This week’s innovation round-up includes Google Fibre’s telerobotic baseball pitch, Corona’s cunning moon advertising stunt and the 3D selfie you’ve always wanted.
5) 3D Selfie
When you know that no gift quite competes with your own radiance, then how about getting a miniature 3D model of it? Twinkind in Hamburg, Germany, is a pop-up studio offering to produce a perfect figurine of yourself. A custom-engineered photogrammetry scanner enables a full 3D scan to be instantly captured and your digital likeness sculpted into a 3D model.
Via PSFK
4) Corona’s moon advertising
Corona in Manhattan launched a somewhat tenuous, but exceptionally smart outdoor campaign featuring the er, moon in their ads. They got hold of an astronomer to work out the exact moment when the moon would look sort of like a lime. Plenty of scientific calculations later and they managed to persuade the moon to make a star appearance in their ad on 14 and 15 June.
Via Gothamist
3) Google’s telerobotic pitch
In an evocative demonstration of their ‘why speed matters’ proposition of Google’s Fiber project, they enabled a kid 1,800 miles away in Kansas City to throw the first pitch at his team’s baseball game. A room set up with motion sensors in Kansas was hooked up to a telerobotic machine at the stadium to enable Nick LeGrande, who has a life-threatening blood disorder, to deliver the first pitch.
Via Google
2) Pirate English subtitles
Where better to promote the need for English lessons than on the very subtitles needed to understand (pirated) US series? To promote classes at the Britanico English Institute, Y&R Peru released special .srt files (the files used for foreign language subtitles) for popular US series that had deliberately poor translations. Whilst the viewer was questioning what the hell was going on, a message then came up encouraging them to learn English at the Institute.
Via Adverblog
1) Smart Text Books
One of the few Cannes winners not featured in this column is the incredibly smart Cannes Mobile Grand Prix winner from Smart Communications in The Philippines. Recognising that students in The Philippines didn’t have access to textbooks nor smartphones, but did have the ability to view texts on feature phones, they developed a series of educational texts accessible on SIM cards. A perfect marriage of insight with (limited) technology.
Via Co Create
That’s it for this week. As ever, if anything screamingly awesome has been missed out, let us know in the comments below. Or feel free to ping any recommendations for next week to @jamescfilmer.
James Filmer
Chief innovation officer
UM