Mobile users can now experience gorgeous virtual products through AdJitsu Immersive Ads. Immersive ads bring native performance and capabilities to banners and fullscreen ad units. Immersive ads feature detailed 3D models of consumer electronics, clothing, automobiles and more. The 3D models are interactive and give users the power to tilt, pinch, zoom and rotate the iPad to explore virtual products.

The ads, which will run in the UK only, aren’t exactly 3D in the way you might expect — that is, they’re not jumping off your iPad’s screen — but they are unusually eye-catching and interactive. A mix of lighting, shading, parallax and motion effects have been used to render the Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone visible from all angles, as shown in the video above. —Mashable

Videos

See AdJitsu’s YouTube channel.

Press

• AdJitsu Press
• Singtel’s Amobee Buys AdJitsu To Take Mobile Ads Into The Third Dimension

My role

Product management, creative direction, interaction design.

A talk at CMU Silicon Valley’s Talks on Computer Science: Design patterns for browsing, sharing & privacy (with an explanation of viewport, bandwidth, focus+context and power as fundamental forces shaping interaction design).

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Fun never gets old. Brands that integrate play, the customer’s ego, and a viral sharing loop are self-sustaining.

Motion and physical dynamics captivate the human brain. I’ve always found the iTunes visualizer hypnotic; the video above takes it to the next level. Have a look and see what you think.

Informally, I conjecture that our perceptual and cognitive systems intuit how much information a scene contains, and then allocate attention in proportion to the quantity of information. I can’t offer a precise mechanism, but FINST theory comes to mind, as does pre-attention. It’s tempting to think of perception and cognition as compression routines—recall that a classifier with no inductive bias can do no better than rote memorization of all examples—that are saturated, or hypnotized, by visual scenes that are rich in complex information. Information is complex to the brain if and when it cannot be easily compressed (cf. Chaitin complexity).

Your thoughts?

(Before I forget, kudos to my former colleagues at NVIDIA for the awesome CUDA, a real-time hypnagogue )

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A bismuth crystal covered with iridescent oxide. Complex structure, stunning color and reflectivity; this crystal has it all. To fully appreciate its beauty, check out the high-resolution version, available after clicking the image above.

Lists that expand or auto-scroll in the direction of list traversal are unstable. Instability makes targeting harder, since acquiring dynamic targets is harder than acquiring static ones. It’s the difference between hitting a moving baseball and a resting t-ball. Unstable navigation forces users to course-correct mid-flight. The result is greater effort in the form of micro-movements and hand-eye coordination.

Examples of instability

Magnification in OS X’s dock

Ever notice how much longer it takes to target an icon in the OS X Dock when magnification is high? Perhaps this is why Apple now ships OS X with magnification off.

Playlists in Flash

Ouch. Just because you can make things fluid and dynamic doesn’t mean that you should. Try navigating the listbox on the right of this Childrens Hospital page. In addition to fostering error, this list makes me motion sick! The problem? The list auto-scrolls in the direction of traversal, forcing the user to acquire moving targets.

Got more examples?

Feel free to post your favorite examples in the comments. I conjecture that there are many examples in the wild.

Orthogonality to the rescue

The more usable alternative to unstable lists are stable ones, wherein list items expand orthogonal to the direction of list traversal (or do not expand at all). For example, if you want to create a horizontal list or navigational element, it will be easiest to use if the list items expand vertically, without affecting the horizontal width of the list.

Try it for yourself (Silverlight demo)

Try navigating these lists. Notice how the stable list, left, is easier to use?

How the Silverlight demo was built

It’s easy to create the menu systems shown above using VisualStates, ActivateState behaviors, and the Blur effect. Here’s a screenshot of my Blend environment.

Observations

• Instability is most problematic for mouse and finger navigation. Instability is less problematic for keyboard navigation, which does not require mouse targeting.
• The further the jump, the greater the error. Notice how attempting to jump from Planes to Autos in the vertical navigation may not even get you to Autos, whereas moving from Planes to Trains usually gets you to Trains (albeit in the middle of the navigation).

Conclusion

Floating Forecaster from Richard Harvey on Vimeo.

The description, if not the video, bills this as a weather information display, reminiscent of some incarnations of tangible bits. The interactive play aspect is at once inane and highly entertaining. Levitation on remote control is great brain-candy. For that matter, floating forecaster is likely more fun, and cheaper, than the Star Wars Force Trainer.

To be really useful and sustainable, floating forecaster needs a svelte power envelope, which might require leveraging, rather than defying, gravity.