Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

Steve Jobs has openly criticised Adobe Flash in his highly critical and public post on the Apple.com site. This is a must read. You can read it here.

Last Monday Alberta Cross released their incredible debut LP, ‘Broken Side of Time’ and, with it, were the first band ever to use ‘Augmented Reality’ technology within their album artwork.

Lead vocalist Petter Stakee commented

“The album is pretty haunting in itself, we wanted the videos to show it and put that across” Stakee continues “Brantely and I talked about ideas to match the video with the music so he went to Salt On Sea in California, which looks like a ghost town that’s been blown up by a nuclear bomb to shoot the videos. It was on old posh Hollywood star’s getaway, they all bought houses there, and one night the whole place sunk into the sand because of a chemical reaction… Some of the old shit like old cars, houses, broken vinyl records are still there, half buried”

The content of each marker/code will be changed regularly and Alberta Cross will be uploading special videos, competitions and other content throughout the year, which will only be available to those who own the album artwork.
‘Broken Side of Time’ was released last Monday through Ark Recordings and

Windosil is a beautifully conceived, constructed and executed Flash puzzle game. The implementation of simple real world mechanics – within a strange, surreal and beguiling graphical world – makes for a a surprisingly tactile digital experience. The sound design is simple but effective. Windosill is designed, programmed and animated by Patrick Smith, of Vector Park. The objective of the game is to solve the puzzle: how to find the cube to open the door. Simpe eh? No. Tickling a giant bird in a distorted – and elasticated – spherical metal bird house, and rolling a wooden train, have never felt so satisfying… play it.

Starting with a raft of digital marketing, web-build and film work for Graham Coxon, the time is nigh to launch a company: head, heart and feet first – curled up foetal position – into the crunch. We Are Humans.

I loved working on this project and to see it iteratively realised by my friends and colleagues at LBi is very exciting. Venturing off of the High Street and into the Social Networking space HMV have embraced the potential of social networking and online community to its fullest extent.

The getcloser proposition is simple and engaging: share your love of film and music and gain access to a wealth of deep, rich and compelling content and information.  This is fan/user contributed information -in the form of Connection-stories, trivia and personal experiences- or exclusive and historical supplier content and information.  Powerful filters and profilers will enable a user to discover a mass of wonderful -and relevant- content.

This Open Beta release sees the inclusion of the key feature set – Connection Tool, DNA profiler, Visual Shelf, Plug-Items Tool – with LBi steadily responding to users behaviour and refining and evolving the experience over time.  I’m looking forward to experiencing the offline-store and online experience integration. I might also find the mythical long-lost Syd Barrett track.

Finally the Web’s most ubiquitous rich media plug-in opens up to search.  The ability to index encapsulated rich media sites has been a huge want and need since the early commercialisation of the Web.  It seems Microsoft has been excluded from this list of partners as they have been developing Silverlight -Microsoft’s rich-media suite- since early 2006.

The announcement [discussed at The Register] means that millions of RIA enabled websites will be immediately visible – and therefore searchable – for search engines without any intervention from web developers.

This is tremendous news. It is a key moment in Flash’s evolution and a vital movement towards compliant and practical rich-media + semantic-web development.  This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.