I was really pleased to see that my colleague Jerome Bertrand (no relation) from the Dutch company Geo-Games produced a short demo video to show how they have been developing a way to offer geo-browsing support and booking transaction sites right from the start - to the finish. It’s not a bad project for now although I still tend to think that the consumer interface needs a bit of work. Please see the demo at : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWd77jBrlO4

STOCKHOLM, May 30 /PRNewswire/ — Second House of Sweden - Sweden’s embassy in the virtual world of Second Life - has opened its doors to the public. Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt this morning cut the ribbon at an inauguration ceremony Broadcast simultaneously to press conferences in Stockholm and in Budapest.(

Second House of Sweden is inspired by the real-life House of Sweden in Washington, D.C., which houses the Embassy of Sweden to the United States.
The setting for the virtual embassy is the picturesque Stockholm Archipelago.Inside and around the Second House of Sweden there is a wealth of exhibits and information. Some examples:

- A recreation of Raoul Wallenberg’s office in Budapest, with a
re-enactment of his last day of freedom on January 16, 1945. (In cooperation with the OSA Archivum in Budapest)

- An art exhibit, curated by Nationalmuseum in Stockholm

- Royalty-free images of Sweden, fact sheets about politics, industry,
design, art as well as virtual Swedish food, with real recipes attached

- Throughout the region, listen to Radio Sweden’s daily news podcasts in English

- Furniture by Swedish wood manufacturers and IKEA - some of which
visitors can use to furnish their virtual homes in Second Life.

Second House of Sweden has already generated great interest both in Sweden and abroad, according to Stefan Geens, project leader at the Swedish Institute: “Now that we have a platform in Second Life to promote the culture and lifestyle of Sweden, many Swedish companies and organizations are interested in collaborating.

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From a DMO point of view probably the most innovative move I have seen in 10 years or so, from a pure marketing standpoint a very dubious move. I’ll check back in a year. You can however see that virtual worlds are getting to be more than a hype for business promotional purposes. I love the Swedes for their boldness in taking this first step especially for the purposes of export and tourism promotion where are the followers to create the trend?

I was just able to grab a few shots of the new Google Earth billboards (see below) before the site went down. I think this has BIG POTENTIAL written all over it. However it could be nice to see someone doing something creative then just plain billboard space (yawn)

Google Billboard in Google Earth

Microsoft Billboards

Microsoft Billboards

Catchyoo.com, a Japanese company is giving creatives a very cool new way of interaction between advertiser and consumer. This form of interactive advertising allows you to design visual, sounds, narrative and copy and promote them on floors, walls, ceilings anywhere on a clean white background.  The beauty of this soultion lies in the incredibly clear and crisp imagery and sound.

“Based on sensors installed in the projection system, people can physically interact with the ad by waving their hands or walking on the ad. Catchyoo has become the new trend to promote hi-tech products e.g. iPhone because it is immediate, colorful, playful, stylish and effective and it draws attention from a crowd. ”

I recommend you actually watch several of the videos which demonstrate this new product, it will inspire you!

Cognitive intelligence is really still something which is far on the horizon but this project certainly gives a good glimpse into the future where media may literally be materialized into a cognitive form.

MIRAGE is an embodied, graphical agent that can communicate with users about real and virtual objects in the user’s environment. A user enters the augmented reality room and puts on the “magic glasses”. Through the glasses the user can still see the room, but superimposed is now the floating graphical image of MIRAGE.

The room that MIRAGE lives in is fitted with trackers that make Mirage appear to be stationary in a particular location in the room, and as the user walks around, Mirage can follow the user with its gaze. Mirage can answer questions about real objects in the room posed by the user, and can perceive pointing gestures by the user, enabling questions such as “what is that [pointing at an arbitrary object]?”, “who is logged in on that machine [pointing at a computer in the room]?”. MIRAGE also has a direct feed to on-line news information that is automatically generated by natural language algorithms every night, allowing users to ask for the latest news.

In the future we hope that technology similar to MIRAGE will be used to teach operators of power plants and take people on guided museum tours, as well as tours of caves and historical sites.

This project was done as part of a graduate computer science course at Columbia University, using the modular A.I. engineering principles of Constructionist A.I.

Kris Thorisson, H.Benko, D.Abramov, A.O.Arnold, S.Maskey, A.Vaseekaran