This talk was given at Interaction ’10 in Savannah, Georgia on February 6, 2010. Normally, I would put the slides up on my SlideShare but because so much of this talk was in video form, it seemed to make more sense as a post.
Update: The video for this talk is now online thanks to IxDA and I’ve included it here. If you’re in San Francisco, we’re also doing a redUX on March 6th, 2010 for free at Adaptive Path. There will be a number of local speakers that spoke at Interaction ’10.
It all started around July or August 2009 when I saw this video:
It was the first time I’d seen the iPhone 3GS’s new compass feature utilized in such a way. I immediately thought, “this would be great as a Ghostbusters-like game.” So my friend Arshad, Coley and I with some help from many of our friends and family, spent a little bit of our spare time over the next few months working on a basic concept which eventually became ARGH: Augmented Reality Ghost Hunter.
How many people have taken the Savannah ghost tours? A few of you? Well, in case you didn’t know, Savannah is known for being haunted. So let’s look for some ghosts.
[showing ARGH game and finding a ghost in the presentation room]
This game isn’t really all that complex. In fact, it’s just a small part of what we originally envisioned. But as we were building and designing this game, I learned a lot about augmented reality and it’s current shape. So that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Augmented Reality: Is It Real? Should We Care?
When I asked on Twitter what people at this conference wanted to learn from this talk, Dan Willis helpfully replied to me:
So, I decided to oblige and have renamed the talk OMGWTFAR?!1!: A Hefty Heap.
In 1992, Tom Caudell coined the term augmented reality when he was working at Boeing on a project to make it easier to assemble large bundles of electric wire for aircraft on the factory floor.
Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.
The live and mixed reality parts are very significant because it means taking a photograph and processing it doesn’t count and it means virtual reality doesn’t count.
However, it doesn’t sound as fanciful as you might think. We’ve been seeing it in Hollywood for ages. Minority Report features scenes where Tom Cruise is greeted at stores with virtual, personalized ads overlaid on top of his reality.
And even earlier than that, in 1984, The Terminator was showing an augmented reality view in the eyes of the Terminator.
It’s not just science fiction. Your reality has already been augmented. This being Superbowl weekend, it’s appropriate to note that the first-down line we see in football games is overlaid on, or augmented, and not painted on. What, nobody told you?
Types of AR
There are different ways to create an augmented reality. What you ee with football games is one of them: show live video feeds and, while watching the feed, additional information is added. This experience is probably the most disconnected AR experience as you’re not actually interacting with the “reality”.
A very common type of AR you’ll see these days are the marker-based AR. The technology depends on the person holding up an easily recognizable and predefined marker to the camera. You can try it yourself with Boffswana’s Papervision prototype.
Another method, which is becoming increasingly popular, is location-based augmented reality. These systems depend on the knowledge of where you are, which direction you’re facing, and what the system already knows to be around your location. The most well known example of this is the Yelp Monocle which shows you restaurants and other businesses in a first-person view.
Another form of augmented reality is based on augmenting your world through audio instead. RjDj have created a suite of music apps which react to the environment and sounds around you as well as the speed you’re moving. Their latest collaboration with British pop singer Little Boots is probably their most polished demonstration of how delightful this experience can be:
Watching the people in the Little Boots video really serves to illustrate just how much of an experience AR can provide. While the term should and will remain the same now that it’s hit the mainstream, I do feel it’s more accurate to refer to it as an enhanced reality and adding information or interaction based on what is happening around you is in fact enhanced context and enhanced meaning which leads to enhanced experiences or even delightful experiences.
Why Now?
When you look at Google Trends for searches on the term augmented reality, you’ll find it’s skyrocketed in the last year. In particular, around halfway through the year, the term gained a lot more prominence.
This sudden increase came about because of a number of factors:
Almost every phone now has a camera which means everyone is carrying a device which can capture what’s around them into a processor.
Smartphones, which are also becoming increasingly common, now have reasonable internet connectivity to retrieve useful and contextual information (insert AT&T joke here).
Phones are now equipped with GPS enabling phones to recognize where the user is.
Most recently, and perhaps the tipping point, both Android phones and iPhones added digital compasses to their devices thus allowing software to detect not only where the user is but also which way they are facing.
And finally, to a lesser extent, the accelerometers on these phones enable designs based on the user’s movement.
So What’s It For?
Augmented reality applications are being used in a lot of different ways. It’s used as art in installations like the N Building:
Our proposed vision of the future is one where the facade of the building disappears, showing those inside who want to be seen. As you press on the characters their comments made on online appear in speech bubbles. You can also browse shop information, make reservations and download coupons.
But it’s also starting to see some practical uses. For example, instead of just finding out the price of a product, LEGO has a prototype where you can preview the actual product from different angles.
The majority of mobile AR applications we’re seeing right now relate to location-based searches or visualizations. Urbanspoon, Yelp, and Wikitude are all examples of this. Layar, one of the leaders in the augmented reality space, allows you to overlay different data sets such as Wikipedia entries or tweets in the area.
Unfortunately, there’s a glut of rather useless augmented reality gimmicks that offer little value. You’ve probably seen some of these like the Robert Downey Jr. Esquire magazine cover, the action figures from the movie Avatar, or the Topps baseball cards:
Much like the pitching “game” included, most AR games are little more than poorly implemented retro games which seem hi-tech because they’re overlaid on top of a camera. Again, there are exceptions and innovators. This demo from Georgia Tech and SCAD-Atlanta creates a narrative around the player (flying in a helicopter) but also adds an additional dimension that involves … Skittles!
It’s actually been quite surprising how fast this technology is being adopted or experimented with. The United States Postal Service isn’t exactly the place one would expect digital experiments to come from. However, they have one of the first useful demos of how AR might be useful. By printing their custom marker, you can see a translucent shipping box in front of which you can then use to determine if the object you are shipping will fit.
Challenges
The future is so close we can virtually touch it but being as new as it is, developers and designers in this space have many challenges ahead. One clear problem—and opportunity—is the lack of any interaction design patterns emerging from common use cases such as AR browsers. The AR focused blog Augmented Planet has a nice summary of some of the ways applications are tackling one particular design problem but this overview also serves to point out just how disparate the interface currently is.
Augmented Planet also makes a case against AR which, among other points, expresses concern over privacy issues.
For example your mother comes over to your house and tweets about your priceless collection of Ming dynasty vases. Your home location is geotagged and out there for all to see along with details of your most valued possession. An enterprising thief using the latest version of BurglAR would be able to see high value items worth stealing in the local area.
As the mashup Please Rob Me demonstrates, these issues aren’t unique to AR but are certainly relevant.
When I first discuss AR with someone who hasn’t been paying attention to the space, their eyes often light up and their imagination starts to take off—much as mine did when I saw the Nearest Tube application. Often, ideas would revolve around turning a corner, or reacting to a step forwards or backwards.
Unfortunately, what we quickly found was that the accuracy of consumer-grade GPS is simply insufficient for many of these ideas. In particular, indoor GPS is even more inaccurate. Look at the disclaimer that Car Finder feels is necessary to show every time you launch the application:
If you were standing indoors, your compass may also be unreliable. On the iPhone, it asks that you wave the phone in a figure-8 fashion to get a better fix. I sometimes wonder if that motion cures hiccups as well …
Other technologies are also in their infancy. A lot of augmented reality’s promising comes in recognizing what your camera is pointed at but consumer engines are barely able to identify when something is a face, much less whose face it is. Much of the image recognition processing is also done after the fact rather than in real-time.
Even if the technology was there, the processing power for mobile devices would not be able to handle the requirements without burning a hole through your pocket.
It Can Be Useful
A lot of the products we see right now use augmented reality in a rather gimmicky fashion—adding little to the application’s utility. In most cases, the AR views are better served with maps or in the case of games, are little more than overlaying a mediocre game over a live video feed.
However, we’re starting to see some real uses both on the market and in prototype form. As technology catches up and the ubiquity of AR-capable devices increases, we should be seeing more and more applications like these.
One way to offer better AR experiences now is to do so with strategically placed kiosks. Instead of depending on mobile technology, kiosks can be customized to the environment. This Japanese company has a kiosk where you can try on different makeup in an augmented reality application. Once you’ve picked out some product you like, the kiosk then prints out an order form.
Some applications are particularly useful in mobile environments. Assuming sufficiently accurate GPS, the iPhone Car Finder application I mentioned earlier is a great use of augmented reality. You mark where you car is as you get out of the car and use that marker to find your car later. Such an app wouldn’t be useful to necessarily remember what street corner you parked in so much as what spot in a garage you might’ve parked in. The former is much better served with a marker on a map whilst the latter doesn’t have any map to mark!
In the near future, we may see even more utility from mobile applications. Nokia has announced that they are working on a mobile language translation application that utilizes Optical Character Recognition (OCR). We may be closer to a true Babel fish than we realize.
Once real-time image processing becomes more powerful, we can extend Nokia’s concept to recognizing faces and finding out more about people (or for starters, helping me remember names of people I’ve met).
And recognition can go beyond just faces. Recall that the term was coined at Boeing in reference to technology that might help people assemble aircrafts. BMW has the same idea and released a concept video of what an augmented reality training tool might be like. Hopefully, by the time you bring your 3-series in, the mechanic already knows what they’re doing.
Looking Ahead
Between the abundance of gimmicky AR “applications” out there and the technological hurdles we’ve yet to overcome, it may seem like it’s still too early to look at this form of interaction as something we should examine. But some companies, like Juniper Research, might claim otherwise:
The market for mobile augmented reality (AR) services is expected to reach $732 million by 2014.
The annual number of mobile downloads featuring augmented reality (AR) content is expected to rise from less than 1 million in 2009 to more than 400 million by 2014.
I’m dubious about those estimates, especially in relation to revenue. However, I do think AR may become an element of many applications in the near future. We will see many more applications that use AR as an alternate interface but hopefully, we will also see more applications that are specifically designed for AR’s strengths.
The rapid increase in smartphone market penetration will also mean a larger audience for AR applications. Based on this Changewave Research survey, we’re quickly headed towards technological ubiquity.
Smartphones may not even be the limiter when it comes to augmented reality. In addition to having location specific kiosks, we might be seeing some solutions that seem right out of science fiction. For example, instead of the awkward interface of holding up a phone in front of you, you could potentially be wearing augmented reality contact lenses.
I think the people behind Google Goggles hint at the future of augmented reality and they come the closest right now to making something that’s actual useful to the mainstream consumer. Watch their video and see what they have to say about their limitations, but also some truly interesting opportunities in the future.
Sadly, it seems like North America isn’t terribly interested in AR. Looking again at Google Trends and the searches for “augmented reality” in 2009, we don’t show anywhere in the top 10. Even English speakers as a whole are a distant third in AR interest.
Much of this might be attributed to the fact that mobile technology and adoption is much slower in the U.S. than in Asia but with iPhone and Android phones coming from right here in Silicon Valley, I would expect a much higher interest in the field than we’re seeing.
The following video shows some of our friends playing our ARGH iPhone game. Our game is simple and doesn’t even come close to the potential of what AR can offer in entertainment and utility but when you look at the expressions and engagement of the people that play the game, it’s clearly an immersive and delightful experience.
I think we may be missing an opportunity here to create incredibly interesting applications which actually take your existing environment and context into consideration. If design’s mantra is “it depends”, augmented reality offers a way to create interfaces that depend on what people are doing, looking at, and listening to.
This post is the third in my Project 52 series. Project 52 is group of people who have all signed up for the challenge of creating new content for their sites at least once a week. Read other articles in my P52 series.
When Coley and I got engaged in late 2008, the first question people asked us was, of course,
Have you guys set a date yet?
We got to talking about dates and initially felt that 09/09/09 would be a good date. We’re not mathematicians nor numerologists but a date like 09/09/09 just has a good ring to it. With the Indian Summers that San Francisco has, a wedding in early September would be perfect. And though neither of us are superstitious, there was the added bonus that “9″ was considered by Chinese people to be a lucky number in weddings.
Alas, 09/09/09 also fell on a Wednesday.
So, at our friend Diana’s suggestion, we looked at 10/10/10 to see if that fell on a weekend. As it turned out, that was a Sunday. Then Diana suggested something which made both our geeky ears perk up:
You could have a binary themed wedding.
Indeed we could.
The next natural step was to determine what 101010 in binary equated to in decimal. Let’s see … 2 plus 8 plus 32 …
Last September, Coley and I spent nine days at Redwood Forest Ranch. The ranch, located 45 mins off a dirt road between Fort Bragg and Willits, CA, was owned by an architect named Charles.
The land includes three houses, all built by Charles with the help of his family. They are powered entirely by solar panels he installed in the sunniest places. Additional heat and light are powered by gas lamps and a gas stove. Charles provides food to his guests that he, himself, grows on his land. During our visit, the fresh produce he offered included corn, grapes, Asian pears, tomatoes, asparagus, and much, much more. This is a truly sustainable style of life.
Our stay there really reminded me of how little we truly need to have a content and serene lifestyle. It also created a heightened sense of awareness around life’s details which are easily overwhelmed and muted by our daily stresses and interactions.
This awareness lead me to discover a different mode of productivity.
Eschewing the Clock
Our trip wasn’t purely a vacation. It was also an opportunity for me to focus on finishing the first draft of my book. Despite this goal, one of the first things we did when we arrived at the ranch was to consciously remove all unnatural concepts of time. Luckily, none of the clocks in the cottage were working. We turned off the clock on the laptop and stored away our phones.
We had no real schedule and thus, no real need to know the time. But what I found every morning when I woke up, or every night when it first got dark, or when we felt tired, was that I had the urge to know the time. It took days to break this habit of associating wake/eat/sleep with time.
The Workday
Once I got over the time-checking reflex, I found that my mornings moved in a much more natural way.
On a typical day, I woke up whenever my body told me to, walked outside in my pajamas and stretched in the sun with the grass underfoot. I picked some grapes from the vines hanging from the back porch and maybe ate a pear or a bowl of cereal. Some days, Coley and I would go for a short forest walk before I returned to start my writing.
Then, whenever I was ready, I sat down in my “office” to begin my workday.
Contrast that day with a typical office one.
You wake up to an alarm clock. Groggy, you get dressed, maybe have something to eat (many skip this step), then drive into traffic or enter a crowded transit service. Within an hour or two of waking, you’re sitting at a desk and reading email (if you hadn’t already started going through your email on your phone or on the laptop next to your bed).
Being Ready
Although I worked for fewer hours on a daily basis, I found that I was able to enter flow almost immediately. I got a lot more done in a shorter period of time than I normally would have—so much so that I did finish my first draft during our stay at the redwood cottage.
Of course, I can’t discount the fact that being disconnected from phones and the internet drastically increases my ability to concentrate. However, I am also certain that part of my productivity was due to my mental readiness. Rather than waking up and jumping straight into work, I was in a mindset where I was ready.
The question is, how can this be applied to a regular day-to-day work schedule in San Francisco? In order to wake up when your body feels it should, setting aside 2-4 hours for stretching or walking to get into an optimal mental state before arriving on time to a 10am meeting, we’re talking about a 10pm bedtime the night before. I know some people actually do this, but I can’t picture it in my own life.
To find a solution, I looked to the most obvious example of morning readiness preparations that I know of: Japanese morning radio exercises.
They’re called rajio taisō or radio physical exercises in references to the NHK radio broadcasts that accompany the morning exercises. In this article about the practice, they pinpoint exactly why I felt there was a level of mental readiness lacking in my day-to-day:
According to the National Radio Exercise Federation, morning workouts have an awakening effect. It takes around three hours for someone to fully wake from sleep, but with the radio exercise, which airs at 6:30 a.m. daily, nerve functions are activated and the blood gets circulated to muscles and the brain.
I used to think corporate benefits like in-house yoga classes were excessive or unnecessary (just give employees gym membership benefits) but now I look at these in a new light. What would an office be like if, in place of the morning status meeting, the first thing everyone did were basic stretches or calisthenics?
This post is the second in my Project 52 series. Project 52 is group of people who have all signed up for the challenge of creating new content for their sites at least once a week. Read other articles in my P52 series.
This post is the first in my Project 52 series. Project 52 is group of people who have all signed up for the challenge of creating new content for their sites at least once a week.
One concept born from the original LifeCamp (2007/2008) was the idea of defining a year with a theme word. Rather than a laundry list of resolutions, the challenge was to distill the coming year and what you want to achieve into a single word.
2009 Recap: Realize
I looked back at 2008 and empirically defined 2008 with the theme word BEGINNINGS because it marked the beginning of many aspects of my life. My theme word for 2009 was REALIZE as it seemed like the year where many of these beginnings would really flourish to their full potential.
But as I look back, a lot of the potential seems to have blossomed but not quite bloomed. My brother Jamie’s first tweet of 2010 could just as easily be applied to me:
With our wedding date set for 10/10/10, my new position at Twitter, and the book finally nearing completion, I could easily say 2010 is the real year to REALIZE.
But that would be too easy.
When I was considering what theme word I’d pick for 2010, I toyed with words centered around success, achievements, and completion. For some reason, these words just didn’t quite seem to resonate as a theme. I started looking around me to see which theme words my friends were choosing. They’d always been a source of inspiration so why not look at their themes and goals and see if that might help inspire me?
Putting Myself Together
It was then that I realized: looking for ideas and growth around me is exactly what I wanted to do more of this year. I found that I could even identify individual traits and skills I’d learned—both explicitly and implicitly—from those close to me. Reflecting on these influences was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle of myself.
From my mom, I learned generosity. She is unquestionably the most giving person I know both in terms of attention and material goods. She also taught me what it’s like to be passionate about even the smallest things. That passion leads to an ability to express opinions and feelings without reservation—a trait that I knew I had but only recently recognized its origin.
From my dad, I learned to be an engineer. His summer holiday assignment when I was 12 was to write a program to find all the prime numbers between 1 and 100 in BASIC. He also taught levity, reason, and is probably the source of my analytical-mindedness.
My younger brother, Jamie, is married and has his own company. In many ways, though 5 years younger, he has acted as my stable anchor and a reminder of both personal and fiscal responsibility. At the same time, his audacious goals and drive push me to shoot for more.
I can’t even do justice to what I learn from Coley, my fiancée, on a daily basis. She’s given me a more macro consciousness and awareness of everything around me that I just didn’t have before. It’s almost like developing a superpower. With that awareness, I’ve also started to recognize drama for what it is and subsequently avoid it. Most of all, I’ve come to realize how much awareness one can have simply by communicating much, much more.
Communicating by Listening
Recognizing how much of a superpower communicating is, I decided that my theme word for 2010 would be LISTEN.
With my friends and family, I hope to not only learn from everyone but also pay attention to their needs. When one is truly listening, they can act rather than react.
Similarly, with my new role at Twitter, I’ll be aiming to listen and learn both from my colleagues and from the community and businesses who use Twitter.
Update: Contrary to reporting, I’m not “overseeing Twitter’s products”. I’ll be a product manager. One of many people contributing to Twitter’s future.
A couple of weeks ago, I announced that I had left Raptr to explore other options. Raptr was an incredible experience for me and I learned a lot there. I watched and helped the company grow from 8 people to the near 30 it is now. (They’re hiring for more, by the way.)
At Raptr, I took on more roles and responsibilities than I have ever had before in my professional life. The team that I left behind consists of some of the most talented people I know whom I hope to work with again in the future. I have a little bit of insight into what’s coming for Raptr and, believe me, if you play any videogames, the service is going to be even better than it already is.
But for me, it was time to take my newfound skills and apply them to new challenges.
Today, I signed an offer letter from Twitter. I’ll be a product manager there working primarily on the web client. As you might guess from my Twitter username (@k), I’m a pretty big fan of theirs and see a lot of potential for the medium next year—for that’s what it is; a medium, not a service.
So you’re thinking about being a designer? If I could tell you only *one thing* about going into the field, my advice would be ________.
I thought of a lot of different answers, many of them quite cynical. I imagine my time watching the industry’s discussions and throwing peanuts at it from OK/Cancel makes me think that way a lot. For example, I considered answering with, “don’t use convoluted phrases just to make yourself sound smarter.” In the end, I erred on the side of practicality:
I’ve always been a big fan of the work that Schulze and Webb do and the insights from everyone in that company. I wasn’t able to see this talk in person but definitely recommend checking out this talk by Matt Webb on macroscopes.
Please make sure you read updates below on how Virgin America resolved our issues with the help of Twitter. Great customer service there but the same couldn’t be said for their phone support at the time.
Ever since Virgin America launched, I’ve been eagerly waiting for the opportunity to fly with them. I’m a frequent traveler and while living in London, was exposed to a lot of Richard Branson and Virgin’s antics and marketing. They’re a fun company with a lot of character and personality. They’re irreverent, they buck trends, providing quality where none used to be expected.
Today, a simple error has caused us a lot of pain and cost VA a lot of good will.
It all started last week when Coley was booking flights for us for a trip we’re taking to LA. She went to virginamerica.com, looked up appropriate times, and booked the flights. However, when she was done, neither of us received a confirmation e-mail even though she’d entered both of our email addresses.
Two days later, we still hadn’t received any confirmation emails. We checked our spam folders to no avail. Coley logged into her VA account and the website said “no pending flights”. No charges had been made to the credit card, either.
As it was two weeks from when we needed to fly we needed to get tickets soon. We assumed the booking hadn’t completed and proceeded to book another set of flights. However, the original itinerary was no longer available as they were booked so we booked slightly different times to fly (but kept the same days).
Another two days pass, and we discover that Virgin America has charged us for both sets of flights. “No big deal,” we thought, “we didn’t receive any confirmations at all and the flight still doesn’t show up on the website. We’ll just call them up and they’ll fix it.”
As you might have guessed, it turns out that even Virgin America with all its irreverance and snarky humour has a Big Corporation side. Coley was on the customer service line for 2 hours, during which time she was subjected to two disconnections and multiple attempts to charge us $150 cancellation fee — again for a flight which we didn’t even know existed.
After the first 2 hours, Coley finally got through to a manager, David, who was reasonable but unable to give us a refund on the flight. Instead, he offered to waive the $150 but the ticket cost would have to stay as airline credit. We reminded him that they were keeping our money for a website error but after an additional hour of back and forth, it was clear he wasn’t empowered to do much else.
His proposed solution? Use the “contact us” link on the website—the website that broke and charged us $300 without telling us we had any flights booked.
This episode shows how a business must invest in more than just its core service. Virgin America may have created a stellar flying experience that outclasses most but that doesn’t mean they can compromise in their online experience and their customer service.
The most frustrating part of this entire episode is how it feels like we’ve been blamed and then penalized for an error on their part. All the good will garnered through their savvy multi-million dollar marketing, fancy mood lighting and in-air WiFi was washed away because of one website error they wouldn’t take responsibility for.
Update 11:00AM 18 May 2009:@VirginAmericaresponded to ourTwitters. It probably helped that others also retweeted us (thanks!). I’ve given them my email address and we’ll see where it goes from here. I’ll be happy to have this resolved but it really shouldn’t have needed this much of a fuss in the first place.
Update 02:41PM 03 June 2009:@VirginAmerica told us we should expect a refund within a week of the last update but it didn’t come through. It turns out that this may have been due to our end because the credit card we booked with was lost and replaced in that time. They have been incredibly quick and responsive in their Twitter responses. Our friend @ang also ran into the same issue yesterday where she booked a flight but it didn’t show any confirmation, didn’t send her an email, didn’t show up on her Elevate account and didn’t show any charge on her credit card. She’s also been in touch with VA because she Twittered about the issue.
I’m really glad Virgin America is coming through so well with the social media tools and customer service but I really hope they fix that web issues that are plaguing them. I also sincerely hope the phone support staff will be empowered and educated on not putting the blame on the customer when the company’s technology fails. I’ll give a final update when we do sort this out but it looks like it’s under control.
Update 05:38PM 07 June 2009: The money has been refunded to our account! Hooray for Twitter and companies using social media!
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I attended SxSW Interactive for the 6th consecutive year. At the same time, I also had the pleasure of attending the much more well known music portion of the festival for the first time.
The Music Festival features hundreds of bands across just about every genre. I thought figuring out which panels and parties to attend during the Interactive Festival was difficult but it pales in comparison to the musical selection — especially when they’re mostly up-and-comers. Thankfully, I was able to tag along with far more knowledgeablefriends.
A quick summary of the shows I saw:
Blitzen Trapper
DEVO — going just to say you did is never a good thing
The Asteroids Galaxy Tour — stumbled upon them because they played before The Little Ones and they’re great
The Little Ones
Nosaj Thing — great danceable set
The Phenomenal Handclap Band
Earlimart
Anchorsong
Camera Obscura
The Bird and the Bee
Janelle Monáe
Arc Attack
By far the best show in terms of performance and showmanship though, was Janelle Monáe. Thankfully, Leonard managed to catch some great footage of that concert.
Arc Attack was awesome for just being awesome. They make music with Tesla coils!
Of course, I couldn’t go to every show and I heard about a number of acts that I wish I could have caught. Here are some of the artists I hope to check out both live and recorded:
My first Danish movie. Contrary to what the American trailer would have you believe, The Celebration is much more a drama than a suspense thriller. I don’t even really know how to describe the movie without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that it’s a great examination into societal norms and pressures and how people will do anything to sweep things under the carpet rather than face realities. Thanks to Arshad for sharing this gem. [imdb link]
