iCandi: interactive concepts and inspiration
We often scratch our heads and think about the best new ways to showcase the work we do. We spend hours sweating over layouts, interfaces, imagery and branding, in the pursuit of making tasty eye candy. We push pixels left a bit, right a bit, back to where they started, and then try something radically different until it all comes together.
Not all this hard work sees the light of day, but we keep everything in the hope we can learn, or gain insight from it in the future. Add to this our collection of mood boards, stock images, and design pieces we’ve kept for inspiration and stimulation and you’re faced with a huge library.
Our latest hack team have made a great new web app: iCandi, that takes this library and displays it in a more appealing way. We can now browse with ease and speed, filter via numerous categories, zoom and sort assets, and save favourites to a virtual lightbox.
The app works well on our office machines, laptops, and touch screens. But that wasn’t enough for the hack team, they wanted to take it to the next level, they wanted to hook the app up to a Kinect sensor.
Although there’s no official SDK for Kinect yet, plenty of people have been busy hacking into it and showing off their work on the web. Our team were able to find a few key drivers online and extended these with their own code, writing behaviours that are browser and context specific.
So, standing in front of a huge screen, it’s now possible to interact with the app without touching it. The Kinect sensor recognises gestures, tracks hand movements and senses depth, allowing you to swipe items around, hover over images to pick them up and pull them closer to zoom in.
We’re already excited about using the app for UX card sorting sessions, client mood board workshops, product demos, and event photo albums. When the SDK is released later this year, it will make personalisation and activation through face and voice recognition possible too.
Right now we’re working on turning the app into a permanent installation in our Bournemouth HQ, and creating a version to implement in the shop window of our London office.
2 replies to “iCandi: interactive concepts and inspiration”
Nice work, is there a video of it in action?
Thanks Chris. I still like to think of Kinect as the project Microsoft were working on while we were developing the Chroma Cam code last year :)
There’s no video yet but I’ll get working on something once we have our installation finalised.