Flashy Flash

Last week in our multimedia pioneering class, we had a guest speaker – Simon Conlin, who is an interactive strategist. Mr. Conlin is involved with Flash in the Can and Flash in TO, he works as a consultant who dreams up innovative interactive initiatives such as branding, from traditional, web, mobile, on-line Video/Audio content and new media events.

Mr. Conlin showed us what a number of multimedia pioneers are up to. The most impressive was the work of Zach Booth Simpson, an engineer, artist and molecular biologist! Below is an example of one of his exhibitions:

What impressed me most about Zach Simpson is that he’s combined his knowledge of multiple disciplines to illustrate scientific principles. There’s great potential for interactive multimedia as a teaching tool, and these tools could be extremely valuable to people like yours truly, who learn better from the “hands on” approach.

Mr. Conlin also discussed a German company called MESO who specialize in complex web applications, multi sensory environments, on air design, and interactive stage sets. For example, they built interactive stage sets for George Michael’s Live 25 tour where the lights would move according to the audio and a position tracker monitored his movements.

Mr. Conlin provided our class with a list of links to websites and videos of various multimedia pioneers and their projects. One of these innovations is iBar, which is an interactive surface. It has integrated video-projectors which project any content on the milky bar-surface. There is also a tracking system which detects all objects touching the surface. Users can interact with the projected content, and move things around with their fingers by touching the surface. This is very similar to the interactive surfaces we saw at Gesture Tek as discussed in my previous post.

Probably the most lasting impression I received from Mr. Conlin’s visit is that the most important thing in interactive multimedia pioneering is team work. Very few people can come up with this stuff and run with it all on their own. Pretty much all the companies/projects we looked at started with small teams. I have definitely noticed that team work is important as we develop our client projects. In my team, we have five people all with different skill sets and it’s great to learn from each others ideas and experience, and also for each of us to be able to contribute something unique to the group.

Following Mr. Conlin’s discussion, we also got to see a presentation from our in-house multimedia pioneering specialist, Dan Zen. He gave a very animated presentation about Focuso – the art of intentionally shooting out of focus. This is a good example of how a relatively simple concept (shooting out of focus) can be made exciting. What is really nice about it is that anyone can do it – most of the impressive interactive multimedia we’ve seen thus far has involved expensive equipment and elaborate set ups, but this is simple, inexpensive and readily accessible. Furthermore, it encourages you to look at the world a little bit differently, perhaps to find the beauty that lies in a crack in the wall.

FYI: Simon is doing a networking bash on Thursday. http://www.flux.to – I’d love to go to this, but alas, I am in Calgary!