We  just posted our 100th video to Johnny Holland TV. To celebrate, we collected the ten videos that we think are the best of the bunch. So without further ado, and in no particular order…

To check out the other 90 (and counting), don’t forget to check out Johnny TV.

It’s hard to look back at 2009 and ignore the rather sudden blooming of augmented reality. What was it that made AR suddenly so popular? The rise of ‘mobile’ apps helped. But was that all there was to it? I don’t think so.You can learn so much about a culture by observing how they take in new information. It’s easier than ever to watch how the internet community responds to new things; whether it be a new president, a new episode of Fringe, the death of a pop icon, or ‘new’ technologies. When something happens you can literally watch the connected swarms absorbing the news, assimilating it into their lives, and regurgitating it in the form of comments, tweets, articles and other hip ways of communicating.

With technological innovation

This cycle of assimilation from inventor to news source and eventually the public (who then sometimes become secondary inventors) can be a frenzied and often frustrating thing to observe. Especially for user experience designers. Until the true benefit of a technology becomes its most prominent usage, it will continue to wallow in worthless gimmicky applications, and this makes me sad. If, instead of embarking on a futile development voyage, we thought about it a little bit first, we might actually be able to figure out how to make good use of a new technology in, say, under a few decades.

ARead All About It

Although the ‘news release’ of augmented reality’s invention may not have ever actually happened, the current frenzy is reminiscent of what happened when the first visions of connected personal computers starting popping up in the 60′s. That is, to put it bluntly, uninspired exhibitions of the technology with little to no regard for a particular user need or everyday application. That said, I really can’t blame people for iterating and trying to hone in on the most viable use, I just wish they could be a little more thoughtful about it, that’s all.

Parading around claims that the latest issue of your magazine is capable of telling the time, that you, the reader can control the weather, wins you no points in my book. The fact that the editor in chief says, “What you’ve seen so far is that, you can control what happens with the issue…” Excuse me, but couldn’t I already control what happens with every other issue of every other magazine I have owned? How does this augmented reality issue suddenly empower me to decide what to do with it? Does it contribute any new meaning in my life? The answer, sadly enough for Esquire’s last ditch effort to save its print embodiment, is that it doesn’t. As much as I love Robert Downey Jr.: this is a gimmick. Albeit a nicer gimmick than some of the other augmented riffraff we’ve seen of late, but it’s still a gimmick. It does not contribute to the value of your print magazine any more than a shiny coupon for a store that you don’t even have in your town.

Now I’m not saying I have all the answers

In fact, I really don’t have any answers. But if I were to think about this, I might arrive at the conclusion that instead of tacking on some fiducials that enable a computer screen-bound fashion model to shed some sweaters, Esquire maybe could have tried to enhance the reading experience of…oh I don’t know…the articles? Come on people, let’s put our heads together and figure out what to do with this goshdarn AR stuff. Why is it so hard to come up with a useful application that everyone can and wants to use?

A few months ago

I found myself optimistically answering someone else’s utterance of this same plea with specific examples of a few really cool AR applications. Just so this rant isn’t entirely ranty, here are some of my favorites:

USPS’s Priority Mail Virtual Box Simulator

You gotta love the simplicity of purpose and beautiful execution of USPS’s Priority Mail Virtual Box Simulator. This, to me it is an ideal example of a company identifying a user need (finding the right box size for some goods). It is answering that need with a technological solution that uses augmented reality, not because its popular, but because it allows for a really great in-home solution to their customer’s problem. Now, instead of trying to fix the user experience in every one of their thousands of store locations, USPS allows users to go to their site, print the USPS eagle image on a piece of paper, turn on their webcam, launch the simulator and hold the eagle icon up to your camera to see what size box to purchase. Voila, value added and problem solved.

Topps 3D Live trading cards

Whoever thought that cutting edge technology couldn’t be nostalgic is being proven wrong with Topps 3D Live trading cards. Talk about reincarnating a dead pastime. Not only do these new cards give sports fans a reason to go out and purchase new cards to supplement their dad’s handed-down mega collection, they also include games. Whether this concept successfully popularizes baseball card collecting or not, it’s certanly an admirable attempt at using new technology to add value (and a more complete service) to a nostalgic product.

Living Sasquatch

While this example may not be as clear cut about adding value to an exisiting product or service economy, the Living Sasquatch project proves once and for all, that Big Foot is indeed real, augmentedly at least.

BMW

It’s likely that this BMW augmented reality video was made almost entirely with video effects, however the concept behind it is a powerful one. A future in which life’s instructions are simply a layer ontop of reality (seen through hopefull less dorky glasses) is a future I’m excited to live in.

Zugara’s shopping tool

Zugara claims that this webcam-based shopping tool is the meeting point of augmented reality and utility. I’d actually have to agree. With the goal of enhancing the online retail shopping experience, the site allows users to ‘try on’ clothes in the comfort of their computer room, all without needing a keyboard or mouse. The tasty blend of motion capture and AR gives this concept a ton of style points.

Tellart 2008 Holiday Card

While there were no doubt several examples of AR holiday cards from the past couple years, I couldn’t help but insert this musical number, made by my multi-talented coworkers at Tellart.

AR Drum Kit

Continuing with the music theme, I really enjoy this drum kit demo for its ability to work with the parameters of AR and maintain the gestural feeling of drumming. It may not be a game changer just yet, but I think it’s one of the most interesting directions I’ve seen.

I really do believe that AR has a place in our world

Science fiction novels have long predicted a future in which everyone sports AR glasses, navigating the real world with varying layers of virtual. And this future is exciting; people SHOULD be excited. I just hope developers get all the useless crap out of there system soon so we can move on to the augmented future we all dream of. The key, I think, is to calm down, think about how to make game changing applications that users will crave, and facilitate the assimilation of new technologies into everyone’s lives in the most exciting and useful way possible.

Top image by: cubistcarborough

This time around we will look at videos that hardly involve any prototypes or scenarios. In these examples, designers are using video as a tool for research, inspiration and cultural probing. This article will probably be the thinnest in the series because examples like these are hard to find. But they needn’t be as these videos are technically less complex than all the rest we have seen.

Yellow Chair Stories

Yellow Chair Stories is a project by Anab Jain at the Royal College of Art. It is a “live service design intervention” conducted outside her apartment. She placed a yellow chair and a sign that read “My Wi-Fi network is open for neighbours and passersby. Free access from the yellow chair.” What resulted was an interesting and fun study on community, public spaces and network technology which became material for her to design future scenarios involving wi-fi.

Domestic Gubbins

“The Domestic Gubbins are a series of four fictional objects, designed as video probes, in order to enter in conversations with people around their everyday ideas of intelligence.” It is another project by Anab Jain with Alex Taylor at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. None of the objects from this project were functional, but the video prototypes were enough for their team to have meaningful conversations with people about such hypothetical products.

Microsoft Mojave Experiment

Although this video plays out like a viral marketing campaign, it’s interesting to see Microsoft combining video and user research to make a point about its products.

Snowbird Video Ethnography by Artefact

There is actually nothing exciting about this video, but I enjoyed it for what it is — a really nice example of video ethnography. Be sure to check out the Artefact blog where they have published the first of three articles about how to film customer insights.

Dispatch

I am currently working on a student project which is a service to help friends coordinate social activities with their mobiles phone. One way I have explored this area is by conducting small social experiments involving my own friends and their phones. Using video allowed me to document their experiences while gaining immediate feedback through interviews. Insights weren’t the only goal, I was also looking for stories, quotes or even footage that could be reused in fictional video scenarios when I present the final service at the end.

This collection of user experience videos will take the idea of concept videos, which we saw examples of last week, even further by showing us future scenarios that involve a range of new products and technologies. These scenarios are opportunities for designers to focus on storytelling and communicate ways that new technology will be a part of people’s everyday lives.

The following videos could have been commissioned for a variety of reasons – to envision how emerging technologies will reshape consumer products, to understand how customer needs will change in the near future, a conversation point about future directions, branding and PR, etc.

Intel/IDEO UMPC Vision

To help Intel imagine new applications for it’s technology and possible future contexts, IDEO created this three part video scenario that envisions user experiences made possible by Intel’s advancements in ultra-mobile PC technology. It’s high production value of depiction of everyday situations makes it a video that anyone could enjoy watching and discussing. I love the collaborative playlist in the party at the end, but what’s up with the silent headphone-rave?!
To see a video prototype by IDEO, check out Vocera.

Microsoft Productivity Future Vision

In a previous article Jeroen already wrote about the Microsoft videos, but they’re still worth the mention. Microsoft video’s always have superior production quality but often come off as gimmicky advertisements. It would be great to see this videos incorporate a narrative and start to explore how these slick interfaces and high tech products will actually help people be productive.

System Hauzen by Samsung

This future vision from Samsung takes the form of a commercial, focusing on specific products for the home. Unlike the last videos, System Hauzen follows a single narrative of a family going about their day. Unfortunately this narrative is broken and becomes a cheap infomercial when the actors address the audience and say things like “this is the future…”. But what’s most striking about this video is how creepy this ethnically ambiguous family is! A comment on the video’s YouTube page compared it to Horizons at Disney World’s Epcot Center, a future vision built in the 80s. System Hauzen is so campy, cliche and borderline anti-utopian that it immediately becomes a parody of itself. It’s fun to watch though!

Nokia Design Views of the Future

Connect is one part of a video series by Nokia Design. Each video explores a different lifestyle and tells a short story while exploring new mobile phone designs.
“The videos are not showing prototypes of actual phones or devices that Nokia is currently working on or plans to launch. They are exploring futuristic concepts and potential new ideas that may or may not be produced in years to come. They are designed to inspire and stimulate discussion around how the mobile device of the future might look and function in our lives.“

Little Brinkland

This is a video from Anab Jain’s Little Brinkland project and is quite different from anything else that we have seen. Anab was asked by a company that designs office products to explore the future of work and workplaces. Anab did this by creating a fictional town called Little Brinkland, set it in the year 2012, and made documentary videos about the people that live there. In this video we meet Andrew, who owns a ‘pet implant consultancy’ and Luka, a ‘networked dog’. What I really enjoy about this video is the way it mixes a fictional story set in the future with situations recorded on the street with real people. Read more about this project and see all the videos at littlebrinkland.com.

STARFIRE

“Showing a day in the life of a knowledge worker in the far-off distant year, 2004.” A classic corporate vision of the future, from Sun Microsystems. You can read more about this video at http://www.asktog.com/starfire/

While last week’s installment showed examples of designers using video as a tool for prototyping new products and services, this installment will begin to look at the way designers are using video to tell stories. The examples below will show designers using the most basic video production tools with a little creativity to create compelling scenarios. We will also look at how larger companies are using professionally made video to tell stories about their own concepts.

Aurora

Aurora is a concept video created by Adaptive Path for Mozilla Labs that sets out to “define a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve inthe future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts.” This video succeeds at both dazzling you with new interface concepts and giving you believable scenarios about how people will actually use it. While the detailed interfaces and the well thought out storytelling give it a more professional feel than any of the video prototypes we saw, the production is still low budget and not beyond the skills or tools of most digital designers.

Nokia Morph

While the Aurora concept video focuses more on context than it does on glossy production, many go the route of this Nokia video. They place a large emphasis on technology and product features but are thin on storytelling and context. They also spend a lot of money and effort ensuring the final video (or animation in this case) is of superior quality. In Nokia Morph, we see a super advanced mobile device built with nanotechnology, but the best thing it can do is…. clean itself?

Participatory Sensing

This video was created by the Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS), a group very much focused on technology, but they do an excellent job exploring the benefits of such technology by using video as a storytelling tool. Admittedly, the opening dialogue and the voiceover throughout give the whole thing a sort of infomercial vibe.

Apple Knowledge Navigator

Knowledge Navigator by Apple is a classic and probably has the highest production quality of all the videos we have seen so far. It’s great to see older examples like this because they make you consider what is the point of these videos… are they discussions points for the here and now? Attempts to predict the future? Marketing gimmicks? Should they be like classic movies that tell universal stories or are they destined to become outdated and irrelevant?

GreenHouse CPH

Green House CPH, another student project at CIID, is an example of how designers can exploit different filmmaking techniques. Because this video has to be done fast, had to tell a story, and had to demonstrate a service with all its’ touch points, the students decided to do it documentary style and they found several benefits for doing it this way. They could be forgiven for having a video that was technically rough around the edges (shaky camera, lots of cuts, etc.) because that’s how documentaries often are. And since since the designers themselves were acting in their own video, it was easy to stand in front of a camera and explain how it works. Finally, by setting it in the future when they service had already been launched, they could demonstrate how the service works in a more believable context. In the end, they presented it as a “mock user-research study” which made sense to their audience of designers.

From now on we’ll be sharing with you some of the videos we’re collecting on Johnny TV. For this first time we would like to show you Don Norman’s lecture from the Stanford’s HCI Seminar lecture series. In it he talks about some of the things that he covers in his book, ‘The Design of Future Things’.

Norman talks about the fact that ‘intelligence’ is increasingly being built into our cars, our appliances, and many other things that we interact with. But he points out that this ‘intelligence’ is not very good at handling the unexpected. As designers, we try to anticipate every possible eventuality, but we can’t anticipate everything. The result is that the very behaviors that are designed to save us from ourselves lull us into a usually-true-but-sometimes-false sense of security. Things go wrong less often, but when they do, neither the system nor the user is prepared to handle it.

I greatly enjoyed this lecture and got a lot out of it. Norman is an entertaining speaker who illustrates his ideas with lots of compelling examples. He doesn’t offer any hard-and-fast rules for when automation should be used and when it should be avoided, and rightly so, in my opinion. These matters are far too complex for simple rules.

The most important thing I took away from the lecture was this: automation is great when it is self-contained (think Roomba). But when control is shared between the user and the system, we must be very careful, and think about appropriate levels of automation and feedback (as well as the apparent precision of the information that the system provides).

Johnny TV

This and many other UX videos are posted on Johnny TV. Should you come across a video that you think should be there, please contact us via mail or Tweet me @martinpolley.

Pop some popcorn, recline in your favorite recliner and rest your laptop. In five articles I will share with you some of the more interesting user experience videos on the web. They represent the importance of video as a tool for any designer working with new behaviors, emerging technologies and complex systems that unfold over time. From low-res, techfree prototypes to science-fiction-like future scenarios, this collection of videos will survey the various ways that designers are using this linear medium to explore possible functions, experiences, contexts and values afforded by new technology driven products and services. And we begin with: prototyping.

Video Prototypes

Video prototypes are used for the same reasons any prototypes are – testing, evaluating, iterating, communicating, etc. But video is an especially useful tool for designers who have to quickly represent design concepts that often involve complex relationships or require a high level of technology. It’s fast, cheap, easy to share and allows lots of space for faking it.

The Economizer

The Economizer is a three part video scenario created by Cooper, a design consulting firm in the US. This series is a great example of low-fi prototyping with video. In fact, it’s not even video, it’s still frames with a voice over. You have to love the hand drawn interfaces.

KeyLess

At the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, one of the fist workshops the students take is on the subject of video prototyping. Over the course of a week, students had to represent a concept as a low fidelity, low resolution prototype and then represent the same concept as a high fidelity, high resolution prototype in an empathetic scenario. Each student was given the concept for a service called KeyLess which would replace lost keys anywhere in the city in under 30 minutes. You can watch all the videos here.

Sketch-a-move

Sketch-a-move is the concepts for a toy car by Anab Jain and Louise Klinker. While the concept for the car is technically feasible, this video prototype allowed the designers to answer the most important question – is it fun? – without having to worry about building a functional prototype. This prototype is a great example of how video opens up new possibilities for smoke-and-mirrors techniques. In this case, one can presume, someone behind the camera is controlling the cars with a remote control.

The RaMo System

The RaMo System is a network of portable devices for elderly homes. This video prototype, also made at CIID, explores the interface of these devices, how they work together, and how they work in the context of elderly homes. It even goes as far to explore how it can be a tool to involve family in the everyday lives of elderly people in the home. For a course about GUI, it was a great decision to use video and capture everything happening around the devices.

Next time: concepting

Did you know the presentation Bill DeRouchey gave in Sweden a few weeks ago is available as a video? Want to see Matt Jones talk about personal informatics? Or interested in watching some new concepts of Microsoft? Since two weeks that’s very easy with our new little brother: Johnny TV.

Johnny TV is the newest project of Johnny Holland. It aims to be the online source for all your UX video needs. Spread over the Internet there are many interesting and inspiring videos of presentations, demos and trailers… on this spot we try to collect them and share them withyou in a balanced way. This doesn’t mean putting 200 videos on one spot and letting you find your way… no we will preview the videos, check what’s worth your time and share a new one every few days. This gives you time to keep up and knowing for sure you want to see it (well almost for sure).

Johnny TV team

For Johnny TV we’re setting up a seperate team, lead by Martin Polley and me. This team will be responsible for finding and collecting the best UX videos around. Interested in joining this team? Contact us.

Lately I keep posting articles about augmented reality. And although I really like it, I have to admit that it still feels a bit quirky. Printing out a strange symbol and holding it in front of the camera is not the submersion people are looking for. Fortunately I came across a video that showed me that a true experience can be reached.

The video shows a photobook like any other. It doesn’t contain strange symbols with extreme contrast, but is realistic. When holding it in front of a camera magic seems to happen. I really like the simplicity of the graphics used. It’s not 3D, but kept simple… making it a nice experience. A great detail about this video is the camera. Notice how it is combined with a desk lamp, making it natural for people to aim at the part you are reading. This way you don’t have to hold up the book in front of the camera anymore. Really nie.

Hopefully this example will become a standard on which we can experiment further.

Handheld projectors are the next big thing in mobile devices. They make it possible to project a screen on almost any surfuce, anywhere. This technology opens up a whole new world of interactive possibilities. A group of researchers came up with the idea to explore multi user interaction for these handheld projectors.

At CES09 the handheld projectors were received with great enthusiasm. The researchers in the video are exploring the possibilities and complexities that arise when you combine multiple projections in a room and make them responsive to each other. Check it out:

The video shows a lot of explorations, not all of them interesting. But that’s how research goes. I personally think handheld projectors suck when you use them for highly interactive tasks, like swapping and sharing files. But they are interesting for exploring and playing around. The treasure hunt idea could be interesting though.

But just exploring technical possibilities isn’t interesting. It’s also very important to ask questions. Like: how do people feel and act when they suddenly can share their personal data in public? I’m really curious in what way people will use it. I don’t think they will beam their agenda and personal letters. In our minds these things are personal and for us. A mobile phone is small and can be ‘protected’ from the world, that makes it a great device. When people have a beamer we have to look at new possible uses. But these are just my thoughts. It would be great if the researchers would explore this. My hunch is that video projecting and new explorative games (the search light metaphor is great) such as the treasure hunt and augmented reality will make the projectors big.