Golan Levin: The truly soft side of software

Engineer and artist Golan Levin pushes the boundaries of whats possible with audiovisuals and technology. In an amazing TED display, he shows two programs he wrote to perform his original compositions.

...took some jeans and made them play music, by Kin

Kin were approached by de-construct to help them realise an interactive in-store promotion for Tommy Hilfiger. To coincide with their new campaign ‘My Denim, My Music’, Tommy Hilfiger’s aim was to fuse fashion and music: both in their external advertising and through in-store promotions.


Tommy Hilfiger Interactive Audio Cassette from kin on Vimeo.

Kin developed a large-scale interactive audiocassette, to work as an in-store point of sale unit. 5 new styles of jeans were chosen, and a unique soundtrack was composed for each one by SkinnerBrosMusic. A specifically designed sticker on each pair of jeans instructs the customer to swipe the jeans against the giant cassette to ‘release the music’.



Kin used pre-programmed RFID tags that were placed behind the stickers. An RFID reader mounted inside the cassette reads the unique tag number.

GoCar

GoCar it's a tour guide…a talking car…a trusty co-pilot…and a local on wheels.
GoCar is the first-ever GPS-guided storytelling car - and it's available to rent right now!
Leave your guidebook behind and see the San Francisco, San Diego, Lisbon, Barcelona and Miami most visitors never see.



Your clever talking car navigates and shows you the way – but that's not all. As you enjoy the drive, it takes you to all the best sites and tells the stories that bring these cities to life.
These cars are smart. An on-board computer and a GPS-system do the thinking so you can actually relax and take in the beautiful cities. Best of all, the adventure happens at your pace. You can stop for photos, take detours, grab a coffee or break for lunch.

Walk Score

Walk Score help you find a walkable place to live by calculating a Walk Score for any address. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.

Walk Score website also has the most "walkable neighborhoods" area.

JotYou

JotYou™ is location based messaging. Send a message to your friends so they get it when they arrive at school or the ballpark or the mall. Make up geo-games. Track a foot race or bicycle race. Stage a road rally with virtual checkpoints, and feed the directions as participants progress. Ever plan to pick up the milk on the way home from work, but drive right by the store and forget? Use JotYou™ to remind yourself as you pass by specified locations.

How it works: You send a message to one person or many people, and specify a delivery time and location using the map on the computer, or an address from your mobile. When they arrive at the location you specify, JotYou™ alerts them by "buzzing" their cell phone, and delivering the message.

LoJo connect

LoJo is a project launched by a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies.


What is locative storytelling?
Using the bouquet of emerging mobile and location-based technologies (from GPS-enabled mobile phones to interactive online maps), locative storytelling provides multi-media content that enhances a user’s connection to a given place. At its best, this kind of interactive media gives users increased entry points, and more control over, any given story, thereby enabling deeper and more vibrant experiences.

What are some examples?
If you’ve ever been on an audio tour of a museum or a city neighborhood, you’ve experienced locative storytelling. Other examples include Google mash-ups (user-enhanced Google maps that layer location-specific information over area maps) and GPS-based mobile games.

Soundwalks

Soundwalks is an audio tour company, producing audio guides in which the listener is able to step into the life of a narrator as they guide you through their neighborhood streets and local hangouts. Soundwalks mix fiction and reality in a cinematic experience giving the listener the impression of actually being in a film.



Soundwalk has created over 40 walking tours - over 20 in New York alone: from the birth of Hip Hop in the Bronx with Jazzy Jay and Africa Bammbaataa to a memorial walk in Ground Zero with famed author Paul Auster. Recently completed a three-city project for Louis Vuitton in China, featuring Gong Li, Joan Chen, and Shu Qi and a unique sound experience for the Channel Mobile Art Container, featuring the voice of Jeanne Moreau. Soundwalk also produced the official Sony Picture "Da Vinci Code" tour of the Louvre with Jean Reno.

You Are Not Here

You Are Not Here (.org) is a platform for urban tourism mash-ups. It invites participants to become meta-tourists on simultaneous excursions through multiple cities. Passers-by stumble across the curious You Are Not Here signs in the street.





TheYANH street-signs provide the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, a portal for audio-guided tours of one place on the streets of another. Through investigation of these points and with or without the aid of a downloadable map, local pedestrians are transformed into tourists of foreign places. Current walking tours include Baghdad through the streets of New York City and Gaza City through the streets of Tel-Aviv.

Photosynth

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation.