power over matter. A simple thought could physically change a locomotive into a flower. The ultimate Philosopher's Stone realized. Even though you'd think what would be the purpose of a locomotive at that stage of evolution.J We could travel freely between galaxies just by a mere thought. No need for warp drives or opening worm holes to cover distances of millions of light-years.
We could be anywhere at once.

Maybe the Internet (a Virtual Reality form of interconnectedness) and new technologies that allow brainwaves to control your computer, and thus also multimedia applications, is the onset of this gradual change. A new mind reading interface developed by Neurosky.com may be the beginning of a new breed of man, when we cause material change to happen with just pure thought alone. We may develop a higher level of consciousness and exercise our innate psychic powers such as telekinesis, remote viewing, material creation by thought, that will become part of our evolution as we progress to use these types of technologies.

It's like riding a bike. At first you're uncertain and need stabilizers, then after a while your parents remove the stabilizers. You may wobble and even fall. But with practice you develop a better equilibrium and it becomes a part of you. The experience is engrained in your mind and you know how to ride a bike for the rest of your life.

The same could work for a mind reading interface. As our minds learn to control machines by thought, new neural pathways are created in the brain, which is really a neuro-transceiver (organic Wi-Fi?), a mind-to-body interface that transmits brain waves into the aether to interact with the mind. The mind (not the brain) is now programmed to perform this way. After a while we can take off our mind reader visors and manifest without them. This ability becomes genetically encoded in our DNA and passed on to the next generations.

A new dawn is breaking for mankind...

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flash and 3d

Triworks.net was founded in 2001 and since then they have been developing internet solutions for websites, print and other interactive media, such as, multimedia CDs, intranets and CMS. They use a lot of 3D animation in their site and make 3D models. I really like navigating this site and looking at the sites Triworks made. This site has given me a lot of ideas for my final's web page like their music player. Well I hope you go to this site.

http://www.samorost.net/samorost2

Samorost is a great mix of movie, story, and game that is fantastically fun and entertaining. You get introduced to the storyline, then you get to navigate through levels as the story continues. The graphics and textures really help to make the game successful, everything has different textures and each scene is visually unique and interesting.

The only product being sold is the game itself, which has been cleverly marketed by allowing the first half of the levels to be free and online. This is smart because Samorost is a relatively small game, even a mediocre gamer can finish it in under an hour. You don't have to go purchase the game or read the back of a box to see if you'll like the game.

Nothing about the game is really "new" as far as media goes, but I think that a lot of unique things were done with Samorost which has boosted its success immensely. The graphics, puzzles, interesting story, creative solutions, and easy access has helped to create a product that appeals to a wide range of customers. The entire product can be created using Flash, creativity, and a lot of coffee and pizza. As the entire game is online and uses no language whatsoever, anyone anywhere can play. It's very beneficial to have a product that needs no resources and has no production costs. Certainly this isn't a game like Sim City, World of Warcraft, or Grand Theft Auto, but an individual could make this game. I think that as the entertainment industry grows individuals are having an even greater impact upon it; one designer or artist can create something.