Snibbe Interactive founder Scott Snibbe was the featured innovator on CNN’s The Next List, which profiles forward-looking thinkers in the fields of tech, science and social change. Clips are below!

Producer Tracy Dorsey brought her crew to Snibbe Interactive headquarters in San Francisco for a three-day shoot that resulted in an intimate and extensive portrait of Snibbe, who, among other projects, reflects on his recent work with James Cameron’s interactive “Avatar” exhibition at the EMP Museum, and Bjork’s breakthrough Biophilia App.

What’s next? Says Dorsey, “He envisions a fully participatory experience, one where your movements will actually change the story and affect what happens around you. It may sound far-fetched, but Scott says all he needs is the right partner.”

Snibbe Interactive founder Scott Snibbe recently spoke at the San Francisco campus of the California College for the Arts in an evening dubbed “What Does an Interaction Designer Do?”

In essence, an interaction designer is a storyteller.

“Every person’s life is a kind of hero’s journey. Every person was born, every person is going to die and when you can look at people like that, you have so much more love and compassion towards them,” said Snibbe in a post-panel interview.” I think that’s what’s missing a little bit in this kind of online world. It kind of flattens the world.

Snibbe suggested finding a way of crafting stories for individuals, which, counter-intuitively, can be achieved by subtracting information rather than sharing too much, too soon.

“By only sharing small bits of information you piquing curiosity and you tell a story,” said Snibbe. “Stories often begin by knowing how things turn out, but then your curiosity is engaged as to how you got there.”

What’s your story?

Snibbe Interactive is proud to announce our production of interactive multimedia and concert visuals for Björk’s new Biophilia tour. The Biophilia live show has its world premiere as part of the Manchester International Festival, with Björk’s first live concert performance in nearly four years. Björk continues performances at Manchester through July 15, and then goes on to a three-year world tour of six-week residencies in eight different cities. In each city Björk will perform Biophilia twice a week, using interactive apps to play live a set of custom built musical instruments.

The video and stage visuals produced by Snibbe Interactive evoke an atmosphere similar to being inside an app itself, with eight screens mounted surrounding a central stage. The immersive concert environment also includes floor projections with cymatics imagery of vibrating sand; a collapsing galactic “reverse big bang” that envelops Björk; a 24-woman Icelandic choir; and famed percussionist Manu Delago. Live imagery from interactive iPad apps, and music and instrument control from these apps, blend seamlessly with the stage performance. In addition to original animation and video, Snibbe worked with several brilliant animators including MacArthur award-winning bioanimator Drew Berry, abstract animator Stephen Malinowski, and cymatics artist Meara O’Reilly.

In Manchester and subsequent locations, the venues also host a series of music-education workshops in collaboration with local schools to emphasize Björk’s integrated vision for Biophilia of Music, Technology and Nature.

Press release from Nonesuch Records

Björk at the Manchester International Festival

New York Times review of Biophilia by Jon Pareles

Björk beneath Drew Berry’s Hollow animation

Icelandic Choir performs under Stephen Malinowski’s animated score

Björk in her amazing spliced mini-dress/evening gown with Scott Snibbe at rehearsals

All photos by Carsten Windhorst/Press

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!

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.

Watch Scott Snibbe’s talk on Social Immersive Media at Stanford University’s Seminar on People, Computers, and Design organized by Professor Terry Winograd last May. The talk gives an in-depth presentation of a theory and practice of Social Immersive Media – augmented reality that focuses on social interaction – with specific applications in museum exhibits, and marketing, and art. The Academic CHI Paper on which this talk is based won best paper of the conference in 2009:

Watch Scott Snibbe talk about Social Immersive Media including applications in museums, commerce, education, and art at UXWeek 2009 on their blog or below:

Scott Snibbe | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.