Storybridge

I remember running around the streets near our home when I was a kid with a toy rifle desperately trying to find where my enemies were hidden. Peeking around the corner I’d see my best friend (and for the time being, mortal enemy) unsuccessfully hiding behind a garden wall.

‘Bang. Bang!’ and other more enthusiastic and realistic sounding gun noises emanate from me as I triumphantly point the rifle at my obviously vanquished foe. ‘You’re dead! You’re dead!’

‘No! You missed! You missed!’

And on and on. Fun but frustrating times indeed.

Gunmen for the iPhone solves this age old dilemma of who has indeed actually shot who for the kids and adults of today. Yes, paintball has already accomplished this but you don’t always have the equipment to hand I’d hope and it’s a tad messy.

The basics of it are then that it is an augmented reality first person shooter that enables you to point your iPhone camera at your mate / enemy, line him up in your crosshair and shoot the scoundrel. And of course he can do likewise to you. Up to four iphones can be linked up at the moment via WiFi so that you can run around the office with your colleagues shooting the banjo out of each other. All hits and misses are recorded so no more arguments about who has been shot or not.

At the start of the game you pick the shirt colour of your enemy and this is how the application recognises your foe and whether a hit has been made. It also records hits so that you can share them with friends online. Christian Zibreg has written an excellent review of Gunmen at geek.com so please feel free to go there for more in depth details.

Hiding behind trees then in real life whilst your mate tries to zap you. Great stuff. Augmented Reality has its detractors as just a gimmick but I hope that this sort of thing will open peoples eyes to the simple proposition that if you give us a screen we can put anything on it. And if this screen is showing you the real world around you then all the better for us to let our imaginations run and give you an immersive experience.

The game producers Shadowforce are apparently bringing in geo location technology to a future release. Here’s where things get even more interesting. I’d envisage that you won’t need to specifically create a game with your friends whilst all together in the same place. You can have one that never ends. It’s always ‘on’. Track your friend down via the mapping technology and blast him when he least expects it. At a restaurant when about to propose to his lady would no doubt go down very well.

iPhone Gunmen app at Apple Store.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Orli Yakuel is a digital consultant and social media specialist with a superb blog that I find invaluable as resource of what’s new in the world of social media and applications. And not just what’s new. Are they any good and useful? Her opinions are pretty spot on.

So I liked the fact that she has used Animoto to show us her digital year in pictures:

‘Highlights from 2009 in pictures’.

Nice way of presenting a summary with some good things to look out for towards the end for 2010.

I’ve used Animoto to easily spice up presentations and to help people visualise things better internally whilst creating Digital Creative Services at Mindshare, Australia. Have a look at one of the videos here:

http://www.storybridge.co.uk/index.php/2010/01/14/animoto-photoshoot/

In the meantime, nice one Orli.

Popularity: 6% [?]

New Media Age back home in the UK is a pretty much ‘must read’ publication for the week as it does a good job of keeping it’s readers up to date on the business orientated news within our digital media industry. So I was happy to find an industry magazine of equal quality over here in sunny Melbourne whilst stumbling around the city, avoiding the moment I would have to start flat hunting in earnest!

The publication in question is ‘Digital Media‘, tagged as ‘Australia’s journal of the New Media revolution’. It is similar in content to the NMA but does have less of a focus on industry news and more on quality articles. This is a great mag for me in order to find out more about what’s happening over here and how people in the industry think. There’s a great bunch of articles in this fortnights magazine, including pieces on the Australian companies breaking break overseas markets, an article on some new social media websites that I had not come across as yet, and some useful tips on optimising your campaigns for social media.

So this is a bit of an advert for the mag but I did find it a bit hard to find and so thought I’d spread the word. they have a good article / blog based website at http://www.digital-media.net.au/ and you can also scan the magazine itself at http://www.imagin8.com/dev/digitalmedia/#/page/0/.

Being able to skim through the mag online is great, although I’d use the arrow buttons to turn the page as turning the page via your mouse in the top corner is a tad infuriating. A nice old school use of Flash there (DNA used to have a website like that a long time ago) but it’s too fiddly and not user friendly. The arrow keys do the job.

And I’ve had a nice email exchange with the editor so all the more reason to write this post. We don’t want to see good industry publications close due to lack of readership, as happened with ‘Create Online’ back at home.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Google is busy working on providing a common set of APIs aimed at the whole world of social networking. You know, that world that every client now wants stuffed into their website whether appropriate or not!

Apologies, that was actually a bit cynical. I’m actually working on a new site design and build for a charity that will actually add value to their offering so it’s not all ‘let’s create a Facebook app’ all the time!

Anyway, the common set of APIs will make it easier for developers to create apps for social sites and of course work across sites. There is an impressive list of sites involved, including MySpace, Ning, Linkedin, ILike, Hi5 and so forth.

So if you are a developer then have a look; might not be of great use just yet but it could be soon.

OpenSocial – Google Code

Popularity: 81% [?]