Cool New Marketing Technologies: Caught and Served

Archive for the ‘Creative Approach’ Category

Microsoft Research: Street Slide for Browsing Street Level Imagery

By Greg Jones

Have you ever used Google Maps or Bing Maps street view to locate a store front, points of interest or a specific street address? It can become a fairly time consuming, often frustrating task as you jump from bubble to bubble, turn your camera and attempt to zoom in on fuzzy details. Microsoft Research recently released their solution to this problem, dubbed “Street Slide.” Street Slide functions by turning streets into a 2 Dimensional side-scroller, showing street name and address and store logos. It allows you to quickly scrub up and down streets, rotate your view 180 degrees to the other side of the street, and even jump onto connecting streets, providing a much faster way of finding those points of interest.

It’s funny how navigating a 2 Dimensional world is the fastest way to locate points of interest in our 3 dimensional world. Go figure!

Here is a link to the white paper

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Why engagement matters more for virtual events

By Steve Gogolak

Watch the video

Raise your hand if you’ve attended a virtual event. Now raise your hand if, while attending that very event, you switched over to read email, browse something else on the web and, perhaps, even forgot that you had the even open in another window. Herein lies the greatest challenge the virtual even industry will face as the market becomes more comfortable with the idea of going virtual: engagement.

What is Engagement?

Engagement consists of behaviors exhibited by the event attendees that demonstrate an active level of involvement in every aspect of the event. That means that:

  • promotion and registration are part of the engagement
  • the experience of entering the event and being guided through content are part of the engagement
  • each presentation’s ability to hold the attendees attention is part of the engagement

In short, engagement isn’t something that happens in moments.  It happens over time across many channels and permeates the event experience.

So how do you plan for quality engagement?

Think like an attendee and create the experience first.  Map out, start to finish, what the entire experience will consist of from registration to pre-event gaming to the event itself and even the follow up.  Once you’ve mapped out the entire experience you’re ready to start creating a project plan that includes specific tactics to bring your experience to life.

How do we do it?

Glad you asked. We here at Cramer have a methodology for thinking about engagement during a virtual experience that we call eCAST. You can learn more about eCAST and hear an in depth discussion about engagement during virtual events in a video we produced specifically about this complex problem.

So how do you engage your attendees online?

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Projection Mapping Techniques

By Greg Jones

Projection mapping has come a long way in a relatively small period of time. It stimulates the senses, breaks the convention of 2D displays, and frees video from expensive screens and places them on everyday objects. The technique has been used in installations, experimental films and is starting to appear in advertising.

Projector Calibration

Johnny Chung Lee’s Automatic Projector Calibration thesis work focused on fitting a projected image perfectly onto a moveable target without distorting the image. He accomplished this by embedding light sensors into portable displays to allow the projector’s calibration cycle to recognize the boundaries of the display. His thesis went further to state that if we combine visible light and infrared light in one projector, we can create a single calibration-free device which is able to perform invisible location tracking to match projected light to any surface at any angle.


In his words, “Embedding light sensors to enable automatic projector calibration allows us to rethink projection technology.” Pretty cool stuff.

Light Installation

Projection mapping in installations has the unique advantage that the geometry of the space can be precisely controlled and mapped to. Using projectors to project colored light onto white surfaces in a dark room can have a tremendous impact. When every angle and every corner has been mapped, light installations have the ability to transform every surface of complex objects into video displays. A great example of this is Envision – Step into the sensory box.


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