OK – there’s no other way to say it – THIS IS RAD.
Assissin’s Creed 2 has launched a teaser site. After a beautiful video intro, featuring some bits of Da Vinci’s sketchbooks, you arrive at screen with a symbol in the center.
When you click on the symbol, it downloads a PDF.
The PDF features the same symbol from the website, with instructions in the bottom left:
1. PRINT ARTIFACT SYMBOL
2. LOCATE WEL LIT WORK AREA
3. ACTIVATE LOCAL WEBCAM
4. INITIATE VIRTUAL INTERFACE
5. DETERMINE MATCHING PARTITION
After I begin the steps, this happens:




It might be hard to tell, but in the last 2 photos, the virtual hand is actually mapping in 3-D space as if it was attached to my piece of paper.
Much like the world of multi-touch computing, this is just the beginning of virtual interactions and camera manipulation we’ll be seeing on the web.
*On a related note, check out the sites Pioneers and Publicis & Hal Riney, which also explore alternative navigation techniques with webcams.

I came across a great word in a recent post on GigaOm (referencing an NYT post):

Kaizen (改善, Japanese for “improvement”) is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life.

According to the post, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is a big proponent of kaizen.
The United States auto industry executives? Probably not so much.

Who gives a shit if Obama’s speech is good? We all know he’s an amazing speaker.
How about we focus on how he presides over this country?
You know, how he actually does his job, not on what he wants to do.

I was watching the movie Transformers last night with my wife, occasionally rattling off the names of the various aircraft that show up – A-10 Warthog, F-22 Raptor, MH-53 Pave Low…. and on and on. She asked me how I knew all these names and I explained it was the result of growing up with a father who played flight simulator & war games (OK, I played them too).
As we watched the movie, I decided to read up on these aircraft on Wikipedia, since my knowledge was very superficial. As I skimmed through a few articles I began to get really frustrated and realized why there’s people bitching about how the openness of Wikipedia isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Here’s an example from the entry on the F-22 Raptor (emphasis added):

The opportunity for export is currently non-existent because the export sale of the F-22 is barred by American federal law. Most current customers for U.S. fighters are either acquiring earlier designs like the F-15 or F-16, or else are waiting to acquire the F-35, which contains technology from the F-22 but is designed to be cheaper and more flexible.

Currently? Current to what? Granted, this entry is probably not the best since the subject of the entry is still fairly new, but at what point in the future will someone decide to update the wording to reflect events that have transpired?
While you can see when an entry was last updated, is that the best way to check on relevance and accuracy? My friend Bryan suggests setting an entry as closed after it is completed and that not be editable until a certain point in the future. While Wikipedia has explicitly policies and guidelines – the website is open and thus, errors will show up. Given the amount of entries, not all errors are going to be found in a timely manner.
Keep this in mind if you’re a teacher, student, or just someone reading up on aircraft you saw in the Transformers movie.

Goddamn, the reasons I love Walken just keep multiplying.
From the Ellen DeGeneres Show:

When i was a kid, I always resented …when I was in school …having to put the period here and the comma here …I felt that it was an imposition …so whenever I wrote anything, I would write it without punctuation. And guess I grew up ending up that way.

Watch it at around the 4 minute mark:

Failure – The Secret to Success is one of three short films currently featured on Honda – The Power of Dreams.
The films come across as thoughtful and sincere and show how the vision of the founder, Soichiro Honda, still carries on in the company.

My colleague Victor just wrote a great post.
From his post:

What is the service this site is providing me – or to put it another way – what’s in it for me (other than a way to waste 10 minutes of my day)?

It’s important to answer that question before your client does.
We all have to make a living, no one likes to turn down interesting work and I wouldn’t be where I am today if I didn’t know Flash and HTML….
…but – that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question the type of interactive work we’re producing.
Why Does This Site Exist?

21.19 (via changethethought, thanks stg54)

So my geeky ass was interviewed on Level3 Hosting’s Red Couch at this year’s Phizzpop competition in Chicago in which the company I work for, Roundarch, was one of the competing teams.

Ok, so I need more practice with my speaking skills (Pound a beer every time I say ‘ya know’).

Here’s the interview with me

(Window Media format, sorry) and here is the page of all the interviews, including my one with my boss, Jeff Maling.

What does it mean for a painter to… actually imitate someone else? What’s wrong with that? On the contrary, it’s a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can’t!

– Pablo Picasso

A big part of my job at Roundarch is working with and visualizing data and taking it beyond bars and pies. I don’t have much experience with data viz and as much as I appreciate and work with data visualizations, I haven’t found my ‘entry point’ into it yet.
Then I came across Nicholas Felton’s portfolio and I found my in.
Felton has done what I’ve always recommended to people who don’t have enough work in their portfolios – make stuff up.
He’s created annual reports of himself for 2007, 2006 and 2005.
Top tracks in iTunes listened to, miles traveled (and how far that is from the moon), digital photos taken, photos per country, books read, food eaten – the sum of Felton’s parts.
Brilliant idea.

His work has inspired me to not only visualize data in my own life, but how to do it for client work, how to find new connections with existing data.
Doing something something new with something old – this is the essence of innovation.
Once you ‘get it’, the world starts to look like visualizations, like Neo in the Matrix (but in a much more interesting way, no so numbery and greeny).
update: Victor tipped me off to this post at Cool Hunting, Andrew Kuo: No Lifeguard on Duty

Safe Trip Home

Dido askd film directors in specific countries around the world to create pieces based on their idea of what home means to them, using a chosen song from her album, Safe Trip Home, for inspiration. So far the resulting film have been made in Brazil, New Zealand, Thailand, England, India, Portugal and the US.

(via Creativity)

Design and the Elastic Mind
I’ve been slacking …this site passed under my radar when it launched. The style and sounds have Yugop written all over it. (thanks vb)