After twenty-three years I’ve picked up the guitar again. ‘Why’ is a whole blog unto itself (which may, itself, be forthcoming). To teach myself I’m using a mixture of books plus the crucial ingredient of YouTube. Of course I investigated the available iPhone/Pad apps. It seems to me that a combination of anyone of these and YouTube browser would make a lot of sense.  The apps are two essential things; fingering suggestions and human musicality. I’m sure you could sort out an algorithm that generated the fingering, but you take so much from seeing the variety of styles and the emphasis that different people bring. I’m currently working on ‘Bianco Fiore’. There are a zillion renditions of it on YouTube and I take different things from each. Combining interactive control over the notation with real human musicality would be a huge step for this category of app.

Those rat bastards at CPB went and did what I originally envisioned for DoppleGangr; they built it on top of Facebook. Here’s a summary of what they did/are doing:

The advantages of using Facebook as the platform for this are pretty clear. First, you have a built in audience that already actively communicates. Second, pictures of people are inherent to the platform (”face” + “book”). Both of these two point add up to the sort of critical mass you’d need for a DoppleGangr-type experience, in theory.

My own experience with the Coke Zero app was confounded by the way FB catagorizes pictures of people. There are pictures of you that you’ve uploaded, and there are pictures of you that other people have uploaded. You access both types by a link, “Pictures of you”, that doesn’t make this distinction.

The problem that I ran into was that the Coke Zero app will only look at “Pictures of me” that I uploaded and tagged as me. You need at least four of these. It took me a while to realize that there was a distinction and that the app was looking only at one set of images. By the time I figured this out I ran out of time and gave up. It occurs to me that the decision to make DoppleGangr a mobile app removes this weirdness because it’s a self-contained system.

The other odd thing is that, at the moment, after the trouble of the submission process, you are told that you have to wait until the database is full to see any results. Kind of a bummer, but presumably something that will go away once there’s critical mass.

All that said, I feel that for all the advantages of FB, a mobile app is still superior. I think the real fun of it is in the bar trick-ness of the experience. It’s a social experience that needs a physcial space social context, e.g. not behind a computer screen. Taking a picture of your friend then showing them their dopplegangers just seems like the core of the experience, rather than just finding people that look like you.

I am happy to see this idea move forward, even if I’m not doing it. It’ll be fun to watch it play out. Perhaps we’ll pick this up again. But not anytime too soon. So, if you’re interested, here’s the preliminary flows for the experience. Enjoy.

While this site isn’t a portfolio of professional work, I can’t resist posting this. It was a ton of fun to work on and a great collaboration with my friends in Munich.

One of the universal behaviors of parents of small children is the “Great Children’s Book Idea” assertion. The root of this is easily identifiable; parents read a gazillion kids books, many of very dubious virtue. Inevitably a parent comes to the conclusion that if Rabbit Does Something Really, Really Random can get published and, presumably, make money, the parent could easily bang something out better.

I had this moment a while ago. In my usual style I’ve just gotten around to doing something about it. My contribution to the Parent Generated Content canon is Cats Can’t Cook Cacciatore. The book would be a series of double page vignettes of cats wreaking havoc in various scenarios. And as you will see, alliteration abounds:

Other vignettes would be:

Cats Can’t Climb Kilimanjaro

Cats Can’t Captain Catamarans

And whatever other ones I can think of. I have a list somewhere.

The book would resolve with “Or, can they?” With a close up of a sly looking cat.

Note: apologies of the crapariffic image quality, my scanner sucks.

With AR all the rage these days it seems to me that there would be some fun mobile applications that are not advertising/marketing related. Back in the day there was a bit of hubbub around the idea of have clothes that displayed unique identifiers. The unique IDs would link to an email address so people who saw you on the street could ping you without actually knowing your name. I don’t know whatever came of this idea but it sounds very ‘01-’02.

My thought is to take the AR technology that we’ve seen in marketing pieces for GE and Nissan and use it to enhance personal articles like . . . wait for it . . . TSHIRTS!

I’m thinking there are two ways the experience could play out; 1) you buy a tshirt with an image on it. The activating symbol is embedded somewhere in the image. As illustrated above, when someone focused their phone’s camera on the image, the image would animate and, ideally, become interactive. Or, 2) the activating symbol itself is the main image on the tshirt. The advantage of this is that you could change up the animation associated with the symbol, which could be kind of cool from the user end, possibly more lucrative from the commercial end – you can sell the image/animations for $.25 or something.

I think this would be neat.

I’ve been working in the car world for a few years now, so I’ve had reason to consider how people could interact with their cars. There’s been an awful lot of focus on making cars smarter, making them more like personal computers in their interface. I think the most compelling developments have been in the emerging integration between cars  and smart phones. Since I read about the turn-by-turn guidance that will be available with the iPhone OS3, I’ve been noodling with what the docking interface might be.

Then I saw this and felt bad:

It’s compelling to think about what other functions a smartphone might be able to take over. What if the intelligence for the human interface side of things was supplemented, and in some cases replaced by the phone? Certainly it would be a better dashboard for setting preferences like radio stations, climate settings. Owner’s manuals would only get better by residing on the phone; they could by dynamically updated. Given that most phones have some sort of Bluetooth thing going on, they could also serve as keys for cars with pushbutton starters.

What’s neat is the thought that as long as you have your phone, you’ll be connected to your car. A friend of mine is a big advocate of just knowing the state of your car; are the windows rolled up? are the lights on? is it safe? When you think of it, a smartphone connection with your car could eliminate those useless car alarms that go off every fifteen minutes for now reason.

There’s lots to think about, and I’m not the only one, or the first. Those IDEO cats developed a great future vision piece for Intel that imagined something eerily similar to the iPhone/TomTom mashup:

This all makes me think that perhaps the future is about dumb terminals in the car with the intelligence residing on the phone. I imagine this would bring the cost of cars down a bit considering how much money (and weight) is sunk into proprietary nav and entertainment systems. Lots to think about.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people have had similar ideas to Dopplegangr. In fact, I’m mildly surprised that no one has done exactly the same thing. I was sad though when  someone sent me this:

Dopplegangr.com doesn’t do anything that we want to do, seems to be more Hot or Not than anything. But it’s a shame that they grabbed the name. There’s another site, Find My Double, that’s a bit more similar and may actually use facial recognition software.

Guess I’ve got to come up with another name. Which is too bad, I’m really in love with the idea of the Doppleverse.

Whoah! Might actually make this one. I got some interest from some of the cats at work and we decided to move it a couple of milimeters forward. We’ve reoriented it towards the iPhone to emphasize the bar trick aspect of it over the social networking aspect. I’ve blown out some flows for the fundamental experience and we’re looking into financial feasibility. Here’s a screen that pretty much says it all.

So, we’ll see. This could be lots of fun!

I just returned from Munich. Added some images to the Hotel Series.

I found my notebook with more ideas for GamesThatSuck.com.

Insane Japanese Game – I love the cultural mistranslations you get when you play games ported over from Japan. It’s not just that the English is sometimes wonderfully odd, it’s also the cultural idiosyncrasies that you get a peek in to. They’re even more intriguing because they’re more often than not served up completely without context. This game would be all about mystifying the player with shifting interfaces, seemingly random feedback and general craziness. It’s would be sort of like watching a Japanese variety show – just on a DS.

Meaning in Life Memory  – This would be a game about searching for meaning and significance in an individual life. It would be just like Memory, only with about sixty cards instead of a dozen. On each card would be the existential goals of life: “Procreation”, “Meaningful Work”, “True Connection with People”, etc. The rub is that not only are there too many cards, they also rearrange themselves everytime you turn them over. Fun!

Don’t Get Picked Last – Very simple. You’re a kid in a group of other kids that are choosing sides for a game. You have to do everything you can to not be picked last.

More updates later.