What's New at Talking Dog

This week Talking Dog president Rob Bryanton is in New York at the gigantic Ad:Tech conference, sharing a tradeshow booth with Katrina German of OneStory. We're looking forward to tales of the latest advances in interactive advertising and technology, and Rob will be showing off some of our latest work there as well.  Here's a little movie showing some of what we've been up to lately, enjoy!



We're grateful to SMPIA for their generous support they provided to get us to this conference.

Experience the Power to Grow Tour

This project was a massive AR undertaking of over a dozen AR presentations, all seen inside a giant dome that has been traveling around Saskatchewan since the beginning of July 2014. Lots of pictures of the tour can be found on flickr,

Created for SaskPower, this unusual project was a collaboration between Captive, Phoenix Group, Brown Communications, with the Talking Dog team creating the central augmented reality parts of the experience.

Here's a little movie showing the introductory sequence from the presentation, with AR, sound, and original music by Talking Dog:

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

Clandestine: Anomaly

Here's a direct link to the above video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svnVnYPc50g

Right now we're hard at work on the sound design and music for a game being created by a team of artists and programmers from across Canada under the leadership of Winnipeg's Zenfri Incorporated. It's called "Clandestine: Anomaly". We just came across the above video Zenfri put out last year that shows some of the Augmented Reality we helped create for advance promo of the game, which has already received some serious recognition: in October 2013, the project's first prototype was presented with the prize for “Best Mobile Augmented Reality Game” at the Metaio International Developer Competition out of Germany.

Speaking of Germany, here's a google-translated screen grab from an interview with Zenfri's co-founder Corey King, this appeared a few months ago in the German newspaper Weser Kurier. You can read more about the article in the Clandestine: Anomaly blog entry about this interview.

Corey King as the "King of Augmented Reality"? Congrats to Corey, those are quite the accolades!

Godzilla AR

Godzilla opens this week, and we can't wait to see it! You'll recall that Talking Dog has a connection to this film taking us all the way back to the 2010 Comic-Con, where Legendary announced they were beginning pre-production on the film. For that event, the Talking Dog team were asked to create a unique experience: t-shirts that were given out at the Legendary booth had an artist's conception of what the new Godzilla was going to look like. When people wore that t-shirt to the Legendary Comic-Con booth, they were treated to the startling augmented reality vision of seeing Godzilla's "atomic breath" streaming from the mouth of the famous monster on their chest! Here's a demo movie of our programmer Rene testing it out:



If you've got a desktop computer running flash and a webcam you can go to this link to try it out yourself:
http://www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/gojira/

Why is the link to "gojira" rather "godzilla"? Because back in 2010 we heard there was some consideration being given to calling the movie that. "Gojira" was the name given to this monster in the original 1954 Japanese release. What do you think? Our experience at the time was that there's still a large fan-base worldwide of Godzilla fanatics no matter which name they use, and based upon the previews we've seen so far, we don't think those fans are going to be disappointed.

Happy Hallowe'en!

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeDNdBl6PV4

Here's a little augmented reality gag for your iPhone or Android phone from the fun-loving gang here at Talking Dog. Go to www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/halloween and use your phone to scan the QR tag there to get started. Happy Hallowe'en!