Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Subway stations are great places for art, commissioned or otherwise. The anxieties of a bustling platform, the boredom of waiting for a delayed train, or even the drudgery of another day’s commute–all can be soothed, or at least temporarily smoothed over, by a well-placed placard with something nice to look at. Renowned artist Mark Wallinger recently finished a new collection of soon-to-be-subterranean pieces to celebrate the London Underground’s 150th anniversary, though their subject matter is somewhat at odds with the whole idea behind these modern marvels of efficiency in the first place. By the end of this summer, at every one of London’s 270 Tube stations, passengers will be able to take a few seconds to contemplate a tiny maze.

The project is part of the ongoing Art on the Underground program, and it’s the largest-ever commission of its kind. For the full set, Wallinger created 270 different labyrinths, one for every stop. The first 10 of the series are being installed this week; the rest will follow in coming months. Once they’re up, each two-foot-by-two-foot piece will be a permanent part of the station in which it’s posted.

“The journeys we take on the Underground are unique to each of us,” Wallinger said in a statement accompanying the project’s debut. “I hope Labyrinth can perhaps reflect that individual yet universal experience.” And in a sense, the maze is the perfect thing to capture that dynamic. Each will be instantly recognizable as such–like the ones you’ll find in any kids’ activity book, they’re nothing more than ordered clusters of black and white lines–though every passerby will have the opportunity to navigate the lines on their own, be it superficially, from a distance, or up-close, scrupulously following their path with a finger.

From the initial pieces, it seems like some will be easier to complete than others. The puzzle for Embankment station is a straightforward spiral to the center. The thin-lined Oxford Circus labyrinth offers a significantly greater challenge, with some potential wrong turns and dead ends thrown into the mix. But for all the pieces, the magic only exists so long as the works stay pristine. Hopefully, the city’s transportation officials have a plan for dealing with the inevitable product of the first drunken ass who happens to encounter one of these with a Sharpie.

Earlier this month, Canonical, the co-creators of Ubuntu–a distribution of the open-source Linux operating system–announced that they were getting into the smartphone business. They previewed an Ubuntu-based smartphone OS with an aggressively gestural UI design. The phone doesn’t have a home button, a slider-based lock screen, a “settings” tile, or an app switcher toggle. Instead, a user accesses these functions by swiping various edges of the screen.

Gestural interfaces–which eschew visual “chrome”-like buttons and tiles in favor of swiping, pressing, or tapping directly on content areas–are just starting to go mainstream. But the Ubuntu phone is going all-in on these new interactions. They’re as baked-in to Ubuntu’s mobile design language as skeuomorphism is to iOS’s. I got in touch with Canonical’s head of design, Ivo Weevers, and Lead Phone UX Designer Mika Meskanen to ask them about jumping into the deep end of gestural interface design. (They responded jointly via email.)

Co.Design: Why did you choose this approach? Was it simply to distinguish from iOS and Android? Or is an “all-gestural” phone OS the future of phones in general?

Canonical: Traditional Japanese architecture teaches us some important design principles about the balance between space and objects. Things that are not needed are not in the way, to allow complete immersion into an activity. Objects are placed around the periphery of the room and so are easily accessible when needed. By studying design cultures like this and how people use their phones, we could design an experience that takes a leap from where mobile user interfaces were until today.

These principles can be seen in Ubuntu’s gesture-based interface, which gives the content or task at hand undivided attention on the screen. Everything else is peripheral, but is easily evoked from the screen’s edges. It means that it’s really easy to switch between favourite and previous applications, and access controls, notifications and settings without ever interrupting the natural flow of activity. Gestures are also very intuitive and give a natural feeling to engaging with your personal content and applications.

Typical phones insist on navigation via hard or soft buttons to go back to a home screen, and eventually to the desired destination. The edges of the screen give immediate access to the features that a user needs the most frequently on a phone.

Co.Design: Exactly what functions can be invoked by swiping from each screen edge, and why?

Canonical: During research, we found that most people use up to ten apps most frequently, so in Ubuntu a left edge swipe quickly reveals a list of these most used apps without ever leaving the current, open app. Swiping right flips between currently open apps. Most of the time, people want to use two or three apps only, and this swipe makes that very easy.

The top edge gives the user access to peripheral but key system tasks, such as accessing and responding to messages, as well as settings such as connecting to wifi, adjusting screen brightness, time, date, and battery life. For these settings, often users just want to take a quick peek or make a swift alteration without having to leave their application, going to a home screen and scrolling through settings, and therefore losing the ‘flow’ of the activity in hand.

The bottom edge of the Ubuntu screen reveals controls for that app only when they are needed, so users are immersed much more into the things that matter more of the time. Most of the time people want to simply engage with content. For example, it is the photos that matter when looking at photos in a hardbound album, not the scissors and tape used to stick them there. Intrusive control buttons or controls constantly available in the interface take away precious real estate, even though they are used only in a minority of situations.

Co.Design: Gestural interfaces have their advantages, but they’re very new and unfamiliar to most people. How do you make these features intuitive and discoverable to new users, when there’s no obvious visual cues or skeuomorphic affordances?

Canonical: Touch interfaces have had the tendency to become very explicit. By consistently using edges instead of physical or software buttons that people have to poke at or aim for, we can leverage a range of human motor skills previously untapped–like muscle memory and finger dexterity.

User research found that gestural interfaces require a short learning curve. However, once learned they are very easy and become natural interactions quickly. There are already clear examples in existing products how the user can be informed effectively about the interactions, and by doing that the user gets access to a whole new world of interactions.

Co.Design: Aren’t design and open-source fundamentally at odds? How can Ubuntu’s design team ensure the best possible user experience when they can’t control what users will do with the software–including modifying, hacking, and forking it?

Canonical: Ubuntu design is led from our exceptional design team based in London, but also through engagement and collaboration at the right levels with other designers and community contributors around the world. There are great examples of co-creation projects that resulted in great products. For example, we have developed our own distinctive Ubuntu font,
which is a great example of a major new design led by our team and developed with the community across the world.

Developers have already shown that the open-source approach can result in great code, so we don’t see why designers can’t achieve the same.

The American system of higher education has long been the envy of foreign onlookers — that’s why the governments of many countries are inviting U.S. universities to open satellite campuses in their centers for higher learning, in hopes of adopting some of the U.S.’s best home-grown practices.

But it’s not just the foreign countries who benefit from the deal. In what the New York Times called an “educational gold rush,” U.S. universities are rushing to claim their turf in cities across the Middle East, East Asia and India.

Where these two aligning interests come together is at education hubs, such as Doha, Qatar’s Education City. When most people think of the Persian Gulf states, things like oil tycoons, casinos and over-the-top hotels come to mind. However, the government of Qatar has taken enormous strides to present the capital city as a regional center for education and research, as the home of the 14-acre hub of universities located on the city’s outskirts.

At Doha’s Education City, students from all around the Arab world can receive medical degrees from Cornell, computer science degrees from Carnegie Mellon, or journalism degrees from Northwestern, without the culture shock of moving, or the post-9/11 fight for a visa facing many Arabs who hope to study or work in the U.S.

Education City, an initiative of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, is home to some nine institutions of higher education, as well as primary and secondary schools. The campus is the brainchild of Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, who had the idea to bring branches of several leading universities to a unified campus in Qatar, the first of which opened in 1998.

With regional advancement in mind, Education City was developed to teach students the skills considered critically important by the Gulf Cooperation Council, as well as a place where university researchers can build relationships with public and private sector colleagues.

The campus includes schools from six U.S. universities — Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar School of the Arts, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, and Northwestern University in Qatar — École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC), the University College of London Qatar and Qatar’s Faculty of Islamic Studies.

But what’s in it for the U.S. universities? The opportunity to get ahead on the burgeoning trend of campus internationalization.

“Sometimes people ask: Why is Northwestern University in Qatar and not in China or India, for example,” Northwestern University in Qatar Dean Everette E. Dennis said in an interview upon the graduation of the school’s first class in May of this year. “Part of the answer is: Because Qatar’s leaders asked us to come. There was an invitation extended, and a determination was made that this had value for the University.”

The rise in opening overseas branches reflects a shift from sending students to semesters abroad or swapping faculty on research exchanges. Just as Dennis described Northwestern’s decision to open in Qatar because of the government’s invitation, so was New York University lured into opening its satellite campus in Abu Dhabi by a $50 million gift from investor Omar Saif Ghobash, according to the Times.

Collaborative urban research hubs are not unique to the Middle East. New York City approved plans in December 2011 to build a graduate campus for technology on Roosevelt Island, Cornell NYC Tech. The campus will be a partnership between Cornell University, which has its main campus in Ithaca, N.Y., and Haifa, Israel’s Technion Institute.

“We believe this new land grant can help dreamers and entrepreneurs from around the world come to New York and help us become the world’s leading city for technological innovation,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when the campus was announced.

The city gave the university $100 million and a grant of city-owned land to help spur the $2 billion project, which will eventually facilitate 2,500 students. Beginning in Spring 2013, graduate engineering classes will be taught in a temporary location until the Roosevelt Island campus is complete.

How do you think cities can best facilitate education? Let us know what cities have to gain when they become education hubs in the comments.

Images courtesy of Flickr, Clint Tseng

Guest point by Eric Schwartzman (@ericschwartzman) on why he believes the Social Media Policy at the 2012 London Olympics failed

First off, social media could have at least partially erased the advantage that some state-sponsored “full-time amateur athletes” from Eastern Bloc countries enjoy over self-financed amateurs from Western countries. But unfortunately the social media gag order by the IOC neutered that chance by restricting athletes from sharing posts that mention their sponsors on Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else online. Here’s the clause:

“Participants and other accredited persons are not permitted to promote any brand, product or service within a posting, blog or tweet…” [PDF]

Since state-funded athletes don’t need to raise money from private enterprise to support their Olympic bids, social media could have given those who do a way to rally funds.

The financial pressure on US Olympians is no joke. The parents of Gabby Douglas and Ryan Lochte both filed for bankruptcy recently, crushed under the immense financial sacrifice it took to get their children to the Olympic Games. Recognizing the contributions of their sponsors via social media might have offered some relief. But Rule 40 erased that possibility.

The Track & Field Athletes Association, Olympians and fans have been protesting the policy by including the hastags #rule40 and #WeDemandChange in their tweets. Above is an image Olympic medalist Dawn Harper tweeted to protest the gag order.

What’s backwards is the premise of the rule, which assumes that if athletes use social media to promote their own sponsors, official Olympic sponsors and rights holding broadcasters will lose. This is second reason the effort failed. It assumed that the media landscape is a zero sum game and that the absence of unofficial sponsors in social media would be a gain for official sponsors in mainstream media.

But as we seen, social media drives traffic to owned media, increasing the number of eyeballs broadcasters have to sell to paid media.

As veteran reporter Suzanne Vranica wrote in a story about the impact of social media on ratings:

“There have been plenty of negative hashtags assigned to NBC’s Olympics coverage on Twitter, including #NBCFail and #NBCStinks. But on Madison Avenue the hashtag for this Olympics so far is more like: #NBC$$$$.”

The take away is this. Social media doesn’t replace mainstream media. It drives mind share. More mind share equals more viewers. And more viewers means more value for official sponsors and broadcasters. What the IOC failed to appreciate is that tweets, blogs and mobile videos don’t cannibalize prime time viewership. They complement it.

To be fair, the IOC’s social media policy is certainly no anomaly. According to the National Labor Relations Board, most social media policies in the US are unlawful. Rule 40 is just one of many shortsighted gaffes that digitally illiterate gatekeepers from a bygone era have concocted to try and police the digital world by analog standards. Which brings me to the third, and final reason the social media policy at the London Olympics failed.

In the US, we enjoy freedom of speech. When organizations restrict that freedom they provoke real hate, and that hatred severely tarnish their brand. Social media policies govern personal expression and many regard personal expression as a natural right.

If organizations are seen as depriving individuals of what they consider to be their inalienable rights, such as the right to improve their working conditions or the right to bargain collectively, those same organizations are seen as unjust and their reputations suffer, which is the case for the IOC.

To sum it up, Rule 40 not only fumbled the chance to level the playing field for all Olympians, it skirted a ratings gain and stained the reputation of the International Olympic Organizing Committee. They protected themselves in the court of law and lost in the court of public opinion.

But it didn’t have to be a win-lose scenario. They could have had their cake and ate it too. If you’d like to learn how to develop practical, win-win social media guidelines by which your employees can conduct responsible, constructive social media engagement in both official and unofficial capacities, here’s a half price link good until the Closing Ceremonies for the first 50 sign-ups to take my online course on social media policy development.

For those who attend them, furniture fairs and “design weeks” are full of parties and relaxed lunches. But for those who exhibit at them–especially young designers–they can be fairly nerve-wracking. “Seeing our projects in Milan, London, Stockholm or Paris gives us goosepimples,” write Spanish design team MUT Design.

The young office of four debuted a number of pieces at the Milan Furniture Fair in April. Among the new work, which included a hanging chair and these Koi fish tiles, was Zig Zag, a faceted mirror that reflects distortions and optical illusions.

ZIg Zag is actually more of a modular system than a piece of furniture. Each mirror is a series of octogonal aluminum extrusions, faced on one side with a strip of mirror. The extrusions are airbrushed in rusty oranges and muted blues, forming lovely gradients of colors “inspired by the favorite landscapes of the team.” Then they’re soldered together at varying widths and oblique angles, creating reflections that fracture and displace the user.

Like the fun Spanish cousin of a Donald Judd piece, Zig Zag invokes abstract expressionism with a big dose of play. MUT, for their part, say the mirrors are about human interaction: “They’re faithful to the promise of creating designs whose final results depend on the participation of the user.”

Read more on MUT’s website here.

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/

As the world gears up for the London Olympics in July, media chatter about the unprecedented expense and trouble of hosting the Games–which are no longer a surefire investment for cities–is increasing.

Perhaps no city better illustrates the fraught host city selection process than Madrid. The city has made three unsuccessful bids to host the summer games, two within the last decade. They lost out just barely to London and Rio respectively, after a long bidding process that included the construction of several large-scale sporting venues; big, expensive “proofs of concept” for Madrid’s Olympic preparedness. In 2008, the 2016 Olympic Committee eliminated the city in the final round of bidding, citing “geographic issues.”

Barring any discussion of the value of hosting the Olympics, Madrid did end up building a fairly remarkable building in the process: the “Magic Box,” a beautiful, austere Olympic Tennis Center designed by French architect Dominique Perrault.

The Center sits on the site of a recently razed housing slum (an unfortunate hallmark of “Olympic urbanism”). It houses three tennis venues within its walls: a 12,500-seat main court and two smaller 3,500- and 2,500-seat courts. The three volumes rest on a steel frame podium, their edges cantilevering over flying buttresses of poured concrete. The frame is clad in a delicate metal mesh, custom-fabricated according to Perrault’s specifications. The one splash of color in the building’s otherwise muted palette of concrete and steel is from the translucent oxblood red seats, which finish the Center with a retro-nostalgic vibe that references the stadiums built by Pier Luigi Nervi in the ’50s or the Italian futurists in the ’20s.

But what’s really magical about the building is its roof: Each court has a separate ceiling of a different shape, attached to a hydraulic jack. When lowered, the three slabs form a single continuous covering. When raised, they can be adjusted to create an infinite number of unique topographies. Retractable roofs were invented by engineers decades ago, but turning the transformation into an elegant spectacle is a stroke of genius. The exaggerated depth of each slab–they look to be about 20 feet deep–is purely aesthetic: They’re made of lightweight plastic panels. Lit from within, the roofs radiate with an unearthly glow at night–hence the building’s nickname, Magic Box.

The Olympic Tennis Center is one of the few projects that slipped just under the wire of the 2008 economic crisis. Since then, Spain’s construction industry has suffered from a slow-motion economic tailspin and allegations of political corruption, especially surrounding “starchitect” buildings such as this one. Dozens of other big-name projects lay canceled or unfinished across the country–reminders of a time when building giant cultural complexes was considered an investment, rather than a risk.

Images courtesy of Dominique Perrault Architects and George Fessy

Benjamin Hubert loves being in the fold–literally. Earlier this week, we featured the London designer’s Plicate watch for Nava Design, a faceted timepiece inspired by paper fans. For the same company, he also used the device on a bag called Bellows for its ability to expand and contract along its accordian-like seam. And most recently, he introduced the Garment chair, a foam seat Hubert developed for Cappellini with a removable cover that wraps and folds neatly into place.

Called Garment, the chair’s cover is a single, stitchless piece of fabric cut into precisely the right size and shape, without creating waste; Velcro fasteners hold it in place. And while the upholstery fits as snugly as a well-tailored dress, the folds also make the seat as inviting as a tautly made bed. Plus, the removable cover can be swapped out as fashion and seasons dictate.

A few days before I grabbed a beef chilli lunch in London with Sunghan Kim at Samsung Design Europe’s office, the South Korean giant had posted some stellar financial results. As well as chalking up 81 percent growth in net income for the first quarter of 2012, it also overtook Nokia as the world’s top supplier of mobile phones. Its margins now rival those of Apple’s (between them they accounted for 99 percent of the mobile phone industry’s profits in the same period). Still Sunghan underplays Samsung’s triumphs, focusing instead on the challenges ahead.

He is approaching the end of a five-year term as chief of Samsung’s European satellite office and will return to the Seoul mothership in August. Sunghan has held the reins during a transformational period. It has become the biggest technology company by sales, as its traditional rivals, Sony and Nokia, have faded. The rules of the game have also changed: As well as competing with Apple in hardware, it now competes with a new set of competitors such as Google and Facebook in software and services. To help retool for new these challenges, Sunghan has recently completed an MBA specializing in service innovation. His strategy: capturing the value in what he calls the “platform economy.”

These current projects are more akin to building new businesses.

Sunghan makes a broad distinction between OS platforms, such as Android, iOS, and Windows, and service platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and iTunes. Not so long ago, Samsung controlled the whole product experience around their phones and TVs. The headache now is that, while it has its own fledgling mobile OS platform called Bada, most of its products and services now slot into ecosystems of interdependent partners owned by others. At one level, this all sounds rather familiar to the corporate-strategy MBA types who have been excited about business-model innovation since the dotcom boom. But what credible role can designers play in this next push?

Sunghan gives a glimpse of the complexity Samsung now faces in this new competitive landscape. Each ecosystem partner is jostling to maximize the value it can capture along the customer journey. Not only are many of their platform stakeholders also competitors, some that don’t pose threats today might become forces to be reckoned with tomorrow. Even platform owners have to walk a fine line: They have to open their product enough to attract partners and profit while ensuring that they retain control. This multisided market of buyers and sellers of hardware, software, service, distribution, and advertising then needs to be re-created for new areas for innovation. Samsung’s growing scope of operations–it recently announced a move into generic pharmaceuticals for example–means that the combinations of potential stakeholders are immense, and developing new offerings often entails building brand new ecosystems. Sunghan likens the projects he now works on to building new businesses rather than developing the products he was designing not so long ago.

As well as buffing up on ecosystem economics, there are also new craft skills to master.

The big design leadership challenge is the familiar one of managing design’s input and role in large cross-functional teams. “Design is more of a community-based activity now,” he reflects. For designers to succeed, they need to be able to collaborate with team members from different disciplines. We mull over to what extent product and service designers need to become with familiar with business modeling, or merely work effectively alongside business analysts. For Sunghan, it’s both. Just as in the Noughties, many product, UX, and service designers taught themselves how to code, in his view, designers in the coming decade will need to have a working knowledge of business modeling, especially at the concept stage, and learn multidisciplinary collaboration for the development phase.

As well as buffing up on ecosystem economics, there are also new craft skills to master. Designers have long played a pivotal role in mocking up or prototyping new ideas. This talent for making intangible ideas and discussions more concrete for multidisciplinary teams is even more valuable when talking about complex platform systems. However, Sunghan notes, the design communication tools he uses for current projects do not look like the prototypes of yesterday. He prefers to call early manifestations of concepts “boundary objects”–a term he borrows from sociology to mean a common body of information that separate disciplines understand but use in different ways.

In his modest but ambitious way, Han has set himself and Samsung’s designers a challenge that will define the company’s future success.

As apartment-dwelling New Yorkers, we’re always on the hunt for clever furnishing designs that optimize small spaces. This time, we bring you the DeskBox, which is exactly as it sounds: a wall-mounted box that extends into a full-size writing surface.

The compact DeskBox is the handiwork of Yael Mer and Shay Akalay, a young Israeli duo who founded their London-based studio Raw Edges shortly after graduating from the Royal College of Art. Last year, they pitched a similar concept to the Dutch manufacturer Arco: a bread box with a hinge mechanism inspired by those found on sewing-machine boxes. “Arco used to produce these kind of traditional wooden sewing boxes more than 100 years ago,” Akalay tells Co.Design. “We took the same mechanism and applied it toward more of an up-to-date use.”

The desk version is made from a combination of metal, for the wall base, and wood, for a warm work surface. “We wanted to make it as light-looking as possible and also to have the cost as low as possible, so the DeskBox will not only end up on magazine pages but at people’s homes,” Akalay says. But that didn’t mean scrapping the details. When the desk is closed, it still provides ample space for writing notes, with a small hole for a single-pencil holder; when open, it features two compartments and a cutout for routing electrical wires. Akalay assures us that it can withstand the weight of a laptop and a few books. “I guess there would be a limit, but there won’t be any problem for any normal use … of a desk.”

Guest post by James Stewart, Director at Geneva Film Co

The debate surrounding 3D’s viability across all platforms continues to rage. Nay-sayers maintain that 3D is merely a “flash in the pan”… a “fad”… soon to fade into technological obscurity. Yet visionary artists and innovators continue to drive 3D technology deeper into the very fabric of our screen-based culture. For brands, agencies, and content creators, is it worth it? In a word: YES.

THE 3D REVOLUTION

James Cameron’s Avatar set the stage for 3D’s emergence in 2009 by showcasing, to a global audience, the true potential of this immersive technology. From that time, a 3D revolution has been slowly changing the media landscape, project by project, day by day, year after year. Once considered a hollow gimmick, 3D has matured into a full-blown phenomenon. In fact, of the 10 movies that have ever crossed the $1 Billion mark, 6 are 3D films with Avatar topping the list. And there is little sign of this trend slowing down. 2012 will see blockbusters like The Hobbit, Men In Black, The Amazing Spiderman, and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus hitting theatres in three dimensions. The format continues to gain greater acceptance by audiences and critics alike. The epic 3D adventure Hugo by cinematic master Martin Scorsese is a prime example, topping this year’s Oscar nominations with 11, winning 5.

One Wall Street analyst decried 3D to be “over” in 2010 when only 38% of the $1Billion grossing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides box office could be attributed to 3D (down from the standard 55% – 80%). If 38% of your customers were demanding a 3D feature would you consider it dead, especially if that feature was selling at a 15% premium? Hugo’s opening box-office was 75% from 3D screenings. The latest box office hit is another 3D re-release: James Cameron’s Titanic. The 3D reboot debuted in China and earned the second-highest opening day ever in the country, selling approximately $11.6 million worth of tickets. It’s a hit across the UK and U.S. as well.

3D COMES HOME

The 3D revolution is no longer being waged on the sliver-screen alone. The real in-roads are being blazed by the growing list of 3D-capable devices that allow consumers to experience the brands they love in 3D, anytime and virtually anywhere. This is no accident. The success of any technological innovation can always be traced back to the moment it found its way affordably into the hands of the consumer– from the personal computer, to High Definition TV, and now 3D. At the center of this surge is the 3D TV market, which showed promising growth in the 4th quarter of 2011, and is tracking for even larger gains through 2012. According to Research and Markets, the global 3D TV market size is expected to exceed $100 Billion by the end of 2014. Which begs the question: in what industry would a product worth $100 Billion in sales be considered “a passing fad”?

3D GOES MOBILE

2011 saw the launch of several “glasses-free” 3D mobile devices, including the LG Optimus 3D Max, the HTC EVO 3D (both of which offer the ability to record and take photos in 3D using dual cameras) and more recently, the Gadmei 8” 3D Tablet. These relatively inexpensive devices offer consumers the full 3D experience in the palm of their hand. This evolution of 3D technology has opened the door for a wide variety of 3D creative needs, from mobile games, to applications, to advertising geared toward the mobile 3D market. The stage is set for brands and their agencies to leap off the screen and into the hearts and minds of the customers in ways never thought possible before. My company, Geneva Film Co., has produced 3D spots for Lexus, Sprint and others, bringing global brands into this next dimension. These projects– produced mainly for cinema– will next find their way to 3D TV and mobile platforms. As the popular YouTube 3D channel has shown, mobile user-generated 3D content can be an immersive experience with huge “viral” potential. In fact, YouTube not only allows stereoscopic 3D footage to be uploaded online, but also offers users a chance to convert their 2D HD footage to 3D with a click of a button online. It’s almost too easy.

3D CONTENT = RETENTION

Another exciting avenue currently being explored is 3D content in the classroom. Several schools across Europe have already started utilizing 3D projection. Astudy conducted on behalf of Texas Instruments showed a 17% increase in test results for those students who viewed 3D content as part of their normal curriculum. It also found attention-levels soared, with 92% of the class paying attention, versus 46% in the traditional 2D learning environment.

This type of 3D retention and engagement is not limited to the classroom. A similar study also conducted by Texas Instruments showed that viewers presented with 3D advertising content were as much as 20% more likely to retain that information than those who saw a 2D counterpart. These promising statistics bode well for Brands who develop 3D content as part of their marketing activities, as well as for agencies and content creators who offer this type of 3D impact to their clients.

3D’s GOT GAME

On the front lines of the 3D revolution are the Gamers: fearless consumers who are always ready to embrace new technology to elevate their gaming experience to a more immersive level. The Nintendo 3DS has sold over 15 million units worldwide and continues to gain traction in the US market thanks to a price cut that saw sales numbers soar. 3D-ready game consoles like Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 now feature franchise titles like Grand Turismo and Call of Duty in immersive 3D splendor. This in turn propels 3D TV sales as gamers scramble to update their home systems to be 3D ready. By its very nature, gaming and 3D technologies are a match made in heaven, tapping into the very essence of what makes 3D so exciting: it just feels real.

3D CONTENT IS KING

Ultimately, content is still king. Like the HD revolution that preceded it, 3D now has the platforms to support widespread use in every aspect of daily life. However, without content to bring these devices to life, consumers will have little reason to buy. As a presenter at both TED, and Cannes Lions, my experience has been that the enthusiasm for 3D has been palpable. Despite initial trepidation by production companies and agencies, overall 3D content continues to expand. 24/7 3D channels like ESPN3D, 3net and Sky Channel are paving the way. 2012 will see the London Olympics broadcast in 3D, with the opening and closing ceremonies, men’s 100m dash, gymnastics, swimming, basketball promising 3D action. Hollywood is also offering more Blu-Ray 3D movies than ever. As more and more content enters the market, giving a greater number of consumers a reason to introduce the growing list of 3D devices into their daily routine, 3D will quickly become a primary format for content across all media platforms. For the brands and agencies bold enough to lead the way, the sky is the limit. Is it worth it? Let’s just say we won’t have the Star Trek holodeck without 3D.

Via Brian Solis: http://www.briansolis.com