Category Archives: Uncategorized

Interactive Welcome Screen

Posted on by Kyle Harris

// The Concept

We are starting something pretty exciting here at Agent X. In an attempt to make our office more connected, we are in the works of creating an interactive welcome screen that can also serve as an ambient control system for our entire space.

There is a lot that we want to do with this, and while we are still in the planning stage, we are sharing using this first post as a mind dump of components that we want to include.

// Components

In order to create an experience that is both engaging and useful, we don’t want to leave any possible element unturned.

  • Clock Resting state for the interface.
  • NewsNot that we are too busy, but for the occasional visitor waiting, it is a great way to pass time.
  • Virtual Check-in A visitor is typically looking for someone. With the virtual check-in feature, they can send an alert directly to the person’s computer notifying them of a visitor.
  • Attendance Possibly done using RFID, if en employee is not in the office, the system will show them as out.
  • Weather Our headquarters in Michigan, the weather changes constantly. From the time a visitor enters the office, until the time they leave, it may be completely different outside. Pulled from weather.com or a similar source, the weather feature is a fully-capable weather app with high definition visualization of current conditions and forecasts.
  • Company Information Elevator speech, portfolio elements, general company information, history timeline… you know, everything someone might want to know about our company.
  • Ambient ControlsThis is where I get really excited thinking about the opportunities. Nothing would say technologically adept than to have ambient controls such as lighting, temperature and music controls in a central location.
  • Agency Calendar For internal use mostly. A nice exercise in visualization of data, with the benefit of seeing company wide bandwidth. If possible, pulling in iCal information to show meetings and availability would be ideal.
  • The actual welcome screen We have tried this in the past by uploading the logo of a visiting client on the TV in the conference room. It was rather successful, but a bit time consuming, and requests to have display screens typically came last minute. Nonetheless, with proper planning this would be a nice touch to let potential clients feel even more welcome.

// The Build

Some basic ideation and planning has been done as to how the finished frame will look. We want to create a unit that has the ability to not only house and feature the touchscreen, but also hide the other various components that enhance the overall experience, i.e. Kinect, speakers, RFID reader…

// Technology

I’m sure we are going to find different / more elements that we are going to need  in order to create the best experience possible.

/ Hardware

  • mac mini The power behind the experience. Compact enough to hide.
  • 42″ Touchscreen monitor Sufficient size we think. While we want to make this an immersive experience, we certainly want to avoid the overwhelming
  • Microsoft Kinect Detect voice and movement.
  • Speakers Part of creating ambience in the office will rely on sounds and music.
  • RFID detection

/ User Interaction

  • Touch Ahh, the physical touch. Most of us are accustomed to it through smart phones and tablet; the challenge will be to create and experience that would rather be had on a screen that would be better than not…
  • Movement For us, this is key. Most interactive displays detect touch, but we want to this experience to go further. When you walk up to the screen, or walk past it, it recognizes a potential user. This creates a much more organic experience between the user and the interface.
  • Voice Also done with the Kinect.
** None of the examples in the main image are the work of Agent X, but instead of the incredibly talented creative individuals that continue to create and inspire. **

Immersive iPad Video? Yes Please.

Posted on by Brian Steketee

Video. Pictures. They’re great, and we’ve become used to having them at our finger tips in our lives. But what about iPad apps offering immersive video? Read on…but fair warning, as much as I love tech I admit I’m the innovator, not the coder. You’ll have to contact us and talk to our team if you want the technical details!

 

For those of you that don’t know – Agent X had the opportunity to partner with Charter Communications last year to throw a large scale concert event supported with an integrated digital campaign. The event was called Charter Center Stage.

When it came time to set up for the event, I was amazed at the sheer size of the event. Don’t believe me? Check out the stitched photo below (via the Microsoft Photosynth App)

 

So there I was. Standing in the middle of a dirt field while production crews bustled and hustled around me, tirelessly working on the venue to prepare for the event the next day. I realized, standing there: there needs to be a better way to share these moments. Photosynths are great, and the app Tourwrist has done a good job of making that technology social, but there’s so much more room to grow.

That especially became true when I tried to share this content with the crew back in the main office that didn’t make it to the event. They just couldn’t grasp the sheer size of the event. Here’s a few other shots, still not sharing the full scale well.

 

Now the challenge became capturing the true experience of an event such as Charter Center Stage in a way that is more expressive than pictures alone. So, being an innovator surrounded by some pretty smart people, we set out to build a 360 degree experience for the iPad tablet and iOS that would allow users at home to really dig in and enjoy an event such as this to the best ability, without having to leave their sofas. Hey, I get it, I’m busy, I don’t have chances to go to concerts like I used to! I’m sure you can relate.

Our tool box for this project consists of Corona as our tablet development tool, Unity for playing with the 360 degree visualizations, and of course software that helps us stick together the thousands of assets we had to work with from the event.

Above is a screen shot of the actual app we’re developing (we edited it into an iPad screen for realistic appeal of course!) We’ll have a future post with video to show it in action.

This app is amazing, and offers functionality making it possible for someone that was not attending an event to be able to:

1. Have some ability to “remote view” the venue as mocked up below.

2. Tap into the live HD feed streaming on Facebook

3. Provide the ability to cycle through 8 different camera angles

4. Link through Apple air play to allow some one at home viewing the show to share the event onto their TV for group viewing

5. Create interactive elements for each major function of the event to provide an additional experience for users (Main event, VIP, interactive areas, “back stage”, artists corner)

Stay tuned for more on this project, we’re quite excited to share this with the world. If you’re interested in this technology set up a time to stop by our main office and we’ll discuss opportunities for you and your brand.

Like this post? Hate it? Well interact with us online, we don’t bite:

www.facebook.com/weareagentx

www.twitter.com/weareagentx

Thanks for reading, until the next post,

Brian Steketee

Kinect – OpenNI and Processing

Posted on by Matt Plichta

(part 1 of series)

Why OpenNI?

We’ve all heard of the Kinect device, or the Microsoft XBox 360 by now and those of us in the developer community are aware that Microsoft has released a second version of the Kinect SDK for Windows. When asked to try to uncover the capabilities and possibilities of this new technology the Microsoft SDK is where I began.

Note: A standalone Kinect is required as the units that come with the XBox 360 use a non-standard USB connector. An adapter is available but rather hard to track down, so I went with the extra camera available at most big box retailers.

While the demos are cute, and installing the camera and SDK is fairly simple (Windows 7 only), the Visual Studio development environment created a super steep learning curve.

Enter OpenNI and Simple OpenNI open source drivers and libraries that can be used whether you work on a Mac, PC or Linux and like to code by hand using Processing.

Depth Camera

The camera consists of (left to right) an infrared projector, infrared depth camera and RGB camera. In addition to the camera there are 4 microphones and a servo motor in the base. WALL-E anyone?

Above is what the camera sees with the depth camera at left and RGB camera at right. Not a whole lot to look at, but notice the shades of grey and black in the depth camera image (lighter shades the closer the subject). The infrared projector projects thousands of infrared dots that the depth camera uses to measure distance.

 

Point Cloud

The image above shows how I was able to create shapes within the point cloud that when touched will trigger drum sounds. Being a musician myself, the idea of a virtual drum set was too cool to pass up. What about the angle of the view? Yes, the kinect camera is right in front of me so how did I get that shot? One more thing to add… the image rotates in 3D.

3D

In the video clip below from daniel shiffman you can see the effect in action:

Another kinect sighting

While browsing the flickr gallery for the New Zealand band Pajama Club I came across this behind the scenes shot from their upcoming video:

Here’s a link to a preview of the video giving some clues as to how the director is using the kinect, OpenNI and Processing:

Click here (use Chrome, Safari or Firefox for best results)

What do you want to see created with this new technology? I’ll be writing another post soon to let you know where I’ve taken my ideas.

The Sphere

Posted on by Josh Stauffer

We’ve been working with this piece of technology for about a year now and the more we do with it the more possibilities we seem to unearth. In its most simplistic form the sphere is a pretty cool and novel piece of technology that lends itself well to group settings and events. It can be used for things as simple as projecting video in 360 degrees or as complex as fully interactive touch sensitive applications built to spec for clients. But where we’ve begun to really see some cool new possibilities is the area of mobile device interoperability.

This idea here is to build up an application for the sphere that can allow for multi-player cooperative game play using your mobile device as a controller and possibly even motion capture from a Kinect to create a engaging experience that will become the RnD framework for client pitches later.

We’ve also been looking into interesting ideas of combining AR (Augmented Reality) and the Sphere, heres a look at a screenshot grabbed out of one of our iPads running a prototype app to test if the curvature of the sphere would throw off the image recognition software, initial success seems promising in this area.

Here are some videos of the initial prototype apps we’ve created for brands like Symantec and Redbull to help illustrate soem use cases for the sphere specific to their own brands.

 

 

The two major challenges we have here are hardware and software. From the hardware perspective we already have a pretty solid framework to start from since were dealing with a mostly complete product and modifying it to fit our needs. The custom lens, projector equipment, LED touch ring and sound system have already been tested out and are ready to go. Aside from that the rest of the hardware will end up off site in the form of a server and wireless network setup.

The software component of this is where the real tricky parts are going to come into play. In the past we’ve used Unity 3D to facilitate prototype development for the sphere and right now we are planning to use it for this RnD project as well. From there were going to need to hook in Touch OSC and some multiplayer capability for the prototype.

Right now we’re focused on getting some open source components up and running on the device so we can test out the general functionality and get a better idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each software option.

 

Google Fiber: And the Winner Is…

Posted on by admin

For those of you who haven’t heard yet, Google has made its decision regarding its broadband fiber initiative. Here’s a hint: it’s somewhere in Kansas, and its initials are KC…

Read all the details here:

Ultra high-speed broadband is coming to Kansas City, Kansas

From all of us at Agent X (formerly Steketee Greiner and Company) to all of you out there who put in all the time and effort and devotion at the local level around this initiative, we just want to say, in case no has or ever does, we were sincerely impressed, and you’re ALL winners in our book.

David

X Now Marks the Spot

Posted on by admin

In case you haven’t noticed, something is different about our blog.  No, it’s not that we’ve shifted directions and are now food critics at large (because the world needs another one of those). But there is definitely something different…

We have a new name! Steketee Greiner and Company has merged with experiential marketing agency Agent X out of Chicago, and we are now calling the new collective Agent X.

We’re still offering our clients the same full-service solutions in strategic planning, creative services, and measurement and insight analysis that we always have, but we’ve added some serious experiential marketing firepower to the stable.

Let’s face it – the marketing landscape is continually changing, and this merger enables us to mash together our services to create measurable, end-to-end brand engagements focused on live experiences that extend into the digital space. We feel this new focus is necessary to compete in a time where the lines continue to blur between experiential and digital.

The other good news is that this means we now have offices in both Grand Rapids and Chicago to serve you better!

Stay tuned for more stories, insights and so on as things develop.

Surviving CES and Experiential/Event Marketing

Posted on by Andrew Rushmore

The office is buzzing even more than usual lately and that can only mean one thing for our team: CES is coming! This will be the fifth year our client (Fulton Innovation) attends the show; we’re excited, as always!

Experiential and event management is exciting yet there are many ‘nail biting/ nerve racking’ moments that can be averted with a proper strategy. If you’re interested in experiential marketing, in the middle of planning an event, a marketing student, etc. than then post is for you. I’m going to share the top ten tips and tricks I’ve picked up in my five years of experience with CES – hopefully you’ll stop biting those nails now! Click below to read more.

Continue reading →

Sweet WOM, Chicago…

Posted on by admin

It’s that time of year again, the birds and bees are out and about making whoopie, and in the bustling metropolis of Chicago the Word of Mouth Marketing Association is preparing to welcome all (including a few of us from SGC) attending the 2010 School of WOM at Swissôtel Chicago, May 24-26.

The reason I say all this is to shamelessly promote the event and to encourage anyone in the industry that hasn’t signed up to attend to do so if you can. We’ve been involved with WOMMA for almost a year now, and the School of WOM is a “shouldn’t be missed” event, if you’re at all into WOM marketing. In addition to presentations by some of the leading voices from some of the world’s biggest brands on their approach to WOM, there will be a number of great discussions around creating sustainable word of mouth campaigns, how to measure the effectiveness of your efforts and more – much more than this simple post can hope to contain.

So, to all you WOMites out there, get registered, jump on your plane, train or automobile and make your way to Chicago. The weather is nice this time of year, the food is great and I’m sure we’re all going to walk away in an enlightened state of mind.

David

In the End, Google Fiber is About More Than Just Google

Posted on by admin

When Google announced they would be taking applications from cities interested in receiving free fiber optic broadband, there was a surge of interest from cities across America – it grew into over 1,000 responses to Google’s request for information (RFI) – and, with some unspoken encouragement from Google’s RFI around community spirit, many of the cities involved in the initiative began to leverage digital media to raise awareness for their efforts, to drum up active support from community members and to show Google exactly how excited they are to be considered for the “grand prize.” In most cases, the people responded. Many who had an interest in bringing Google’s promise to their city acted as brand champions, spreading the story everywhere through both traditional and non-traditional channels. For many of these champions it became a highly competitive race to get Google’s attention, showing the vested interest participating cities have with Google’s fiber broadband technology.

As we began to monitor conversations around the initiative and the participating cities in the digital landscape, several cities stood out as clear leaders. These leaders had over ten thousand Facebook fans alone, with some breaking twenty and even thirty thousand. Pictures, tweets, blog posts, videos and more all supported the digital media presence of active cities, showing how very hands on participants became – fiber became a catalyst for community growth in cyberspace and beyond. And I say beyond, and this is a key learning for everyone, because the cities that controlled the largest share of digital voice were those that not only pulled together strategies for deploying digital media but carried it through to PR and experiential activities as well.

As Google’s March 26th deadline loomed closer we monitored even more excitement online as many cities saw last minute increases to their fan bases. This was likely tied to the flood of nationally recognized events various cities used for promotion, as well as the effect of word of mouth and the variety of media coverage that backed the buzz around Google’s fiber initiative. Continue reading →