Ever find yourself standing at a bus stop, starring at a poster for the latest Hollywood Blockbuster, and wondering “well, looks exciting, but what’s it all about?!“? ViPR Visual Search, developed by Evolutionary Robotics, promises an answer. Snap the cover of a CD, DVD or book with your camera phone, and it will analyse it and return a description, YouTube link and iTunes store link. Presumably it could recognise (or be programmed to recognise) the film poster too, saving you the trouble of such hassles as typing the film title into a search engine and selecting a suitable result.

It’s already on 3 million phones, and is soon coming as an app for the iPhone
through the App Store, which is fast looking set to be an important way of popularising such innovations.

See demo above

Cogapp was recently accepted onto Apple’s official iPhone Developer Program, so we’ve been thinking a lot about the potential for the device, and technology like ViPR, in our field. This got me wondering….

How about implementing this in a museum, so information, visitor reviews
and audio guides can be activated just by pointing and snapping? How about a
children’s version with alternative, child-friendly content? It would be an easy, playful and really rather useful way of accessing information when and where curiosity arises.

Thinking bigger - what if major art galleries could collaborate on a database, so that when you come across famous works of art you can find out where they are currently on display? It would keep up to date with the movements of famous pieces from one gallery to another, and as you leaf through that book in school or on someone’s coffee table, you immediately know where you might have to go to see the piece in the flesh.

As technology like this improves, and more and more people start to own capable devices, the possibilities continue to multiply. It’s going to be exciting to see how and where such things start appearing. Snap snap!

A few weeks ago the Victoria & Albert Museum opened the doors to its new Jewellery Gallery. The impressive William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery boasts 3500 jewels from the V&As collection, focussed principally on the last 800 years of European jewellery. The opening night attracted around 1500 people. Not surpising when you see some of the amazing objects out on display (behind heavily fortified glass of course).

The opening night was also a big moment for Cogapp, as we had designed and built three interactive kiosks to allow visitors to search the large collection and find out more about the objects. The ‘Search the Jewellery Gallery’ kiosks let visitors find specific jewels, or explore the collection by applying interchangeable filters such as ‘Material’ or ‘Location’ to pull together custom user-specified groups of objects.

The software also features a deeply zoomable interface that allows the very close inspection of each object’s detail. Given the small scale of some of the pieces, and the fact they must be placed behind glass, this function plays an important part in allowing visitors to really inspect and examine the exquisite detail many of the jewels feature.

We made a video of the interactive in action, as the screenshots can’t quite convey everything. Do follow the link and take a look….

Time for a nice cool cocktail, mixed from the finest liqueurs of our internal blog. Here are a few of the things we’ve been drinking, I mean thinking, about recently:

Biggest drawing in the world
Spotted by Tristan

Makes our Journey On GPS drawing look tiny, but then we’re a bit suspicious of all the curls in this one…

White glove tracking
Spotted by Joe

http://www.whiteglovetracking.com/

Internet users collaboratively helped isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. This took 72 hours. The data was then released into the digital wild for people to play with. The results were great.

Got to love the Giant White Glove idea:

Human Brain Cloud
Spotted by Gavin

The Human Brain Cloud is a massively multiplayer word association “game”. A kind of  cross between a tag cloud, the Dictionary and Mallett’s Mallet. Badombom…ping!

It’s interesting because it might help us think about the links users see between different words, plus it’s funny because it asks you to say the first thing that comes in your head when someone says “BLABBY” to you.

iPhone as remote trackpad
Spotted by Joe

http://www.touchpadpro.com

Inflatable New York street art
Spotted by Joe

That’s all for now, we hope you found it refreshing. More coming very soon.

Following Ian’s distillation of our internal blog a few weeks ago, here are some more delicacies we wanted to share with the wider world. A useful forum for ideas, observations and mind-boggling curiosities, our internal blog is sometimes just too good to keep to ourselves…

Here’s a peek; and expect more soon.

Zoomable Interfaces
Spotted by Joe
Does the Internet take advantage of how humans best process information? An interesting article in Newsweek suggests that scrolling and linking are inferior methods of taking in information when compared to zooming, which comes far more naturally. This observation has not been lost on technology giants and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, who are rapidly trying to develop effective zoomable interfaces. The obvious example is the iPhone, but also look at Deep Fish, and more importantly Seadragon (demonstrated at a 2007 TED talk by Blaise Aguera).

Explore the whole universe!
Spotted by Tim
Talking of TED, the highly regarded Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences, Tim spotted a recent talk by Ray Gould on Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope, which combines feeds from satellites and telescopes and weaves them together into a ‘media-rich, immersive experience.’ Not dissimilar to Google Sky in effect, it’s an interesting example of a zoomable interface as discussed above.

Read all about it
Spotted by Sam
PDFs, while undoubtedly a useful format, seem increasingly incompatible with the modern web surfing experience. The Safari browser allows you to view them without having to open another application, yet the memory-hogging bulky approach is not terribly effective. So where to now? Enter iPaper, a Scribd Platform development, that converts a range of document types into an embedded flash object, much like YouTube converts videos and allows them to be distributed across the internet. It’s lightweight, accessible, and may be an effective solution for organisations looking to make large amounts of text available online.

And finally…
Instead of combining element from two or more sources to create something new, let’s try removing one of the elements from a single source and see what we get. It’s the reverse of a mash-up. Garfield minus Garfield. Spotted by Ian

And how can fashion and technology live in harmony? Meet the iPod suit. Spotted by Gavin.

Digest over; we’ll be back soon with another online stew, cooked to perfection in the Cogapp kitchens.

You will almost certainly have solved one of these in the last month, if not dozens:

The uptake of CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) has been swift and widespread, as they offer a straightforward and directly effective method of determining whether the user is a human or a computer. Their success rests on discovering something humans are extremely good at, and computers are extremely bad at - interpreting the content of images. Until computers get better at doing this, spammers will continue struggling to overcome the CAPTHCA barrier without having to somehow involve organic brain power.

It takes, on average, 10 seconds for a person to solve one before they continue submitting whatever they are submitting. Just quickly enough for it not to become too disruptive or inconvenient, so long as you don’t have to do too many. But what may only be 30 seconds a week for you, is actually 1,050,000 hours a week for mankind. The inventors, Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford, were worried about how much time their creation had begun wasting. Just think what could be done if a year of CAPTCHA-solving time was put to some other use, they recently thought….

Then they had a brilliant idea.

The benefit of computing limitations for spam-stopping is also a frustration for the good honest people who want to digitize the heaps and heaps of written text we cannot yet search, download or cut and paste from. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is used to automatically render printed text as machine-editable text, and has been put to work scanning the millions and millions of pages we want to make digital. But, as Stuart will tell you from his recent experience, it’s a highly imprecise method, returning a mixture of well-rendered passages and absolute nonsense.

Enter the reCAPTHCA Project, turning 150,000 hours of wasted human labour into something dazzlingly efficient and useful. The words that computers can’t figure out when digitising texts become the CAPTCHAs, and we do what we are good at - interpret images. But wait! How will it work as a spam-filter if the makers don’t yet know what the words are?! You translate 2 words - one a designed CAPTCHA, the other a word OCR mangled somewhere. If you get the CAPATCHA right, your answer to the mangled word is returned as being correct. The same word is then given to a few other users to improve the accuracy of the result allowing everyone to help digitise the world’s written history, something otherwise predicted to take 400 years.

Well done, aren’t you clever?

Shelter, the charity for housing and homelessness, are asking their supporters to build a virtual city as a fundraising initiative. The site has been live since September and is gradually gaining interest.

As contextual research for our snowflake project we had been looking at simple and engaging applications that have the potential to go viral. This seems to tick quite a few boxes - it’s playful, easy to grasp, a call to action, and has scope for personal customisation.

So how does it all work?

Each grid area as above (a neighbourhood) is divided into plots. Any SimCity enthusiasts (I was once obsessed) should be able to grasp the idea immediately. You select your plot, register, then choose a property to buy - houses are £10-20, department stores are £500 and skyscrapers are £1000. Beyond that, in a very canny (and fun) twist, businesses (or rich individuals) can have custom properties designed, with prices starting at £1500. Work in the Gherkin? Get your boss to donate… it’s good PR!

Once your house is built you can add your message, a photo and a link. It’s the critical viral step - get your friend to build a house next door to yours (keep up with the Joneses?) You can see ours here.

As the space fills up, the success of the project is quantifiable, and your contribution remains for all to see. The coherence of this, and the clear logical relationship with the campaign’s real intention, is an imaginative and effective way of visualizing the issues the charity confronts.

The site was built by Cimex in London.

It almost feels too effervescent to call an ‘installation’. Urban Echo, an ongoing project by Christopher Baker, Laura Baker and J. Anthony Allen, lightly graces the wall of a building in Copenhagen, fleetingly reflecting the thoughts of those passing by before they fragment and fizz skyward.

A playful example of Interactive Architecture (an emerging area blogged with great zeal by Ruairi Glynn here), it’s simple yet infectious. People are encouraged to answer questions or send messages from their mobile phones, and these then float into the projection, bouncing cleverly off windows as they drift up like bubbles.

It’s an incredibly expressive examination of our relationship with public spaces. We interact with buildings each day - seeing, passing, touching, entering, exiting - both as individuals and as communities. Creating a space where relationships can be visualised, where a silent building can ask “what are you hearing?”, and we can answer, is a warmly provocative way of exploring what architecture means to us, and what we mean to architecture.

A well-executed, beautiful and engaging use of technology. If only more such things might interrupt our routine walks around our cities.