AF Journal \ Vol.2 - The Creative Technology Edition

Journal Vol.2

WELCOME The fusion of creativity and technology is an irresistible combination, especially for brands looking for breakthrough ways to engage with people.

Since AnalogFolk opened its doors in 2008, we’ve been hell-bent on exploring how creativity can unlock technology to surprise, delight and above all, add value to people’s lives. But make no mistake, this doesn’t just mean chasing the latest shiny thing. It can be as much about using established technologies in innovative ways, as it is finding creative uses for new ones.

This edition sees our very own Folk getting to grips with these endless possibilities.

Enjoy.

DESIGNED \ PAUL J DAVIS

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EDITED \ JOE THOMAS & NICK MCWILLIAMS

CONTENTS 6 WHY YOU SHOULD ALWAYS START WITH PAPER 12 SIX SMASHING APPS 14 THE IMPORTANCE OF SEDUCTION 20 THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN THE ROOM 22 FIVE THINGS OUR FOLK DIG 24 DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD DATA 28 DATA SNAPSHOT 30 PLUGGING INTO TECH 32 8 TECHNOLOGIES TO EXPERIMENT WITH

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WHY YOU SHOULD ALWAYS START WITH PAPER

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DOUG BAKER Senior Strategist \ London

Paper is a romantic thing.

The phone number from the night before.

The song lyrics jotted on the back of an envelope. Getting lost in a hardback book. But like all romantic things, it can feel a little out of place in the modern, hi-tech workplace. Open plan offices with row upon row of flat, gleaming screens.

Companies proudly announcing that they’re going paperless. Paper is just a bit too messy for this modern business world.

Creating an effective TV advert was, and is still, difficult. Requiring insight into your target audience, a strong brand, a creative spark, great art direction and script, and finally a well planned media strategy.

So though it may seem rather counterintuitive, dull, archaic paper should be at the heart of your digital innovation process. Why? Because it allows companies to embrace Paper Prototyping.

Newness – We can research, hypothesise (ok, guess) and plan. But if you’re delivering something new to market, there is little certainty about how people will use it or react.

Paper prototyping is an innovation process by which teams concept and test interactive products, tools and services.

From focused experiences like a new shopping list feature on a grocery website to an industry disrupting service. All without ever writing a line of code.

Interactivity – We create things that are used and participated in, rather than consumed, meaning more inter-connected dependencies and considerations.

It represents a huge cultural shift for large, traditional companies. From linear work flows and high fidelity presentations, to iterative testing and learning often with rough and ready versions of a product or service.

Digital experiences and creative innovation can deliver step change performance or even disrupt a whole industry like Uber. But the trade-off is that they are very hard to deliver well.

All of that is still true for digital creativity, but we now have two additional layers to consider:

When a problem reaches a certain level of complexity, we need better methods of exploring and sharing ideas. And that’s where paper prototyping comes in.

“DOING IS THE BEST KIND OF THINKING”

Tom Chi, Google

In a nutshell, paper prototyping is a method of ‘exploratory design’. Whereby you help gather thoughts and information on a solution by just getting on and designing ideas.

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A team uses Post-it notes, Sharpies and big bits of paper to sketch out what potential solutions could look like. These paper prototypes are then used to provoke discussion, highlight potential advantages and flaws, and help run basic research.

It fits into a wider philosophy that the best way to create effective solutions to difficult problems is not a linear one, but rather an iterative one that involves collaborative thinking, rapid prototyping and regular testing.

6 Steps to paper prototyping fun 1. START WITH THE PROBLEM

4. PROTOTYPE, SHARE, REPEAT

As with all things worth doing in business, start with a really clear brief. What is the problem(s) you’re trying to solve? Focus on the consumer problem, even if it’s one they don’t know they have yet, not on your problems.

Split into smaller teams and work up very rough prototypes of your potential solutions.

Get back together to share and discuss.

Identify similar solutions, prioritise the most promising and repeat the process.

2. GET YOUR TEAM TOGETHER The people you get involved don’t need to be able to code or even draw well. More important is a comfort with workshop environments (collaborative, good listeners) and bringing a useful perspective, whether that’s technical, creative, business or consumer understanding.

3. LOCK YOURSELVES AWAY You can split it over half days, but get out of the office, turn off phones. It will be worth the time spent.

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5. SELECT FOR TESTING The best (or a small selection of the best) potential solutions are then chosen to test with consumers. This may seem really early to test, but the rapid prototype philosophy says get feedback early and get it often.

The opinions of highly paid managers and designers with pointedly confusing haricuts are useful, but not necessarily representative of your future user base! Either use the paper prototypes themselves, or even knock together a prototype using PowerPoint.

6. ITERATE So you’ve got ideas and consumer feedback and it hasn’t taken a week. Now it’s time to create another rough prototype based on what you’ve learnt.

REASONS WHY PAPER PROTOTYPING IS GREAT Doing is the best kind of thinking

Forces you to think about experiences, not pages

When faced with a complex problem with lots of things to consider, the best way to tease them out is to come up with specific solutions.

There is a risk with more formal design methods that you end up thinking about elements of a design - this approach helps you to think holistically.

Speed

Open thinking

You will generate a lot of ideas in a short space of time, which can help avoid becoming too focused on one solution too quickly.

Inclusivity Typically a prototype means handing over to the experts. But as no coding or design skills are required at this stage, you are able to get more opinions involved on a level playing field.

Not attached to specific solutions Once an idea looks nice, people tend to look for incremental changes, not question its fundamental viability. Having things in a rougher form make it easier for people to discard something that isn’t working.

Paper prototyping isn’t limited by the available fonts, widgets and buttons. You can just focus on getting your idea down.

It’s exciting Making things with your hands isn’t just useful, it’s fun. It can energise a team behind a project.

SO, Paper prototyping is a brilliant way to run the early phases of an innovation project. It is also an easy way to introduce a modern, iterative approach to innovation more suited to today’s media and technology landscape.

And why stop at paper? Paper prototypes are great for flat design, but other materials can be used to prototype 3D design. The first Google Glass prototype took 5 minutes to make, was made using a coathanger and clay, and produced a vital design observation that ended up in the final product.

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SIX SMASHING APPS ANAND PATEL Creative Technologist \ London

1 YAHOO NEWS DIGEST There’s no need to waste time watching the news or reading the paper anymore – the team at Yahoo have surprised us all by developing a slick digital newspaper app which uses Yahoo’s news algorithm to pick and serve up 10 top trending headlines. With a beautiful layout and bold header images it’s easy to pick up and read on the commute to work.

2 SNAPGUIDE Ever lie awake at night wondering how to pick the perfect pineapple? Or how to make cork planters? What about how to cook pancakes in a rice cooker? Well worry no more. SnapGuide lets you browse through thousands of crowdsourced step-by-step guides, and add your own. There’s a whole world of tech tips, new recipes, fashion ideas, and life hacks waiting to be discovered – selfimprovement’s never been easier!

3 CITY MAPPER When the inevitable tube strike strikes, this app could just save you from being late for work – and it’s no longer exclusive to lucky Londoners. Enter your location and destination and City Mapper does all the work for you, finding the optimal route via buses, trains, cycling and cabs. Conveniently, all bus and train time info is real-time, so you’ll be notified if there are any delays. But when does that ever happen?

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4 MYGLASS The first Google Glass devices have been in the hands of developers for a while, but it’s about to get a whole lot more fun with the release of Google’s MyGlass app. It means users can unlock and use all the out-of-the-box features of the device – from video calling with Google Hangouts to escaping from the walking dead with Zombies Run.

5 SECRET I know – another social network to signup to. But Secret is a little different from your traditional platform. As the name suggests, you’re free to speak your mind about anything with no profile or name attached. In today’s society keeping anonymous doesn’t come easy, so Secret has become the go-to place for anyone wanting to speak freely amongst friends and other users without being prosecuted later for their honesty.

6 WORD LENS You’ll have one less thing to pack on your next vacation. Word Lens translates text in real-time using the built-in camera on your iPhone, Android or Google Glass, effectively ending the need for a translation book.

The app uses Augmented Reality and ORC technology to overlay foreign words with their translation. And best of all? There’s no internet connection needed, so it’s bye-bye to hefty data roaming charges.

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. . . . . . . .

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. ...THE

IMPORTANCE OF

Seduction OLIVIA HALL General Manager \ Sydney

The other day, a friend of mine at another digital agency told me; “I’m just bored of so much new stuff.”

I almost fell off my chair. But I know what he means.

Beyond the gadget geeks (us) and those that work in innovative creative tech and digital companies (also us), there’s only so much time and headspace that people will give to trying new creative technologies without a proven return. Marketers the world over are frantically up-skilling, learning new ways to work, new ways to think and restructuring to put technology front and centre of everything.

But let’s just say for a moment that for the real-life customer, there is an element of ‘next new thing’ fatigue.

Too many things that they’ve heard about, downloaded, bought and discarded because the return wasn’t there. So many ‘next big things’ fall by the wayside after the first wave of early adopter excitement that we’re also teaching people to wait for critical mass, general adoption and the finished, polished product. So if the novelty factor is wearing off the novelty factor, then how do we make sure that the brilliant idea we have for a client is one of the few that bubble up into real life?

I believe that the solution and competitive advantage won’t be found by solely honing our focus on creative technology; the winners will be the ones who have creative technology nailed but remember to put the story back on top.

When we’re breaking exciting new ground, doing something that’s never been done before and pushing the boundaries of creative technology ever further with our clients, there’s a tendency to focus on solving the ‘hard’ problems. So we diligently identify the areas of the project that will pose the greatest risk to the product performing and ensure we prototype, test and refine the hell out of it to make sure we nail the elements that we didn’t know how to do. The whole industry is becoming awesome at it; there are

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new processes, agency structures and roles focused just on this. Neverdone-before is the new norm when it comes to creative agency outputs.

But what about the ‘soft’ problem of changing people’s behaviour by pulling the levers that we know will resonate with them? All the things that marketers and creative agencies have been perfecting for decades.

Let’s assume that the ‘hard’ challenges have been overcome and we have a piece of creative technology that has huge potential to bring the brand and customer together and provide value for both.

It’s a great idea driven by a real consumer need or desire, a brilliant but invisible technical solution, effortless user experience, and perfectly-crafted design. When it comes to launch however, we have to assume that the customer simply does not care. They are totally ambivalent to all our efforts and techie brilliance.

Telling them what we’ve made is not going to excite or seduce them.

If the creative technology idea is driven by a business need rather than a consumer need then obviously incentivising or outright coercion will probably be the way to go. In which case your communications might as well focus on the functional change and get straight to the point.

But what about those creative technologies where the idea deserves to be loved and has the potential to pull people in, adding value to them, not just the brand? It’s about enticement and seduction.

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We need to dig back into the customer insight that prompted the idea in the first place and sell the need for it with all the tricks in our emotional, storytelling, beautifully crafted, advertising armoury. We still need to tell people about our products and services in a way that delight, entertain and emotionally touch customers if we want to entice them in. It’s what we’ve been doing for years – we just have to make sure we don’t find ourselves blinded by how amazing the tech is and get tempted to tell people about that instead. Real life people who don’t go to SXSW don’t care.

As an industry, we talk about failfast cultures, MVPs, beta testing, and consumers who understand and accept a world of rapid prototyping.

We talk and position access to early versions of products as an advantage.

Let’s not kid ourselves though – the majority of people would rather that they only ever saw a curated collection of creative technologies that will become essential to them – those that had already achieved critical mass of content or adoption and were glitch-free. It’s a high bar and a hard sell at a functional level. But it’s far less daunting if you switch back to ‘left brain’ and appeal to people on an emotional level instead. I’d be willing to bet that if anyone had bothered to put the sexy into smartwatches they’d be huge by now, even without having the functional benefits sorted.

So it’ll come as no surprise that in a social and business community, where quoting from Mashable and TechCrunch makes you smart, it warms my heart to see Pharrell Williams earning a Cyber Lion for Happy.

Yes, the production and interface was brilliant, seamless and beautiful, but it’s the real butterflies-inyour-tummy, visceral reaction that makes digital moments like this stand out so far from the crowd.

We won’t know for sure until years from now when we look back fondly through the lenses of our Google Glasses, but the agencies and marketers that manage to balance the focus between solving the ‘hard’ new things and preserving the old ‘soft’ things are the ones that will win.

‘‘

We have to make sure we don’t find ourselves blinded by how amazing the tech is and get tempted to tell people about that.

”

PEOPLE

THE RIGHT IN THE ROOM BARNEY VOSS Head of Production \ London

Someone, somewhere, has just had a great idea that could change all our lives. Whether the idea will actually come to fruition is dependent on a lot of things happening, like funding or finding an audience. And whether the person with this great idea is working for a big brand, an agency, a government, or even from their bedroom, how they approach the product’s development will be key.

The growing number of ways to reach a user digitally – through an everexpanding environment of platforms and devices – naturally increases the complexity of developing a product (whether that’s a creative idea or a tangible object). Because of this mercurial environment, unlike in traditional agencies, the work going on at digital agencies is often untried and untested.

So it’s not enough to simply get Creative Technologists (the team who will build the product) into the room to sanity check whether a concept is “possible” before building it when the time comes (as has long been the accepted approach in agencies).

It’s only when a project is very safe and simple, with everyone aligned with what the final outcome will be, that a prescriptive waterfall approach is ever valid.

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But safe and simple isn’t what today’s feature-rich, multi-platform

environment is about. It’s complicated enough as it is, and we make it more complex by trying to solve problems in new and innovative ways. After all, the products need to stand out, engage, and inspire the consumer.

If we are going to engage and inspire the audience we have to engage and inspire the folk who are going to bring the idea to life. That’s why Creative Technologists should be actively involved from the get-go.

Everyone on a project needs to not only understand the concept, but also why it solves the problem, or provides an opportunity. Only then can there be a complete consensus as to how they develop the product.

The team that will design and build the product have years, if not decades, of combined knowledge, and will have experienced many projects and the problems they had. So for them to learn about the concept from its inception will reduce the uncertainty and risks in the project. But to use that knowledge in the evolution of the concept – to help form it as a viable product – is hugely powerful and key to developing truly great creative tech products.

And that’s just the start. Now that the project team has a shared goal and understand how to achieve it, then let them share a physical space too. The same team sat together allows easy communication, insight sharing, and actually witnessing the work in progress.

The team can plan, design, and develop the product together.

This involvement of everyone in the development from concepting to a released product also brings ownership of a project, and with that comes a protectiveness of it. It will be nurtured throughout its lifecycle.

The net result of all of this isn’t just a harmonious team and a beloved project (although that’s great) – it’s a robust piece of creative tech which is true to the concept, that the user actually wants.

So involving the Creative Technologists isn’t just what the techs want, or even just what we should want. It’s what the user wants too.

‘‘

Creative Technologists should be actively involved from the get-go.

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FIVE THINGS OUR FOLK DIG HOLLY ATTRILL & SCARLETT MONTANARO Creative Team \ London

INSTANT LOMO Most of our pictures are stored on our phones but that doesn’t stop us loving the real thing, especially if Lomography are involved.

An instant camera with loads of features, it lets you play with lenses, exposure length, multiple exposures and colour gels.

Instant physical pictures that give you the freedom to experiment – that’s a fun invention.

PORTABLE PHONE CHARGERS There are lots of portable phone chargers out there, but the problem of low battery still stumps a lot of us. Starbucks has come up with a nifty solution – phone-charging mats. With these they’ve found another way to increase footfall and coffee consumption whilst we all swarm to charge our mobiles.

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SAY NO TO SELFIES With Selfies now being the biggest genre in photography, we can’t help but feel a pang of disappointment in humanity. Never fear because OK Do This is fighting it. It’s an app that instructs you on what to photograph and provides inspiration to anyone who has a camera phone and is at a loss of what to snap. Hurrah!

www.okdothis.com

GAME CHANGER For once the word ‘game changing’ is actually appropriate. Super Mario, a game we have all loved for years, will finally fulfil our customisation dreams. With Mario Maker coming out on Wii U next year we’ll be able to build our own levels and play them, switching between modes with a click. Game changed.

THE WORLD’S HANDWRITING BIC – the best selling pen in the world – is creating a typeface by crowdsourcing people’s handwriting.

The experiment is global and anyone can be a part of it online. In a time when handwriting is falling at the feet of fingers jamming into keys this is a lovely project that mixes the digital and analog worlds.

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DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD DATA MATTHEW ROBINSON Analytics Director \ London

So I have a confession. I get a bit twitchy when innovation, creative technology and bold design are heralded as the go-to industry jumpleads in advertising and media. Working in a creative industry, that might sound like heresy. But as someone who works in analytics, and aspires to support both Creatives and creativity, I worry that data still doesn’t get called upon enough to guide decisions and to inform the creative process.

To my mind, Nielsen are spot on believing that more research equals more questions equals more answers equals a better product. As such, getting excited about the latest new and shiny creative tech is all well and good, but not if it acts to lessen people’s commitment to research, robust testing and data-driven design, in support of driving the on-going optimisation of any solution.

To a degree, the industry-wide resistance to routine testing is understandable. There’s a perception that it’ll ramp up costs, hamper innovation, fuel conflict, and put Creatives on the defensive. Quite famously, Google’s Visual Design Lead quit a few years ago because he resented having to make decisions based on test results, rather than his own opinion. He wrote at the time; “Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralysing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.”

But one could argue that testing actually helps foster more creativity. It encourages more variations, more potential solutions, and welcomes the bold and radical ideas as much as the safe and sensible ones. The only rider is that the strongest results, not the firmest opinions, have to hold sway. As testing guru Craig Sullivan once reflected; “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

And that for me is the salient point. Designers and developers must always remember they aren’t creating stuff for themselves, they’re working things up for users and consumers. And if that means more creative decisions get to be based on lifting conversion or increasing revenue, that’s got to be a good thing right? If it works for Google, it can’t be bad for the rest of us.

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That said, it’s wrong to think we need to choose between numbers and creativity. A strict adherence to testing each and every creative choice would be as limiting as always relying on gut instinct, best practice, or aesthetics. For the same reason that you have to moderate your artistic and technical solutions against what consumers actually need, hard numbers shouldn’t pull rank unconditionally, particularly if they risk undermining a long-term strategy, an overall user experience, or a brand’s credibility. Besides, it can of course be risky only going with what users say they need. The customer is not always right, and doesn’t always know what they need. If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

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It’s wrong TO THINK WE NEED TO choose between

NUMBERS and

creativity

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So how to harness creativity, but stay true to data-led design?

Well, here are four pointers:

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Identify which business objectives a creative solution is intended to support, and ensure Creatives know them. What does the creative have to deliver in order for the business to achieve its stated aims? Steve Jobs was always adamant that the business of design is not so much concerned with how something looks, but how it works. You need first though to have a proper grasp of what “it works” actually amounts to.

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Detail the end-to-end user journey and map out the specific actions people need to carry out for the identified business objectives to be met. User experience design is nothing new, yet I remain unconvinced that it’s founded on systematic qualitative research and/or usability studies frequently enough. Which is a shame.

So much of what the creative tech solution needs to offer in order to work would be revealed if greater attention was paid to validating form and function up front. As Debra Dunn, a professor at the Stanford Institute of Design notes; “It is more from engaging with users, watching what they do, understanding their pain points, that you get big leaps in design.”

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Establish performance KPIs on the back of the agreed user experience design.

And, importantly, focus most attention on metrics that are properly actionable – be they the ones that will drive the others, the ones belonging to any sort of conversion funnel, or the ones that can very easily be made the subject of split testing.

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Make testing (be that A/B or multivariate) a continuous process. It shouldn’t be an ad hoc exercise. The wonders it can do for a solution’s efficiency ought to make it a no-brainer. Here, digital can and should take a leaf out of the direct marketing playbook. Few working in DM would think to run a large campaign without first placing a significant portion of the prospects into a test control cell.

And as well as always-on testing, it pays to constantly re-assess visitor satisfaction and intent too. So no encasing the agreed UX in concrete. A data-led creativity and design process is never done and dusted.

In summary, by all means seize a hold of the exciting possibilities that creative technology can deliver. But, as much as possible, try to innovate in accordance with analytics best practice and data-led design. Let insights and proven results aid the business of being creative.

GAMING

FACEBOOK

BROWSERS

MESSAGING

UTILITIES

DATA SNAPSHOT Distribution of time spent on apps on iOS and Android devices Statista.com \ April, 2014

YOUTUBE

ENTERTAINMENT

PRODUCTIVITY

NEWS

TWITTER

PLUGGING

MATTHEW ROBINSON

INTO TECH IAN BRENNAN Head of Technical Concepting \ London

In 2011 the Google Glass Project was heralded as the future of creative technology – a new dawn and the golden child of wearable tech. It was hard not to be inspired and excited, despite the ‘glassshole’ label that has been crudely stamped on it like a brand name on a pair of designer sunglasses.

Three years on, Glass is on sale to the public in both the US and UK. However, during the Keynote talk of Google’s 2014 I/0 developer conference the word ‘glass’ was never uttered.

Not even once. It was a glaring omission.

Glass, after all, was supposed to be the future of wearable technology and accessible to everyone – well, those with a spare £1,000 lying around.

Now, suddenly it looks somewhat dated.

Glass was a game-changing piece of kit and whatever the reasons for Google not mentioning it, the tech giant clearly has something special up its cyber sleeves. There’s one thing for certain – Google’s silence on the subject is testament to how fascinating the world of creative technology has become. Constant change in the wearable tech arena specifically is indicative of the regular explosions taking place across creative technology generally. You only need to read up on ‘8 Technologies To Experiment With’ on the following pages to see how exciting the current roster is.

Amongst this perpetual technological evolution, it’s an exciting time to be a developer.

However, the changes that are occurring impact everyone, so it’s important for us all to be on top of them. Blink for a second and you may have just missed the next big thing...

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So, how do you ensure you’re up to speed? A few short years ago the landscape was relatively simple. Now there’s a plethora of wearables, touchables, talkables, and gesture-controlled devices. Learn to enjoy it.

Here are three ways of ensuring you do:

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Absorb everything

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Play with everything

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Challenge everything

Knowledge and inspiration can be picked up by immersing yourself in the tech culture – whether that’s by subscribing to blogs and podcasts, reading magazines and books, following Facebook and Twitter feeds, or attending Hackathons and talks.

Play with everything. It’s one thing to know about a device, it’s quite another to experience it.

So whether that’s going in-store to have a go, or whipping out the credit card on launch day, get your hands on as many devices as you can.

Challenge everything. Once you’ve got hold of a device, don’t just follow the manual. Break conventions and let your imagination run riot. That could mean hacking it, linking it to an API, or even syncing it with another device – you might just surprise yourself with what you find.

8 TO EXPERIMENT WITH DES HOLMES Creative Technical Director \ London

These are exciting times. It seems like everyday there’s a shiny new piece of tech crawling out of the woodwork, offering brand new ways to engage with people and add real value to their lives. Here are the ones we’re most excited by...

CUBESATS Keep an eye out. A new class of miniature satellites were released into the Earth’s orbit back in February (28 of them, in fact) to capture up-to-date images of the final frontier. Recently, they’ve become popular with schools and governments due to their low price and easy assembly. Just a few years ago you needed a degree or millions to build a satellite (or both)... now all you need is a credit card and some elbow grease.

OS X YOSEMITE Apple is trying a new look with the next iteration of its Mac operating system –a redesigned interface more inline with their iOS8 design. With other improvements, including better notifications and the new Spotlight search, it’s one that will definitely get people talking.

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REACT Facebook has released a new coding framework for building user interfaces – React. It changes the way we go about building these interfaces by breaking them into reusable components. Since they’re so encapsulated, these components make code reuse and testing easy, as well as giving the website great efficiency and ultra-high performance. Everyone’s a winner.

OCULUS RIFT There’s no denying that 3D headsets have suffered a string of false starts over the last couple of decades. But Facebook’s high-profile acquisition of Oculus Rift has indicated that Virtual Reality could become more than just a gaming peripheral, and has the potential to provide a platform for a multitude of uses.

SCRIBBLE PEN Parents rejoice! Tomorrow’s schoolchildren may never have to experience the classroom brawls over a newly-opened Crayola pack. Using an RGB colour sensor, the Scribble pen and stylus lets you pick any colour around you and transfer it directly to paper or a mobile device.

iBEACONS Using Apple-licensed iBeacon technology, these tiny USB devices broadcast a signal that can be heard by smart devices. The retail implications of technology like this are vast and, even better, they’re portable: iBeacons 1, Geo-fencing 0.

WEBGL 3D has been a gimmick that’s been available for a number of years using plugins, but finally (!) WebGL makes it possible to display amazing real-time 3D graphics in your browser. With Microsoft’s Internet Explorer adopting the standard and Apple recently announcing support in the form of iOS8, a lot of 3D-based ideas will become achievable in the coming months and years.

AR DRONES Ever dreamt of flying? Now’s your chance. AR Drones let you fly a lightweight drone using a smartphone or tablet simply by tilting your device in the direction you want it to go. They’re also equipped with HD cameras, giving you the chance to capture great footage from the air, straight out of the box and for (relatively) cheap.

If only these were around when Macaulay Culkin was defending his home from the Wet Bandits…

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July \ 2014 Feb 2014