Bad Words available on AppStore
My second iPhone App made it to the AppStore yesterday. Find more screens on the project page:
Audi 3d Configurator on 46″ Multi-Touch Display
We managed to port the Audi Surface Application over to a 46″ Multi-Touch Display running Windows 7. As shown in our last video, the original configuration process on Surface featured a physical token which obviously didn’t work out in this scenario.
So, apart from adjusting the configuration handling, the major tasks included to swap the underlying Multi-Touch framework and scaling the app up from 1024×768 to Full HD.
The application was demonstrated at the Windows 7 Release Party in Hamburg.
More impressions @ Emerging Experiences.
Baby Dice available on AppStore
I’m relieved the review phase didn’t come up with any unpleasant surprises and Baby Dice is finally ready for sale. This is certainly not the kind of app that will make me rich, but I’m confident there are some people out there who will like the original idea and concept behind Baby Dice.
The next days I’ll try to come up with a roadmap for the next releases.
The most important features still missing include a way to manage your favourite names, a history (undo) and e-mail / tell-a-friend functionality.
If sales are good enough, I might also switch to a commercial baby name database to improve the results and provide more information about the names. This is supposed to be a long-term project with periodical updates.As promised I’m going to write an article about my thoughts and experiences regarding the development process soon. If you have any additional ideas or feature requests let me know.
Latest Surface Project Showcased at IAA
This year I had the pleasure to spend most of my time working on extraordinary projects so far - each one with a different focus and unique challenges. Since there was lots of research and secrecy involved I’m relieved there is at least one project which made it to a public release.
We’ve been working together with Realtime Technology AG to create an outstanding car configurator which was showcased at IAA 2009.Read more about the project in my article on Emerging Experiences.
Baby Dice (In Review)
The idea behind Baby Dice originated over 2 years ago. There was this idea of a game of dice which lets the user find baby names in a playful experience. My coworker and I sat together working out the interaction design and we created a rough prototype in flash. Months passed and there were few approaches where we tried to give this little idea a platform, but it just didn’t work out.
I almost forgot about it until I got my first iPhone three months ago and realized that this is the chance to gain more experience with mobile development. This is where it became obvious that Baby Dice on the iPhone would be a perfect start: It’s relatively simple to code and fun to use. As it turned out, the development and distribution process was way harder than expected, but it was worth every second.These days Baby Dice is already in review and will hopefully enter the AppStore soon. I’ll post more details about the gameplay and development process after the app has been approved.
Screencaps Online
When deploying Microsoft Surface projects it’s common to produce at least a neat little video afterwards. This way you preserve the most relevant output with all the efforts from the team and it makes it easy to include a short sneak peak in an upcoming presentation.
This inspired me to create a couple of Screencaps also from my recent online projects, since the Surface stuff will be covered in videos anyway. I updated my portfolio with the following videos:- adidas Women - Style Yourself
- Foot Locker Bounce
- BYM Online CommunityMore to come.
Event Connect - Microsoft Surface meets Facebook
A small-sized team at Neue Digitale / Razorfish had the pleasure to spend a couple of weeks working on a Microsoft Surface project that would be showcased at Xtopia Conference 2008 in Berlin.
The idea is to be able to identify yourself with your conference badge on the table and share your facebook friends & photos with other attendees.
Event Connect - Microsoft Surface Application from Heiko Schweickhardt on Vimeo.
Portfolio Updated
Last week we launched the new adidas Bounce Microsite for the Foot Locker campaign ‘Get an unfair advantage’.
The site features a 270° VR Panorama with seamless integrated video sequences. The 3D environment was realized with the latest Papervision 3D revision.
The lovely adidas Running Maps also got another visual update and we migrated the formerly yahoo-based application to google, which offers a better map coverage and the new physical maptype. There are still a couple of features and optimizations missing and we hope to get that realized in the next weeks.
BYM Online Community Launched
I spent the first weeks of 2008 working on several flash tools for the german BYM Online Community. The most challenging part was building the papervision-flavored room configurator. It allows the users to create, design and share their own rooms.
The application consists of one flash module which is fed by various xml definitions to determine the room type (e.g. kitchen, room), its architecture and initial state, available object catalogs and user-specific items. Users can either choose of common furniture in the catalogs or upload their own wallpapers and posters.
Apart from the huge configuration madness, the tough part was definitely the 3d-transform tool, which allows you to set posters in 3d space on walls and floors and still being able to scale, rotate and drag them around the room, while providing the same look&feel you’re used to with 2d objects.
The free-text tool inherits that functionality and enables you to apply the same transformations on rasterized textfields.Click here to join.
rot.fm wins DMMA Award
Great news: Along with two other projects the rot.fm website won the German Multimedia Award in the category “Marketingmaßnahmen”.
Part of the rot.fm website is the track generator module (”Rot Machen”) which allows you to record an audio/video stream to create a seamless fantrack. This module is also available as a portable widget for your blog and social network profiles - you may have a look on my portfolio here: rot.fm trackgenerator.
FFK 08
After attending at a couple of international flash conferences over the last years (Spark Europe/Amsterdam, OFFF/Barcelona, Flash on the beach/Brighton) I finally got back to the German Flashforum Conference in cologne and was really curious about how the sessions would turn out. Apart from those where you feel like you already heard them before - there were at least three of them I found remarkably and worth to remember, which is pretty decent.
Though I have the pleasure to work with Eclipse FDT everyday, there were still some little tricks to learn at “Pure Coding Comfort” by Malte Beyer. In prospect of better OSX Support, an AIR Launcher and UML Roundtripping I felt reassured and delighted. These new features will definitely help to improve our workflow.
Jens Franke started with a status quo of how the flash platform is currently utilized and continued with a rather provocative introduction, encouraging the creatives to explore new interactive ways. Technologies like Arduino, MakingThings or innovative controllers like the Wiimote are there for years, to bring interactivity not only to the web or desktop, but also into the real world. Though I missed some examples or ideas of how to apply these techniques to commercial projects, his session made it to be the most discussed in our group and provoked a couple of interesting conversations.
Finally Sven Claar (MX|Usergroup Central Europe) updated the crowd about Adobe LiveCycle ES and related products which I was really grateful for. I didn’t manage to follow all the different developments in that area over the last months and was pleased to get an update and leave the conference feeling well-informed about the current status of Adobe’s Enterprise Suite.
Arpeggi by flight404
Arpeggi by Radiohead is a stunning track by itself and flight404 adds a fabulous visualization.
Portfolio has moved
Just cleaned up my webserver and migrated my portfolio over to http://portfolio.platform7.net. Please update your bookmarks accordingly.
The idea is to dedicate this space to everything that seems relevant to me in the world of interactive media and rich internet applications. Focused on technology the articles will cover Flash, Flex, Windows Presentation Foundation and related platforms.
