Talking Dog Showreel

Check out our brand new Talking Dog Showreel.


Here's a list of a few of the projects shown in it.

• Royal Saskatchewan Museum Big Bert exhibit
• SaskTel 25
• Gojira T-Shirt experience
• Star Whacker kinect game
• Mosaic AR map experience

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Moire visual toy for iOS

Talking Dog Studios recently published a playful, visual toy for iOS called Moire.

"In mathematics, physics, and art, a moiré pattern (/mwɑrˈeɪ/; French: [mwaˈʁe]) is a secondary and visually evident superimposed pattern created, for example, when two identical (usually transparent) patterns on a flat or curved surface (such as closely spaced straight lines drawn radiating from a point or taking the form of a grid) are overlaid while displaced or rotated a small amount from one another."
wikipedia

Get Moire on iTunes

 

Check out our lead developers music video he made using Moire & some editing.



Get Moire on iTunes

Moire website

Also, check out cool sounds of Guidewire

AR Whack-a-Mole

A direct link to the above video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q0AmgJ1PtU

Last entry we talked about the Live Interactions we created for Riderville, an amazing event you had to see to believe. The above video recaps those three interactions. As part of the festivities in the days leading up to Grey Cup 2013, tens of thousands of people converged on Evraz Place here in Regina, Saskatchewan, where football teams from across Canada hosted their own convention rooms for excited fans. It was the home team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, who hosted "Riderville": the biggest and most in-demand room of all, filled to capacity every evening with long lineups waiting to get in.

Inside, there were rock bands playing on stage, marching bands playing on the dance floor, cheerleaders showing off their choreographed routines to pounding techno music, and party people shoulder to shoulder throughout this gigantic space. And Riderville Whack-a-Mole, an augmented reality game created by Talking Dog for the event was one of the popular activities.

Here's a movie we looked at last time that gives you an idea of how the game was played.
A direct link to the above video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9lcaPP2w0k

Right now we're hard at work on a set of Augmented Reality experiences that will be touring throughout Saskatchewan for the next six months, we'll give you a look at that in an upcoming entry. Meanwhile, let's stop and think about the simple idea of Riderville Whack-a-Mole and how it relates to the idea of Augmented Reality computer interface design.

Back in 2002, Spielberg's Minority Report gave what for many people was the first glimpse of the possibilities of an AR interface - you wave your hands in the air and the computer responds to your actions. It seemed so impossibly futuristic back then! More recently, we've seen Tony Stark using much the same kind of an interface in the Iron Man movies. Our game, simple as it is, shows the start of that same big idea, using nothing more than a $700 Mac Mini and a first generation Microsoft Kinect. No super-computers required! Did Tom Cruise's pre-cogs see that one coming? Hard to say.

Where do we go from here? Tell us what you need. "Wave your hands in the air and have something happen on the screen" is such an open-ended concept that the possibilities really are endless. And integrating multiple experiences like the ones shown in the video that started this entry is one of our goals. Think of this: already we have an interface that responds to your actions, no need to be holding a device in your hands. Voice interaction adds flexibility. And being able to collect input from devices anywhere in the world and show the results in real time adds yet another layer of possibility.

If you come to Talking Dog, we currently have well over a dozen different kinds of live interaction that we can show you, all running on inexpensive devices like the Mac Mini, a tablet, or a smart phone. We love figuring out solutions that use these kinds of live interactions, whether that be for education, entertainment or that wow factor that attracts a crowd. How can we help your company grow with these fantastic new tools? Give us a call and let's find out.

Yours augmentedly,
www.talkingdogstudios.com

Riderville Interactive Experience

Here at Talking Dog, we're excited about how the technologies we've been developing since 2009 are so useful for "live" experiences. A perfect example from not long ago is Riderville, the four-day party environment where as many as 6000 people at a time gathered to celebrate, as part of the lead-up to the Grey Cup football championship which was being played here in our home town of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

We developed three different Live Interactions which were featured nightly at Riderville. Let's take a look:

1. Live Polling
In years past, being able to individually poll an audience and see the results posted in real time was an expensive proposition, since it required a specially-designed hardware setup. Nowadays, with a large majority in possession of a smartphone, we figured out a much more cost-effective solution that runs in a web browser. Want to try it out? Go to talkingdog.tv with your smartphone to place your vote right now. If you have a second device nearby, use it to view the results at talkingdog.tv/1/viewer.php .

You'll notice there are two buttons near the bottom left on this viewer screen: if you click on Recent, the results will be temporarily cleared. This means that if you are with a group of friends, each with their own smartphone, tablet, or whatever, everybody in the room can vote and you can see just the results of your voting. You can then click on the Totals button and see how everyone else who has participated in the poll since it was launched stacks up.

Finally, there are actually 11 questions in this poll, so for instance if you want to view the results of the second poll you have to change your viewer link to talkingdog.tv/2/viewer.php , and so on. Simple? You bet! But very flexible. Imagine a conference or a large meeting where the moderator is taking questions from the floor, a question is quickly typed in and everyone in the room can then use their smartphones to express their opinion. Or imagine a room where multiple screens are set up, each showing the results viewer for a different question, and visitors are able to stroll from screen to screen and use their smartphone to place their vote and see the results in real time.

For the Riderville experience, where most of the questions were trivia-related, we also posted the answers, which you were given a link to once you had answered all 11 questions. Inexpensive live polling is definitely something that could be used in a wide variety of settings, from just plain fun to very serious.

2. Real-time Animated Sound Meter
This is something you've seen a version of at sporting events for years - a cartoon depicting a sound meter is shown to the crowd, and fans are encouraged to cheer as loudly as possible. Wouldn't it be better, we thought, to create an animated display that actually responded to the sound of the crowd rather than just pretending to? That's what we built for Riderville. Here's a picture of our meters being used on the big screens at the event:

Those big screens were provided by our friends at IKS Media, who also created the opening animations for the sound meter, and our Whack-a-Mole game:

3. Riderville Whack-a-Mole
Using a kinect and a Mac Mini, we built this augmented reality whack-a-mole game, which was a popular attraction throughout the event. A player would simply stand out on the dance floor, wave their hands in the air, and see their on-screen "shadow" hitting moles as they popped up out of a football field. But they had to be careful - because occasionally team mascot Gainer the Gopher would pop his head out, and if you hit Gainer you'd lose points. We'll talk more about this game in our next entry, but in the meantime, stay augmented!

A direct link to the above video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9lcaPP2w0k