This is the final Countdown of Awesome for 2012. Since its commencement in July the column has featured 110 examples of awesome work within its weekly top-5 countdowns which have hopefully inspired as much as divided.
Given this is the last issue in 2012 it seems appropriate to look back and round up the best-of-the-best, most outstandingly awesome, Top Guns of 2012.
So here’s this year’s Top 10 Compendium of Awesome. Enjoy, have a great Xmas and see you again in 2013.
Number 10) Telepathic quadrcopter
(Featured 6 September)
This was the ridiculously smart innovation from researchers at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China who devised a ‘brain machine interface’ that lets users control an AR drone.
The user just thinks “right” to fly forward, "push" to increase altitude and "left" to turn clockwise. More complex commands involve "Hard left" to initiate takeoff and clenching teeth to cause the drone to descend. The drone's onboard camera is also controlled via blinking four times rapidly to snap an image of whatever the video feed from the drone is displaying.
Number 9) Paddy Power 'sky tweets' ambush Ryder Cup
(Featured 4 October)
In Number 9 is the sky written Tweets stunt from Paddy Power, which the Rider Cup US golfers probably didn’t appreciate quite at much as this blog.
Over the last 2 days of the competition the cunning stunt involved five planes "writing" 40 tweets in the sky which which had been originally tweeted by European Ryder Cup fans. Slightly tenuous link to betting but pretty cool all the same.
Number 8) Aurasma – the ultimate in AR experiences
(Featured 9 August)
We thought we had seen pretty much everything in Augmented Reality until Aurasma was aired at Ted earlier this year. The Harry Potter style wizardry could seamlessly animate any object within the confines of its 2D surrounds, all via your humble smartphone. Outstanding.
Number 7) Old Spice – Music Muscle
(Featured 6 September)
How was W&K going to top The Man Your Man Could Smell like in 2012? Their answer was of course not to try to, but to do something completely crazy but utterly addictive instead. In the bespoke Music Muscle interactive Vimeo execution you can record your own musical tune from instruments synched up to Terry Crewes’ body. Completely nuts, yet utterly awesome.
Number 6) DVF through Glass
(Featured 20 September)
But for the awesome Popinator this would have earned a deserved Number 1 slot. Fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg teamed up with Google’s Project Glass crew to enable people to check out the whole experience from the models’ own view point.
Talking to Jason Pelligrino, industry Director at Google back in September, he proffered the following highly re-quotable quote, “Innovative technology has gone from being the geeky guy at the back of the classroom to the most fashionable person at the front of the runway”.
Number 5) 3D print yourself as a fairy princess
(Featured 4 October)
Disney became one of the first global brands to develop an awesome marketing usage of 3D printing when they enabled kids to scan and print themselves out as a princess. The D Tech Me Princess experience uses ‘the world's highest-resolution, single-shot 3D face scanner to then create the final princess figurine via a high resolution 3D printer. The end result is perhaps just a little creepy as the most popular YouTube comment still ventures, but undeniably smart.
Number 4) The Popinator
(Featured 20 September)
September featured a piece of connected magic called the Popinator. Upon saying ‘pop’ a bianaral microphone pinpoints your location and shoots a piece popcorn to be gobbled up to an impressive distance of 15ft. Genius.
Number 3) Goertz: The Augmented Reality Shoe Store
(Featured 26 July)
In arguably the smartest use of augmented reality seen within retail to date, Goertz the German shoe retailer, enabled people to virtually try on their shoes within outdoor installations. Each installation used 3 Kinect sensors, a beefy CPU and big screen to 3D map their entire shoe range to people’s feet. They could then cycle through their favourite shoe brands, change colours and sizes, post to Facebook for friends’ feedback, or even buy them directly on their mobile via a dynamic QR code displayed on screen. Pretty damn awesome.
Number 2) Ken Block DC Shoes: Gymkhana Five
(Featured 2 July 2012)
Only beaten to Number 1 by the sheer amazingness of Stratos, Ken Block DC Shoes viral racked up an amazing 6.6m views in 2 days and today has nearly 36m.
The ridiculously amazing stunt involved his pimped up Ford Fiesta (to 650 bhp!) ripping up the entire city of San Francisco. Surely there’s never been a better 10 mins advert ever created, let alone one for a pair of trainers?
Number 1) RedBull Stratos – The biggest jump in history
(Featured 11 October)
The best of the best, of the best, for 2012 has to go to Red Bull for perhaps the most incredible piece of marketing publicity ever created in Red Bull Stratos.
The backstory was of course that in 1960, US air force pilot Joe Kittinger jumped from a balloon at 102,800ft setting a world record that had never been broken. With 5 years of painstaking preparation Red Bull planned to beat this feat by launching a space capsule capable of taking Felix Baumgartner 23 miles straight up from the surface of the earth. From there Baumgartner would break the skydive record as well as becoming the first person to also break the sonic barrier. Watching him free fall after issuing the following address was just hypnotic:
"I know the whole world is watching now. I wish you could see what I can see. Sometimes you have to be up really high to understand how small you are... I'm coming home now."
That’s it for 2012. Did we miss anything worthy of being in the Top 10 for 2012? What would have been your Number 1? Let us know in the comments below.
Have a great end to what by all accounts was an outstandingly awesome 2012.
James Filmer
Chief Innovation Officer
UM