MIT Advertising Lab blogs about SS+K, the agency working on a unique game concept that requires collective audience participation.

“Several theaters in LA, Philly and NY will be equipped with a camera that tracks the motion of the entire audience. Projected on the screen will be a modified version of the NewsBreaker game and a faint mirror image of the audience in the background.

When the audience leans their bodies to the left in their seats, the paddle on the bottom will react with their movement and move to the left. When the ball makes it way towards the right, they will all have to collectively lean to the right to keep the ball in play, and so on. Like NewsBreaker, many of the bricks will have msnbc.com headlines (via RSS) embedded in them, that fall as the bricks are destroyed.”

Note: Newsbreaker is a tile game where bricks become news items.

A few hundred years ago, the idea of having a “conversation through pressing some buttons” would have sounded alien-ish. When IM clients started spring up a few years ago, most people couldn’t believe that users would actually type in their thoughts into a text box, and communicate with someone they knew. Over the last few years, IM (in its many different incarnations), has emerged as the chief communicating metaphor for a generation of IT savvy corporates. Is it a manifestation of man’s need to connect in a severely fragmented universe?

Almost as a parallel development, the notion of “worker’s union” vanished from the tech industry, although most other industries in India still have to deal with it. In its pristine form, the worker’s union used to look after the benefit and well-being of the labour force as a bonafide entity. However, they brought in their own unspoken baggage, so their disappearance was considered a good thing. However, alongside, the employees work hours started climbing steadily. There came to be an unspoken rule that the 40 hours mentioned in most offer letters was just to keep the beaureucrats happy, and that reality was quite the opposite.

A colleague recently joked — when a human being spends 80% of his waking hours at work, does his sexual and emotional being seep into his professional one? Does he become unduly “touch-feely” about his work? Is that something the behavioral analysts (read, psychiatrists) should worry about? Do the cliched childhood traumas manifest themself in some way at workplace?

I wonder.

Another colleague has the habit of calling mergers and acquisitions, marriages. “If we get married to X Inc… if Y divorces with us, we will have…”. Heh.

Perhaps we are seeing the emergence of the Corposexuals? Asexual humans whose primary relationships are in their workplace. Relationships where the dynamics emerge from workplace roles. A relationship that’s fast replacing all others in its intensity and devotion — marriages, families, everything.

Chanced upon this gem while I was searching for the existence of the word Corposexual. More on that in the next post.

From ADs of the World. Absolutely positively brilliant!

Day before yesterday, I took the customary three hour bus ride from Pune to Bombay, and found myself sitting next to a retd. Major General of Indian army. Within the next fifteen minutes, he gave me the recipe to make wine in India, the Indian way –

“Pour 20 kg of grapes inside a giant mud container… the one that’s normally used to keep water thanda (cool), fill that up with water, and add sugar enough to fill one fifth of the container. Then roll your sleeves and start smashing the grapes, so that they split apart. Then put some yeast, and close the container (make sure its airtight as much as possible). Put half a bottle of rum. Now forget about it for four months. Then open it up and mix everything well again. Close it back, and then forget about it for next 3 months. After that, just filter out the liquid and your wine’s ready to serve (of course, after you have chilled it).“

Interesting. I almost feel like trying rightaway. But, is it worth taking the risk of 20kg of grapes and incessant urges to open the container and check the “status”?

However, from wine recipe, we got into the conversation about the latest moral policing in Bandstand, Mumbai — apparently, holding hands or kissing is now considered obscene behavior, and couples caught red-handed are instantly taken to jail and their parents informed. Of course, all this apart from a fine of 1200 rupees.

Amazing. Why do I think I have heard this before? The land of Kamasutra, now with a ban on kissing. What’s next?

One of the greatest living violinist plays at the L’Enfant Plaza Station in D.C. in the rush hour. What happens? From an experiment conducted by Washington Post:

“HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a fewdollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’EnfantPlaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles:policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?”

Continue reading here.

Trent Reznor and NIN have produced an awesome marketing campaign around their upcoming album Year Zero. Check out this excerpt from wikipedia synopsis of the whole act:

“On February 12, 2007,fans found that a new Nine Inch Nials tour T-shirt containedhighlighted letters that spell out the words “I am trying to believe.” It was discovered that iamtryingtobelieve.com was registered as awebsite, and soon several related websites were found in the IP range,all describing a dystopian vision of the world fifteen years in the future.

Many events reported on these websites take place in the year “0000.” Digit Online later reported that 42 Entertainment had created these websites to promote Year Zero. Rolling Stone described the fan involvement in this promotion as the “marketing team’s dream.”Trent Reznor has however stated, “The term ‘marketing’ sure is afrustrating one for me at the moment. What you are now starting toexperience IS ‘year zero’. It’s not some kind of gimmick to get you tobuy a record – it IS the art form… and we’re just getting started. Hope you enjoy the ride.”

More about their use of USB drives and waveform messages here.

Ted Berger, a USC researcher, spent last 10 years of his life crafting silicon chips that would recreate thought. Their chips model less than 12000 neurons, as compared to 100 billion present in human brain. Yet, as we all know, once (it might takes decades for that to actually happen) the first barrier is crossed, its a matter of time when forgetfulness will be history. What sort of world would that be? I wonder…

“In wet lab 412C on the University of Southern California’s Los Angeles campus, Vijay Srinivasan is poking a long, evil-looking needle at a slice of rat brain about half the size of a fingernail. All around him, coils of cable are piled near hulking microscopes. Glass vials and fluid-filled plastic dishes compete for space with spare keyboards and computer chips. The place looks more like a computer-repair shop than a world-class laboratory.

“Watch this,” says Srinivasan, a design engineer working with USC’s Center for Neural Engineering. A thin wire runs between the needle and a tiny silicon chip hooked up to a boxy signal transmitter. He flips a switch, and a series of small waves shimmers across a nearby screen—waves that mean exactly zilch to me. Watch what? I wonder.Srinivasan explains that the chip is sending electric pulses through the needle into the brain slice, which is passing them on to the screen we’re watching. “The difference in the waves’ modulation reflects the signals sent out by the brain slice,” he says. “And they’re almost identical in frequency and pattern to the pulses sent by the chip.” Put more simply, this iron-gray wafer about a millimeter square is talking to living brain cells as though it were an actual body part….“

Rest here…

I have always been a giant fan of Photo.net. It is one of the oldest photography sites on the net, and is almost entirely created by users. As an example, check out the photograph below from their Photograph of the Week (yes, you can submit and compete as well), and tell me if its not better than anything you have seen on flickr or photobucket. And if you don’t like this particular one, go check out their Photograph of the Week section.