You’re at some trendy restaurant and a waiter with all the hirsute hipness of Russell Brand (but none of the pluck) wafts to your table and recites of the specials by rote. Once you’re impressed with the joint’s preparations of exotic animal parts (en francais, of course), the waiter will then botch your order and overcharge you for the privilege. It’s the tax one pays for being so outré.

While I was recently enduring this kind of experience, Snibbe Interactive’s Social Tables (tabletop multi-touch interaction for education, entertainment, branding and digital signage) came to mind as a means of staving off my inevitable foodie FAIL. Though our engineers consider it sacrilege to even consider dining atop one these finely-prepared servings of art and technology (I too do not recommend eating off high-tech art) I salivated at the possibilities of poking through an interactive menu, a live video stream from the kitchen, pop-up explanations of whatever it is that “haute cuisine” means or the latest trend spotted at the Fancy Foods culinary trade show – all available by merely stroking the screen.

And why not? Of the future-forward restaurants listed on, say, UrbanSpoon, many have equipped their waitstaff with iPads. An interactive table functions much the same way touch-based controls – so let’s cut out the middle man. Sure, my colleagues think I’m mad but it’s not like I’m suggesting we get all Ginsu like the teppanyaki tables at Benihana, I just think there are better ways to experience information that’s as easy to use as eating finger food. And though I don’t advocate playing with one’s food, playing with “virtual” food could whet one’s appetite for a four-course informational experience with side dishes that never have to be bussed.

Our SocialTable-based “Health Choices” game, for example, integrates experiential learning with a fun user-interface that tallies in real-time the results of one’s health-related choices (video below). This can be customized for all manner of applications, from hospitality to hospitals. I for one, would like to see “etiquette training” touch table for waitstaff. The interactive display could teach you how to properly set a table using virtual flatware (salad forks go on the outside, Russell). And, for once, it’s okay to put your elbows on the table (something interesting will happen). Let’s do lunch.

The recent release of Microsoft’s Kinect* has raised the profile of our time-tested 3D tracking interfaces. To support the demand for full 3d sensing, Snibbe Interactive has now adapted all of its large SocialScreen interactive wall products to work on the LCD Display of our SocialMirror platform. To get started, just plug it into an outlet and the system auto-calibrates and runs within moments, requiring no special background behind visitors.

In an exciting development, as of the beginning of 2011, all or our systems now support the Kinect Camera in addition to the industrial depth-sensing cameras we already offer. Watch the video below to see some of our most popular immersive titles running on SocialMirror with Kinect! And, even better, you can purchase these titles immediately for museum, entertainment, and marketing applications. Our shipping systems run with time-tested industrial depth-sensing cameras, and don’t need to wait for the eventual release of Microsoft’s commercial SDK sometime later this year. Of course, we’ll be excited once this license is approved by Microsoft and we can offer the Kinect as part of our suite of cameras.

*Kinect is a trademark of Microsoft

Watch the new video below for a selection from the wide range of InfoTiles interactive walls that we’ve installed for museums, entertainment, and marketing.

1) At the Guinness Museum in LA, people discover the top records of Hollywood stars.

2) Dell used InfoTiles at a tradeshow to deliver a complex message on custom software with ease and humor.

3) The College Basketball Hall of Fame uses Infotiles to explore its history.

4) Prudential used Infotiles to colorfully highlight ways of using social media.

5) The Singapore Science Center used InfoTiles to teach about penguins.

6)  Floodgate Investments highlighted its investments in Twitter and Digg.

7) The Miami Science Museum uses an expanded version of InfoTiles that asks questions about sustainability, letting people literally vote with their feet. Many more are coming your way this year!

“Chinese audiences absolutely love the Dream Lantern interactive. Especially kids, it’s a big hit with them!” – Christian Lachel, ICP Creative Director, BRC Imagination Arts

Working with BRC Imagination Arts, Snibbe Interactive created a customized Word Wall experience for Information and Communications Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, sponsored by China Mobile and China Telecom.

The two interactive walls show colorful ICT Power™ characters flying across the screen. As visitors to the expo walk in front of the walls, the characters drop 3D animated dream lanterns. Using their shadows, people can interact with the wall to catch and collect the lanterns and release fireworks. Visitors can later retrieve a personalized video of themselves interacting with the ICT Power™ characters that can then be shared online via SocialShare. If a picture is worth a 1,000 words – the Word Wall is truly exponential.

Snibbe Interactive created a customized InfoTiles SocialScreen for the recent launch of founder Mike Maples Jr.’s Floodgate Fund. By creating a large interactive wall, entrepreneurs and investors at the launch event in San Francisco were able to interact socially and physically to understand Floodgate’s investments in companies like Twitter and Digg, and also to understand the fund’s unique “Super Angel” approach to investing.

Ann Miura-Ko, Partner in Floodgate said, “We couldn’t have found a better way to get a brand message across in a social setting. The interaction conveyed our brand message directly from the display to the attendees, allowing me to focus on the high level interactions with our guests.”

For more information, read the press release from April, 2010.

Just on the tail of March Madness, we have a new customization of InfoTiles to share, customized with historic video and graphics from the history of college basketball. Courtesy of College Basketball Experience in Kansas City, Missouri, we were able to install this experience in Las Vegas earlier this month. Watch the video:

Also attached to the InfoTiles interactive wall is a SocialShare video email station to share videos online for viral marketing. Visitors can make, send, and post videos to social networks (Facebook, YouTube, Myspace) like the one below:

IAAPA (The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions) published their February Funworld Magazine last week with an article that prominently mentions Snibbe Interactive’s new technologies for interactive digital signage. Of most interest is the new SocialMirror platform that uses LCD screens and a three-dimensional depth-sensing camera to measure people’s full-body movements without any special background; the platform also precisely tracks the number of impressions and dwell-time of people in the experiences. The article also discusses the SocialShare platform’s ability to share personalized experiences created in digital signage applications online in Facebook and other social networks. SocialNet allows hundreds or even thousands of SocialMirrors to be connected into an interactive digital signage network for stores, franchise, or advertising networks. These new technologies show great promise for high-traffic, low-space environments including retail, public digital signage networks, theme parks, and other public franchises.

We’ve just published our 2010 catalog of interactive experiences in print and PDF formats. Our products pages will always have the most up-to-date listings of our product lines, which increase monthly. However, this compact 8-page document neatly summarizes our platforms and many products and is available in print format. You can download a copy right now, or request a print copy from our office.

Customers in Entertainment, Museums and Marketing can use this catalog to order unmodified ready-to-ship experiences; or as a basis for customized and unique experiences. Don’t hesitate to contact us about your project.

Last month the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded Snibbe Interactive an Export Achievement Certificate for expanded exports in new foreign markets in 2009 including the Philippines, UK, Norway, China, and Germany. Below is a photograph of Brian Hageman, U.S. Business Development Director, receiving the award:

Left-to-right: Stephan Crawford, Director of the U.S. Commercial Service, San Francisco; Trishan Arul, CFO, Snibbe Interactive; Maribeth Rubin, Project Manager, Snibbe Interactive; Tom Meyer, CTO, Snibbe Interactive; Brian Hageman, U.S. Business Development Director, Snibbe Interactive; Teddy Johnston, Chief of Staff for the Undersecretary of the International Trade Administration; Steve Glickman, Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Commerce/Director General of the U.S. & Foreign Commercial Service

We recently released the new InfoTiles product for socially browsing large amounts of information. Interaction in InfoTiles is similar to moving the game piece on a Ouija board. Using their shaodws, one or more people push a selector around above tiles appearing on a wall, floor, or table. Placing the selector on a tile makes it turn over, revealing the information below. The selector can be a frame, image, or logo.

By keeping the image on the tiles mysterious, people are encouraged to explore all of the information. In this example application for Shell, the tiles hold numbers, and people must flip over the tile to discover the number’s significance. The product combines the elusive parallel needs of communicating large amounts of information with creating a fun, social, emotional experience. Watch the video below:

This experience can be customized for walls, table, or floor. See an example concept of a floor experience with space themes below: