Spirit of Collaboration.

Snibbe Studio and Snibbe Interactive are proud to release a new iOS music app, born from a collaborative venture between our sister studios. The app reveals a feature length interactive treatment to the incredible new Philip Glass Album REWORK_ with eleven visualizations of his music remixed. The album, made in collaboration with Beck, was released last month and features other artists including: Tyondai Braxton, Amon Tobin, Cornelius, Dan Deacon and Johann Johannsson.

This epic collaboration is just the beginning of things to come.

Here at our studio, in San Francisco’s SOMA district, we anticipate that 2013 will be the year of new creative collaborations, not only between our studios but also amongst other pioneers of machine vision and touch-based technologies. Sharing our insights through meet ups, collaborations and the occasional Christmas party, are all great ways to mature these fledgling technologies into full bodied interactive languages.

To learn more about the app, read Snibbe Stuido blog for details. You can also purchase the app here.

We are very proud of the interactive walls, floors and displays we’ve developed for hospitals and clinics throughout the country. Recently, Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows team was so inspired by our work at Alex’s Place, a children’s oncology unit at the University of Miami, that they produced this heartwarming video about the clinic and the power of our Character Mirror powered by Kinect for Windows. Watch the video above and check out the Kinect for Windows blog to read more about it.

In the Studio, we often find ourselves talking about the transformative power of gesture and touch technology in our work and daily lives, which people are beginning to call Natural User Interface. In October, our very own Scott Snibbe was invited to speak on a panel at the Seattle Interactive Conference that addressed these same themes and asked the question: where is this technology going? There are some very interesting answers and the Kinect for Windows team writes up a great summary on their site.  You can read more about the event here.

For more information on how to make the Kinect work for your needs, contact us.

Care to draw some stars, twist them into galaxies, then explode them like supernovas—all with just your fingertips?

Gravilux for Microsoft Windows 8: Interactive app

The Gravilux App from Scott Snibbe Studio and Snibbe Interactive is now available on Windows 8  for PCs and tablets. 

This launch joins the already available versions on Apple  and Android, fulfilling our cross-platform goals. This app allows multiple fingers and players to use gravity, and anti-gravity, to create a cosmic world full of multi-colored particles in all shapes and sizes.  There will be a second version released in December that will jam along to your favorite musical tracks.

Grant Stevens (Business Development) and Zheng Yang (Immersive Media Engineer) were fortunate enough to show off this app during a boat cruise in Seattle. Thrown in conjunction with the 2012 Build Conference it was a fun party with many of Microsoft’s top app developers demonstrating their products for Windows 8. Gravilux is popular as an app and installation as we previously made an appearance with Gravilux at the Calvin Klein fashion show in Seoul.

We’re excited to see where this app and future apps will take us next!

For more information on how you can impress party guests with Gravilux, click here.

Our Creative Director, Graham Plumb, spoke at the Digital Out-of-Home Interactive Entertainment Association (DNA) conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. His panel titled “Maximizing Social Media in Leisure Facilities” highlighted the strategies to maximize social media in entertainment locations, such as amusement parks, hotels, and shopping malls.  Graham drew upon Scott Snibbe’s paper, “Social Immersive Media” (CHI, 2009) to discuss the design principals that create successful immersive experiences.

Interactive Digital Strategy using Snibbe Interactive's SocialShare Kiosk

A perfect example of maximizing social media to share a physical experience is our Social Share Platform. It allows users to share a video of their interactive experience with their online networks.

At the DNA conference we revealed a strategy becoming strong with our top clients, the “360 Degree” approach that takes into account the user engagement before, during, and after people are onsite, by leveraging apps and social media that draw people in, and then engage them later. With the 360 Degree approach, engagement becomes less about the technology used in the interaction and more about story and relationships. In an age where we can all take out our mobile devices and instantly connect, it is more vital than ever that the interaction is meaningful and relevant.

For more information on how to connect with our Social Share Platform, click here.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

However, this is information we are allowed to leak!  Snibbe Interactive is thrilled to showcase our latest permanent installation in the La Concha Motel Lobby of the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, opening on October 27^th. The exhibit features two large interactive kiosks with LCD monitors, displaying our InfoTiles technology with hand-tracking capabilities. Visitors gesture with their hands to move a selector box and choose a tile on screen.  The tile flips over to reveal information about the Neon Museum in the form of text, images, or video.  This experience keeps visitors entertained and engaged as they interact with various tiles to learn more.

The Neon Museum is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving iconic Las Vegas neon signs. They have collected over 150 signs that date back to the 1930s. This museum project has been in the works for the last 15 years and everyone in town is excited to finally reveal this historic and cultural landmark to the world. Tours and ticket information can be found here.

For more information on how to brighten up your space with an InfoTiles kiosk, click here.

Snibbe Interactive's Creative Director Graham Plumb @ East Bay Center for the Performing Arts

Snibbe Interactive puts on its dancing shoes this Saturday, September 29^th for the debut of our latest permanent interactive installation at East Bay Center for Performing Arts in Richmond, about 16 miles Northeast of San Francisco.  The interactive comprises of four street-facing 42” LCD monitors displayed in the windows of the recently renovated Winters building.

Inspired, in part, by Scott Snibbe’s large scale video installation Transit, at LAX, this public art piece amps up the experience by adding an interactive element. “Our new piece at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts is a kind of x-ray view into the heart of the center, showing people from the outside the kind of joy and play going on inside with music, dance, and performance. But more than that, it also draws passers-by into that play, with magical interactivity, taking a person’s movements and gestures, and sprouting ribbons that wind through the silhouette performances of the actual people who teach and learn there,” says Scott Snibbe, interactive artist and CEO.

This project is part of a larger vision by Richmond city officials and local organizations to socially engage the community and celebrate its diversity. Historically, Richmond, especially the Iron Triangle neighborhood where the Center lives, is known for high levels of poverty and violence. With the renovation of the Center and the addition of our interactive art piece, the city hopes to provide opportunities for the youth to explore their creativity and restore community pride to all residents. This effort has even caught the attention of the San Francisco Chronicle!

Close up of Performers in Interactive Display

The unveiling will happen at 6pm during the Richmond Arts in Motion street fair along MacDonald Ave. The street fair runs from 1-8pm and features dance and music performances, food trucks, and activities for kids.

For information on how to get your own groove on with an interactive display, click here.

Who says Fashion Week is just for New Yorkers? We here at Snibbe Interactive were able to participate all the way from San Francisco, putting our fashion face forward to create a socially immersive interactive retail display for the luxury retailer, Saks Fifth Avenue.  This interactive debuts on September 13^th at Saks Fifth Avenue’s  flagship store in Manhattan, zip code 10022-SHOE to launch Saks’ largest women’s contemporary line, Vince.

The experience is a “Three of Me”  where there are several time-delayed shadows that trail behind the user. Each shadow represents a different texture. In this customized version for Saks, images of models in beautiful Vince clothing as well as scenic inspirations of LA and sunsets reveal themselves as users move in front of the camera. What makes this experience so immersive is that it encourages users to explore their curiosity by gesturing to discover why lies beneath.

This isn’t our first time interacting with the fashion world. We also made an appearance at the Calvin Klein Fashion Show in Seoul, Korea this past spring.

What we’ve learned is that fashion is a lot like interactive technology—engaging, innovative, entertaining, and oh-so-fabulous!

If you want a fashionable display at your retail location, please contact us!

Many of us at Snibbe Interactive have a difficult time describing to others exactly what it is we do. Terms like “interactive touch system,” “gestural experience,” “social interactivity” just aren’t as obvious as saying we’re nurses or nuclear physicists. What becomes of this discussion is usually a lot of arm waving and vivid descriptions of gigantic iPads.

So what goes on in an interactive studio and what kinds of people work here?

Studio life is not that much different than life in any other office, except we have giant projection screens, a woodshop in our basement, and more Kinects, cameras, and screens than Jimmy Fallon. Not to mention the grooming, dancing, and vamping of people in front of our SOMA office’s one-way mirror front windows. We all go out together every Wednesday for lunch at a neighborhood restaurant – everything from vegan (which in San Francisco is a synonym for “delicious”) to hard core barbecue. We also have bi-weekly Show-N-Tells where each of us presents the exciting projects we are working on. And if the weather is nice enough, we gorge on ice cream while skateboarding around the prototype space.

We’re a diverse mix of talented and creative minds from all over the world. Our employees speak Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and The Queen’s English. In addition to being engineers, designers, installers, and business developers, we are also authors, electronic musicians, comic book artists, sculptors, podcasters, parents, spouses, and friends.

Even our parents and partners sometimes scratch their heads as to what we do all day. A recent school group that visited reported back that it was like visiting Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. If interactivity was akin to a chocolate bar then that description would be accurate. But really what we do as interactive tech-geeks is to continue to gesture wildly and hope for the best.

I am one of the true space probe fanatics who’ve been tracking the Mars Curiosity Rover’s progress since it was announced five years back. Eight months ago, when the Mars Science Laboratory launched on an Atlas V rocket, I marked my calendar for this summer’s landing. On August 5, I watched the unbelievable perfect touchdown on a laptop in bed, tears welling up in my eyes in sync with Mohawk Guy’s.

As I’ve obsessively downloaded each new image coming from the rover, I discovered a great lesson in interactivity worth sharing. People regularly ask me what’s the value of interactivity – what do interactive screens, walls, floors, and tables add to an experience above and beyond an ordinary picture or video? The two images below help to explain.

I found this first image on the NASA MSL page – a beautiful high-resolution panorama of the Curiosity Rover and its surrounding landscape. Obsessed to see as much as possible, I dug into the high-res version, and zoomed around with my browser to get a sense of what it’s like to be on Mars. It was cool, but my brain couldn’t quite figure out how to unwrap the weird warping that turned the rover into a long strip of metal across the bottom of the screen. The experience felt like examining photographic evidence than actually being there. It felt flat and dead.

With a “mars rover” Google alert that’s been in action for more than five years, I get a lot of extra information, and a French link stood out the next day: “Le site de Curiosity, au cratère Gale, en full panoramique!” The author had created a QuickTime VR of the same Mars scene. Now with an interactive display, I could magically look around, as if mounted on the rover’s camera, and zoom in and out too. The difference was astonishing – now I really felt as if I were looking through a window to Mars.

The lesson is clear: if you take the same picture data and drive the view based on one’s own decisions on where to look, all of a sudden it’s like you’re right there at Bradbury Landing. As humans, we interact with our surroundings, not stare at a picture of them. In its dynamic interactivity, this little web app, based on Apple’s technology from the early 1990s blows away even the highest-resolution images. All simply because you can interact.

Click on the picture above to experience it yourself. Scroll down to the second image on the page, press SHIFT and CONTROL to zoom in and out, and your arrows to control direction.

- Scott Snibbe

Gravilux touch interface with wall projection. Photo courtesy of ©2012 Ju; JW Moon; Hyoseok

Last spring, The New Museum of Contemporary Art teamed up with Calvin Klein, Inc., to throw a stunning one-night-only bash of high fashion and interactive art mixed with glamorous celebrities on the rooftop of the iconic Seoul Station in Seoul, Korea. Scott Snibbe was one of three interactive artists commissioned to heighten the celebration which featured Calvin Klein’s new fall collection. A bright interactive wall made shooting stars that defy gravity was the best choice for interactive entertainment and we developed a custom installation (read: Interactive Haute Couture) which featured our Gravilux app.

Gravilux is played with on an iPad, iPhone or Android phone but for this event we projected a stunning interactive star field on a large wall surrounded by an exhibition Calvin Klein’s innovative and minimalist fall line.  Throughout the evening, guests could control the visuals via an interactive touch interface nearby.  Celebrities decked out in Calvin’s Klein clothing attended the show including Lara Stone, Chloë Moretz and actress Kate Bosworth, who wrote about it in the August issue of Vogue.

Calvin Klein model plays with Gravilux. Photo courtesy of ©2012 Ju; JW Moon; Hyoseok

You can expect Snibbe Interactive to make another stylish appearance at an upcoming launch of a well known fashion house that will feature our socially immersive interactive retail display. We may be self defined interactive tech geeks but we dress up pretty nicely when asked.