How's It Look?

Envisioning furniture as it might look in your living room can be pretty tricky. Buying it because you think it might look good, then getting home to find out it doesn't, happens all too often.

IKEA's 2013 product catalog uses a number of digital technologies, but the use that caught my eye is how the catalog, a downloadable app and your mobile phone, tablet or computer combine to show you what a piece of IKEA furniture would look like in whichever room you want.

Unlike promotional uses of augmented reality technology in the past (GE's early effort comes to mind), this use of AR addresses the already existing need to get a good idea of how a piece of furniture might look. A nice example of really new media!

The Pacific TwiTrip

Sorry for the lag in posts over the past month or two. But you just can't rush perfection... And if there are few if any examples to post about, then let it lie.

Not like today, though.

Travel is always social. You're always meeting people and sharing with friends about the trip when you return. But this week The Guardian (UK) has launched a feature that lends itself well as an example of really new media.

The premise: Send two English reporters on a road trip down the Pacific Coast of the U.S., Seattle to L.A., who write about their trials/travails.

The twist: Start without any itinerary or specific plan. Rather, rely on readers tweeting suggestions for things they should do, places to visit and eat at. The reporters gather all the Twitter suggestions, decide what's possible, then do them and report (text and images) on a blog posted back to the newspaper's website.

The technology: Pretty simple. Digital imaging (likely lots of phone-camera snaps), blogs and Twitter.

What makes it so innovative is not some code-intensive fancy gizmo or app, but the pulling together of lots of individual pieces that hadn't yet been pulled together. This lives up to its billing as a "crowdsourced tour," taking up the socialness of travel and the commonplace act of friends suggesting to other friends where to go and what to see/do one step further, into the realm of digital/social media.

My hat's off to The Guardian--some mighty fine really-new-media thinking!

What's Viral? Storytelling

After reading through earlier today the 2013 Viral Video Awards from Advertising Age, I discovered what they all have in common: what the article calls "great brand storytelling."

It's not enough to put any random thing on YouTube and cross your fingers.

Despite all the things that digital technologies can do, really new media depends on compelling stories that fit the brand and the audience.

New media without a home (yet)

Really new media means not just new gizmos, but new ways of thinking about and using gizmos. However, it's always good to consider new gizmos that have yet to come into their own.

Cases in point:

One is the multimedia work of artist Toni Dove. I ran into an account of her work on NPR, and soon after tracked down her website, etc. It's not mobile media in the sense of "take it anywhere in your pocket," but it certainly is mobile in the sense of exploring new forms of expression and engagement.

Two is a much more pedestrian, but that tries to make something new with mobile. From our geek friends at Google, this distributed game called "Chrome Super Sync Sports" hooks up your smartphone and computer to play the game against four remote contestants. The point is not the game as much as it is exploring the way to hook together these often discrete devices.

As I mentioned, these are gizmos and uses as yet without a clear home. But that's where innovation lives, right?

What's new?

It's been a bit quiet on the new media front. But, what I find almost as useful as tracking down projects that count in my book as "really new media" is reading claims of innovative digital which, on second look, aren't in my book very innovative.

Case in point is fashion retailer Burberry's. It's touted in the latest edition of the Creativity online newsletter as "where marketing, dreaming and digital meet."

But what's the result of this meeting? Streaming catwalks to people outside the show. Curating images people take of themselves wearing a trenchcoat. And so on.

Although portrayed in this piece as leaving the 156-year-old heritage of the company behind in this digital work, to my mind its age is displayed in both.

Old Time Media are New Again

Remember flip books, where a slightly different picture on each page, when each is flipped through in fast sequence, create the illusion of an animated scene? Honda used this a few years ago to good effect for its Fit model, which was small. It made a little flip book that created a 360-degree view of the car.

This goes one step further, making a flip book for the digital age. As Creative Review notes, scenes from the Nippon motor-car rally in Japan were animated via a flipbook of images on a Facebook page. Sure, you need to click fast--and on a fast connection--to get the illusion of motion.

But it's an inventive way to make old media new again.

Virtual is Real

How many times have we heard about differences between virtual and real space, the irrelevance of one or the other, and difficulties in connections between virtual and real?

The forefront of thinking seems increasingly to be that the very distinction virtual/real itself is irrelevant.

What's replacing it? Ways of mapping the real in the virtual, and the virtual in the real to the degree that the distinction just plain doesn't matter.

A case in point: CNNCTD+ and its Sound Graffiti project, most recently used in conjunction with the promotion of Bob Dylan's new album "Tempest."

As DJ Manero, the the head of the creative agency notes in a recent blog interview, the system maps and releases specific music only when located at specific geographic points--such as in the case of Dylan key places from his past.