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!

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.

Snibbe Interactive recently completed three new interactive exhibits at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry for You! The Experience. This groundbreaking exhibition creates a nonlinear social multi-user experience that mirrors the way people experience media today – through the lens of the personal, social, and online.

As the centerpiece of the exhibition, MSI commissioned Snibbe Interactive to create a twenty-four foot wide multi-projector interactive wall that accommodates dozens, and sometimes hundreds of simultaneous visitors.

The purpose of Get in the Action is simply to get people to move as if they were in an sporting class. In the center of a large screen a video coach demonstrates one of four activities: Basketball, Hip Hop Dancing, Tai Chi, and Yoga. As people follow along, magical motion effects create on-screen trails that outline their past movements, inspired by sports science analysis and visualizations similar to those that professional athletes use. These trails make the audience excited to follow along. In a free play session, people’s outlines overlap in an open-ended experience that encourages even the shyest person to dance and play with his body. Get in the Action can hold people for long durations and promotes physical exercise and social engagement.

Laugh Garden is a cluster of monitors with video faces that play on each screen. When people move in front of a monitor, the face begins to chuckle, to laugh, and eventually to roar. The greater each person’s movement, the greater the laughter. Groups of people can make the whole garden laugh together, and the laughter spreads quickly to the visitors themselves creating a social experience. The exhibit utilizes our newer depth-sensing three-dimensional SocialMirror technologies.

With Support Networks people create personalized collages about their network of friends and family. Using a touchscreen monitor, a person enters her name, which appears at the center of a large wall-mounted display. Next, the visitor enters the names of several friends. As the visitor answers questions about her social relationships, the names of people who provide more support become larger and larger. With our SocialShare add-on, the collages can be posted directly to Facebook and other social networks, or emailed to friends.

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.

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:

Welcome to the Snibbe Interactive blog. As part of the launch of our new website, we have also launched this blog, to discuss all aspects of social immersive media. Look here for frequently updated information on our new products, new installations in science museums, new immersive interactive branding experiences, and new entertainment and theme park experiences. We’ll also be featuring articles on social immersive media platforms and technologies involving projectors, displays, and both regular and stereoscopic/three-dimensional cameras. And we plan to include articles on design principles, user studies, educational studies, interactive arts and media, positive outcomes for branding and retail to enhance sales, interviews, and commentary on this young and exciting medium.

The site was designed in-house, and implemented ably by Michael O’Neal of Daka Designs.