Very Interesting Debate: Who Owns the Advertising Space in an Augmented Reality World?

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Excerpt from mashable post - worth reading the whole!

"John C. Havens is EVP of social media at Porter Novelli and the author of Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build their Brand. He speaks regularly about augmented reality and emerging technology.

Look up in Times Square and you’ll see the earliest version of a banner ad. Real estate developers pay massive sums to secure air rights for the empty space above buildings. Monetizing by building up (as opposed to out) in crowded areas like Manhattan, they also get to dictate what advertisements appear in the air that they control.

Augmented reality (AR) has made it possible for this same paradigm of advertising to exist via your smartphone. Multiple apps feature the ability for ads to appear on your mobile screen as miniature virtual billboards assigned to GPS coordinates. Brands can tag the real world via this “Outernet,” and if they sponsor the AR browser you’re using, in essence they own the virtual air rights (VARs) for everything you see.

Eyebrawl

So what’s to keep multiple brands from owning the same virtual space? Currently, nothing. Services like Tagwhat let anyone create video, photo or text messages they can attach to specific coordinates. But just like the desktop web, top AR browsers like Junaio and Layar are becoming augmented equivalents of Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Smart brands will also encourage the use of a preferred browser via value-added incentives for users. Imagine the year 2013, where the official SXSW mobile app is enhanced with AR browser Junaio. Attendees will download the app, as it’s the only way to see exclusive video content available on the virtual banners behind speakers. Brands will sponsor the app, and attendees will be entertained between panels with clickable content they can share with their social graph.

Google’s Vision for Goggles...."

read the full post:

http://mashable.com/2011/06/06/virtual-air-rights-augmented-reality/

Oh. Wow. Raising the Bar on Cottage: Recycled Materials Cottage by Juan Luis Martínez Nahuel | Design Milk

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From the original post:

"Located in Chile, this cottage by Juan Luis Martínez Nahuel used materials from other homes to create a new home for a client.

The reused materials included glazed doors from a 1960s Horacio Borgheresi house, eucalyptus and native rauli parquet floors of a house of the 70s by Larraín, Swinburn and Covarrubias, and commercial laminated beams and steel pieces used for a temporary exhibition. A great result and a cozy-looking residence..."

Read more at Design Milk: http://design-milk.com/recycled-materials-cottage-by-juan-luis-martinez-nahue...

Good Post from The Player's Side of the Screen: Plotting and Paradigm: How to Open a Story

I realized something important about the design of the plot. Whenever Bond stumbled across an initial lead, it was because something went wrong. A courier got noticed who wasn't supposed to be, a drop was made sloppily, leaving room for him to track. If you think about it, the exact same thing happens in a great many Alfred Hitchcock films: the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time mucks an entire plan up.

In essence, it's all about an organization. Every plan, every conspiracy, every villain operates through structures that work just like machines. To accomplish Objective X, parts A, B, and C need to come about, and each has a specific mechanism that makes it tick. If the plan is a recurring one, like a Mafia's money laundering scheme, then the machinery is more or less regular.

And every machine has parts that can break down. For example...

Beautiful Short by Chris Abbas remixes NASA footage: CASSINI MISSION

Chris Abbas' description:

"I truly enjoy outer space. It's absolutely amazing that we now have the ability to send instruments out into the void of the universe to observe all sorts of interesting things. Asteroids! Moons! Planets! Dark matter! This is the perfect opportunity for a Carl Sagan quote:

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

The footage in this little film was captured by the hardworking men and women at NASA with the Cassini Imaging Science System. If you're interested in learning more about Cassini and the on-going Cassini Solstice Mission, check it out at NASA's website:

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/​science/​index.cfm

Track: 2 Ghosts I, Ghosts I – IV by Nine Inch Nails

ghosts.nin.com/​"

Very Cool: Ergodic Cinema / A Garage Collaborative Experiment on Production Notes

From the site:

"Toward the end of 2010 fellow Mubian Anonymouse began a thread to recruit members to write a collaborative script, a script that anyone could make a movie from, from high school students to professional filmmakers. After continuous discussion about structure, theme, and film pitches, on December 21st, PolarisDiB made the following proposal for structure:

“Wikipedia entry for ergodic literature.” Also it’s linked associated articles for: “Cybertext” and the professor/writer of these concepts: “Espen Aarseth.”

This is what I propose:

Making an Ergodic Cinema, or an Ergodic Movie.

Here is why:

1) Ergodic Cinema: The theme that took off, “moving through”, “travelling,” could be interplayed both structurally and stylistically with the overall content and texts of the movies. Literally, we create a structure of posable deviations from a central narrative, and filmmakers themselves are quite allowed to create their own “offshoots” of the original structure. WE have to produce the first few movements, say, half a dozen short films that revolve around what seems to be a narrative, but which can branch out in any direction. Think The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, except made by multiple artists instead of a single director." -- PolarisDiB

2) Cybertext: Another theme that has seemed to take off quite well in these dicussions is our placement as cyber-collaborators, detached and decentered production units capable of a global scale production but struggling with the viability of pulling our resources together in any meaningful or continuity-edited way. Cybertext fixes this. The short films refer to each other, but not just in terms of allusions but actually in terms of structure. We must create short films that can be seen in any order, thus changing the narrative of the overall project as a whole—these short films should refer or allude to each other in a means that draws the audience to other “chapters” of the story via a visual hyperlink, but without the dead ends or frustrations of an anticlimactic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. The most successful result would be the one where an audience just simply doesn’t know when to end, even though finding its way back to similar videos rewatched, recontextualized in a different part of the narrative.

Issues:

1) Logistics...

2) Design...

3) The Seed of Growth...

The What: Or, Deciding on a Theme..."

Damn Fine Read! Good Day Sunshine For Writers - Forbes via @RyanMcFitz #infdist

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Excerpt from June 6 2011 post by ALAN RINZLER

"This is the best time ever to be a writer.

Especially for those in the vanguard: the self-publishing writers at the cutting edge of the brave new turbulent world of literary art and commerce.

I say that with some authority. As a worker bee from deep within the trenches of the book publishing industry, I can tell you from the inside that we’re living in an era of topsy turvy shifts in the balance of power and major changes in the core business of the book publishing industry.

Authors are steering the ship

What’s emerging is a new paradigm. That was the message loud and clear at Book Expo, the publishing industry’s behemoth annual convention, held recently in New York.

The advent of digital writing and publishing and the spontaneous democratic practice of social networking has in fact revolutionized the book business, challenged and changed how books are written and published irrevocably and forever, and shifted the balance of power from the commercial book publishers to the author.

Yes, you. The authors. The iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, garrulous, shy, outgoing, charming or grouchy writers working at home, courageously facing the blank screen or typewriter paper or yellow pad, getting up early before work or when the kids are still sleeping, up in the attic, down in the basement – you writers now have the upper hand.

Publishers confess they’ve goofed

Here’s why: Book publishers have been very slow to realize this but gradually began to admit that they really didn’t know all that well what they’re doing.

Excellent Post - Reconciling The Tension Between Code and Story - Canalside View

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Excerpt from a longer original post:

"The tension between story and code

The body of academic, popular, and practical literature on the nature and role of storytelling in culture is beyond fulsome. Nobody in their right mind would argue that storytelling as a cultural practice is dead.

But it is clear that we are all struggling with a bit of a problem. Namely the tension between code and story.

At last year’s CAT Conference, Iain Tait spoke about the conflict of working cultures and practices that exists between the storytellers and coders of our industry. Yet I think the issue may run even deeper.

Aristotle's ideas of narrative construction still dominate - consciously or not - much of our thinking. As he argued in his Poetics, a plot is constructed out of a fixed sequence of events; it has a definite beginning and end, is characterized by a sense of wholeness and unity, and a ‘certain definite magnitude’.

The problem is that code allows us to create a vast and ever-evolving wealth of experiences that simply do not play by any of these Aristotelean rules.

Code allows us to create stuff that’s non-linear, rather than having a fixed sequence of events. It allows us to create experiences that are open-ended, rather than finite. It allows us to create worlds in which we are actors and principles. And so on.

If we take the standard writer's definition of story as: 'An engaging character overcomes tremendous obstacles to reach a desired goal', then it’s clear that code allows us to make stuff that just isn’t story.

And so we find ‘coders’ and ‘storytellers’ at best unable to understand each other’s profoundly differing starting points. And worst, we find them glaring at each other over some invisible divide, muttering darkly that They “just don’t get it.”....

read the full post:

http://mweigel.typepad.com/canalside-view/2011/06/code-and-story.html

My comment below:

"nice post - this approach has been the foundation of my teaching and consultation for years- I trace it back (for me) to Lev Manovich pronouncing in Language of New Media that database & story are natural enemies. A flawed approach that fails to understand that we rarely access databases without some frame/algorithm/ question that doesn't already set in motion a narrative potential."

Bookmark! One Designer Shares: How to Use Design to Tell a Story | HOW Design

Pick up the pen
Viewing design as a language and as a way to communicate with people entails great responsibility. Design has the capability of being one of the coolest and most emotional systems for dialogue. If you spend your time just making things look pretty, the language is pointless. You must make sure that you’re not just decorating; there has to be a reason behind your design.

The solution is storytelling. It doesn’t have to be writing in a traditional sense, but defining the design’s message is very important. When you start to think of your design as a story rather than just a creative execution, you’ll find it much easier to recognize and discard gratuitous design. Every element in your composition should add something to the story, or it has to go. This doesn’t mean that you should strive to create dry and unemotional design. On the contrary, the real power of design is the ability to make a message emotional. The trick is to understand how your design affects people. There are so many ways to communicate today and you have a very powerful toolbox; you can simultaneously design posters, websites, video blogs and short films*mdash;all from a single computer. But you can only excel in delivering your message when you understand how to put people in a particular mind-set, which comes from knowing how to capture their attention.

Start with the script
A good way to get started is to put together a creative statement about your project. Do it as if you were ready to present your design to the client, and write a script. What’s the idea and philosophy of the approach? Why is it different and new? Why will people care about it? Actually, why should they pick your idea? (It’s definitely not going to be because you know how to use a computer with Illustrator and Photoshop and can copy trendy graphic styles.)

Coming up with the creative statement can be really challenging. Even though it won’t capture any of the design’s details, it’s about figuring out the essence of your approach—or you won’t have one at all.

You’ll revise it many times as you get additional ideas and insights, but you should get it going right away. When my design firm, Trollbäck + Co., was faced with the task of re-branding the CBS network, the first branding the CBS network, the first thing we did—before any designing started—was flesh out a creative statement. In it, we jotted down all our thoughts on and mapped out our intentions for the project. 

The question that had originally surfaced when we were presented with the project was whether we should market the network itself or focus on its shows. But as we worked through the statement, we could see that the decision was only hard if we insisted that a choice between the two had to be made. Instead, we were able to realize that although the shows are the network’s lifeblood and must be heavily promoted, it’s crucial to market CBS along with them. We believed that only by building equity in CBS as a brand could we expect a positive predisposition toward the programming as a whole.

The next part is to take that strategy and determine the project’s motivation—what purpose is at the heart of the story, what’s your story’s happily ever after? Think about it this way: If you raise a child, telling them, "I’m confident that whatever you set your mind to, you’ll succeed in," there’s going to be a greater likelihood that they’ll grow up believing that and proceed to actualize it. Believing in a product and a project’s success is much the same. Look at HBO: They claimed, "It’s not TV, it’s HBO," at a time when the channel was falling short. But the projection—the end they had in mind, their motivation—worked. It’s ultimately about cause and effect.

read the full post here:

http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/storytelling/

Kat Cizek & NFB launch HIGHRISE DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP PROJECT

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From Kat Cizek's Director's Blog:

"So much of life in the global highrise is hidden from public view, behind concrete walls. Even more invisible are the virtual/internet lives of highrise residents. So what is digital connectivity like in the global highrise?

Just last week, Statistics Canada revealed that “Overall, about 80 per cent of all Canadian households had Internet access in 2010… Almost all the homes with total incomes above $87,000 were connected, while just 54 per cent of households with incomes under $30,000 had access,” according to The Canadian Press (good coverage at cbc.ca too).

That’s quite the Digital Divide. The stats also reveal a discrepancy between urban and rural. But our question is: how does this play out in the suburb highrise? What is the relationship between virtual social networks and the geography of suburbs? What does this mean for the future of a (sub)urban planet? These are questions I have been fascinated with since beginning HIGHRISE, and we are starting to get some early answers this week, as we begin production on our HIGHRISE Digital Citizenship Project. It’s a unique collaboration between our HIGHRISE team, residents in a Toronto Highrise, and a team of academic researchers, led by Prof. Deborah Cowen and Emily Paradis PhD, and connected to the Global Suburbanism MCRI project at York University.

This week, we are working with 14 highrise residents as Peer Researchers, who are going door-to-door with our survey in their highrise building, interviewing their neighbours about digital technologies, their use, access and effects. From the results and discussions that arise with the residents, we hope to gain some baseline knowledge about the state of “digital citizenship” in one building. We hope to build on this data, possibly by doing comparative studies elsewhere in the world, and by going deeper with interviews, focus groups and documentary methods within the building itself. After the first survey session earlier this week, one peer researcher told me she’s been working as a community engagement officer in this building (that she live in) for a while now, but the survey was the first time she got to go into people’s homes to really see residents in their own space...."