At this year’s DICE 2010 Expo, Carnegie Mellon’s Jesse Schell gave a fantastic presentation that starts with why Facebook *shouldn’t* work in the way that it does and extrapolates forward into a half-creepy and half-inspiring vision for the embodied internet, the network of things, the culture of games and the SPIMEworld to come.

Via dvice.com.

24,000 color LED, plus a couple of ipod batteries guarantees you’ll stand out in the crowd:

Special effects typically are a feature of the runaway show — not the dresses themselves. The Galaxy Dress, on the other hand, is one spectacular special effect — the most dramatic evolution in 21st-century fashion.

24000 full color LEDs, measuring a mere 2 by 2 mm in size, were used to create this mesmerizing dress. The circuitry itself is hand embroidered on a layer of silk in a fashion that permits it to stretch, allowing the LED bedazzled fabric to drape with fluidity over the body.

To fuel the LED fabric, a few iPOD batteries illuminate the silhouette for 30 minutes to an hour.

Additional layers of silk chiffon diffuse the light, giving the gown a colorful jellyfish-like transparency .

When the digital patterns fade and the silhouette grows dark, more than 4000 hand-applied Swarovski crystals add sparkle and glitter to the gown.

Take a look at the dress in action:

Link and video from Syuzi at fashioningtech.com. Besides a very pretty pattern to display, a person could run a personalized message or potentially sell advertising space.

The Nokia N900 ad, creepy future and all. Via engadget.com.

Link and photo via medgadget.com.

From inventorspot.com:

Closed, a jean brand that provides designer styles based in Hamburg, has launched a denim vending prototype machine in Florence, Italy to see how people embrace jeans-on-the-go. If the concept seems to take off, the idea is that it will be setup in train stations, bus stations and airports around Europe so those jet-lagged and unclean can find themselves in a new and clean pair of jeans.

From MIT news:

The ubiquitous barcodes found on product packaging provide information to the scanner at the checkout counter, but that’s about all they do. Now, researchers at the Media Lab have come up with a new kind of very tiny barcode that could provide a variety of useful information to shoppers as they scan the shelves — and could even lead to new devices for classroom presentations, business meetings, videogames or motion-capture systems.

The new system, called Bokode, is based on a new way of encoding visual information, explains Media Lab Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, who leads the lab’s Camera Culture group. Until now, there have been three approaches to communicating data optically: through ordinary imaging (using two-dimensional space), through temporal variations such as a flashing light or moving image (using the time dimension), or through variations in the wavelength of light (used in fiber-optic systems to provide multiple channels of information simultaneously through a single fiber).

From pinktentacle.com:

Spotted at the International Stationery and Office Supply Fair, this eye-catching digital signage system consists of a 0.3-millimeter-thick high-luminance rear-projection film (Vikuiti Rear Projection Film developed by 3M) applied to a 3-millimeter-thick glass substrate cut into the shape of a woman. A rear projector beams video onto the film, whose microbead-arrayed surface produces a crisp, brilliant image viewable from any angle, even in brightly lit environments.

From the movie ‘They Live’

Yesterday’s Buzz Bin Blog has a pretty interesting article about applying the rules from Dale Carnagie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People” to social networking.  I think it’s of particular interest because the rules they lay out echo my own oft-repeated mantra of “treat conversation on the internet like you treat conversation in real life”.

Of course there’s a focus on marketing and conversation as marketing to both the blog entry (and the book itself) but as much as I sometimes get grumpy in the presence of a marketing-based approach to communications, the same rules that help you sell yourself and your ideas to others can also create better and more stable lines of communication — maximizing the bandwith of your “Friend” connections on various social networks.

Also?  I want “It’s 140 characters, not a debate club” on a goddamned t-shirt.

Win People to Your Way of Thinking
10.The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
11.Show respect for the other person’s opinion. Never say, “You’re wrong.”
12.If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
13.Begin in a friendly way.
14.Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.
15.Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
16.Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
17.Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
18.Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
19.Appeal to the nobler motives.
20.Dramatize your ideas.
21.Throw down a challenge.

Actions to Win: LinkedIn & Facebook

Create a group to engage thought leaders, interesting parties. Ask their opinions.

If logic/position is not factual, ask them how they came to that position.

Don’t say they’re wrong, yet state your facts. Ask them what they think.

Socratic method is a great way to engage. Sometimes writing out logic in an online group helps expose and address weaknesses.

Admit & amend wrongs

Challenge people to come up with answers.

Acknowledge and seriously weigh responses on any of these issues.

In areas of conflicting opinion, ask people to find a compromise.

Give credit to anyone who contributes to ideas used.

Actions to Win on Twitter

Engage in a dialogue on meaningful issues.

Remember, Twitter is public. Let folks save face.

Admit and amend wrongs.

Don’t flame, rather ask and state your dialogue.

Give people an out. It’s 140 characters, not a debate club.

Look for the positive result, and celebrate it. Laud your conversation partners

From Urban Prankster:

This past Saturday over 120 illegal billboards were white-washed and covered with art in New York City by a team of volunteers and artists. The guerrilla operation was organized by The Public Ad Campaign over the past four months.

via Laughing Squid

Improv’ed poster mash-ups armed with just a razor and his mind; meet Poster Boy:

via MAKE | Wooster Collective

From GIZMODO:

Messing with ads in subways is becoming an artform, but this “Photoshopping” of ads in Berlin takes things to the next level by creating a Photoshop interface with stickers. This is pitch-perfect adbusting right here.

That’s just brilliant..

More photos here.

An innovative marketing scheme or a life-saving advertisement? All of the above:

Link via makezine.com.

Quite a powerful image, produced for HSBC by Ogilvy & Mather Mumbai ad agency in India.

via Neatorama

Via scaryideas.com.

From scaryideas.com.

From the Origonian’s coverage of Esozone:

They call “Esozone: the other tomorrow” a festival, but don’t expect corn dogs and Ferris wheels. Fringe thinkers, visionary artists and occult musicians from around the world will gather at Watershed, a rambling, ramshackle building near Sellwood for a weekend of … well … the inexplicable.

Noah Mickens, who will take part in the festivities, defines it this way: “Esozone is an exhibition of scientists, philosophers, magicians and performance artists, gathered together by a subculture of young radicals who don’t recognize the distinction between the four.”

    Esozone: the Other Tomorrow opens Friday in Portland, Oregon.   Where else can you participate in a “show and tell” of Mad Science and Occult Technology  one day and discuss 2012 or hear Hecate perform the next?  It promises to be an interesting event.

    Also:  I note because people keep asking me, I won’t be there to cover the event, sadly.   But I’m sure there will be at least a few of our readers there.   

From Pink Tentacle:

Throughout October, selected test participants will be able to receive and view digital content such as movie stills and trailers simply by holding their NFC-compatible phones (containing NFC-USIM cards) next to the smart posters. Along with the digital content, users also receive an access code that, when transferred to a compatible Hitachi HDTV at home, allows them to view a WALL-E trailer in high definition (via Hitachi’s content distribution service).

The tests, which are designed to help the companies evaluate the effectiveness and potential of NFC smart posters as a promotional medium, could be a sign of things to come in the field of poster advertising. Should NFC smart posters become cheap and easy to produce, they have the potential to replace the ubiquitous QR (2D) code that commonly appears in Japanese advertising posters. NFC is seen as more convenient than QR code because the user does not have to scan a code and visit a separate website to view the data. Instead, digital content can be accessed directly with a simple swipe of the phone.

I am very curious to see how these work in the field, and since I will be over there in a month I can find out (hooray!).

We have had billboards with data in Australia for three years now, and I am sure they are elsewhere too. So what is different about this Near Field Communication? Is there some thin electronics being printed into the poster? More investigation is clearly required.

From the Times Online:

Emily…was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated.

Researchers…started with a video of an employee talking. They then broke down down the facial movements down into dozens of smaller movements, each of which was given a ‘control system’.

The team at Image Metrics…then recreated the gestures, movement by movement, in a model. The aim was to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical.

“Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real,” Mike Starkenburg, chief operating officer of Image Metrics, said.

Watch the video and judge for yourself!