The Spotlite: Google Fool's Day

This week: student’s show off their favorite shade of Gray, a London mall brings this season's trends to life through VR and motion-tracking, and the planet’s leading search engine pokes fun at the gullible like no one else.

Gray Area’s 2015 Creative Code Winter Showcase

Gray Area hosted their 2015 Creative Code Winter showcase this past Wednesday at their Mission District headquarters, the Historic Grand Theatre, where recent Creative Code graduates displayed their work. The event’s entrance fee was donation based and proceeds will help fund Gray Area’s #RevivetheGrand initiative.

Wednesday night’s event was a huge success. Guests enjoyed several digital art/tech installations, including “Fragile Ego”, an exhibit by Daniel Sullivan. This project featured a wall filled with 30 pieces of glass artwork, all curated by the public. During the event, viewers visited fragileego.rehab and had to choose whether to save or destroy a particular piece on the wall. The “saved” artwork remained intact while the “destroy” votes activated mechanical triggers which gently nudged the glass art pieces towards their doom. This was a pretty dark, tense exhibit which kept the public in suspense throughout the night. It was definitely up my alley.

Fragile Ego by Daniel Sullivan

“What You See”, by Tonia Belgari, half of the activist-art group Browntourage, is a visual play on neighborhood culture and gentrification. In this exhibit, participants stood in front of a screen which displayed images of new Mission District buildings and condos. The exhibit tracks motion and uncovers Mission District murals which used to exist before the new edifices went up. With this visual and motion-tracking interplay, the artist asks “what defines this ‘destination’ neighborhood? When a place becomes ‘destination’, it’s traditional residents and culture are at risk of being overlooked and easy to displace, thus begging the question: What makes a place?”

What You See by Tonia Belgari

We saw some pretty impressive work this past week and we can’t wait for the upcoming 2015 Creative Code Spring Showcase to take place in a few months. Gray Area also announced an open call for their Summer 2015 Creative Code Fellowship this past week. This program has limited seats so make sure you apply soon for this prestigious fellowship. Also, check out the Gray Area’s Creative Code page to see work from previous student showcases.

Future Fashion: Westfield London’s Interactive Installation

Westfield has done it again. They’ve extended their retail-meets-technology ethos from Bespoke in Westfield San Francisco, to Westfield Stratford City in East London. Westfield partnered with Inition, a VR interactive experience company, to create motion-tracking and VR experiences for their Future Fashion installation, which was available to mallgoers April 2nd through the 4th.

To help promote this spring’s top fashion trends (floral, denim, and future modern) they created rich VR experiences for the Oculus Rift with Leap Motion technology to track hand movements, large-screen motion-tracking experiences using Xbox Kinect, and a giant touch screen using Edit Me to help shoppers find the latest fashions within the Westfield mall.

This installation was only around for a few days, but Westfield more than likely has other neat interactive tricks up their sleeves. Check here for some of Westfield’s projects this side of the pond.

Google Fool’s Day

So April Fool’s Day has now become the “What will Google Do?” Day of the Year. With their previous month 4 work, like Gmail Blue (“It’s Gmail, only bluer”) and Google Nose (essentially a smell search or their “mobile aroma indexing program” in GSpeak), they achieved the impossible by outdoing themselves yet again.

This year, Google had some winners with concepts like Google Fiber introducing a special “dial-up” mode you can use to delay loading, leaving you time to enjoy the simpler things in life. It’s also useful if you want to be nostalgic, like when you just can’t throw away your AOL install disc. Can’t blame you for being resourceful; maybe your retired Uncle Sid in Tampa, FL really needs it to check his sites.

Google Japan joined the fun and announced their Party Horn Voice-to-Text Adapter. For you millenials, a party horn is what parents used to give their children to play with at parties before it became commonplace to give kids their own iPhones. Party horns are loud, obnoxious, they make silly sounds that no one is happy to hear, and they roll out quicker and with more force than Gene Simmons’ tongue. Anyway, Google Japan found an “ingenious” way to translate party horn racket into text. The adapter can be placed on a Google brand party horn or any party horn you may have lying around the house, most likely from that surprise party your mom threw for you in 1998. Soon, in the April Fool’s alternate universe, Google Japan will install a mini windmill to generate electricity from all that horn blowin’ energy. They also “plan” on collecting blown CO2 and combining it with sunlight to create energy via photosynthesis. Come on America, why didn’t we think of that?!

Google had a few other gems, like the Chrome Self Browser (like an Ask Jeeves on steroids?), com.google or Google "backwards", Google Maps’ Pac-Man -- although I would like to see a more realistic SF version packed with one-way streets, lawless Uber drivers, and disgruntled bike-riding ghosts cutting you off at every corner. I am sure Google is working on a 2016 version as we speak.