Google Infinite Digital Bookcase
Google: We designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix; http://eicker.at/Google3DBookcase
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Metaverse and Augmented Reality
Augmented reality will become the next big thing: popular, mainstream, mass culture, ubiquitous in 2011; http://eicker.at/1w
Gerrit Eicker
Google Beyond Search
The New Google is merely a matter of search. Jarvis: Google builds hegemony in local and mobile; http://j.mp/632ewu
Gerrit Eicker
Google is Going Yelp
TechCrunch: Google and Yelp are in advanced acquisition negotiations, confirmed by multiple sources; http://j.mp/8I905J
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “Google and Yelp are in advanced acquisition negotiations, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. And while the deal isn’t done, we’ve heard that it’s very likely to close. The price is supposedly at least $500 million. … Google is building out their own directory of local businesses with its Place Pages, which can be accessed via Google Maps and local search. … Yelp, of course, already has all of this data, along with a growing and active audience of consumers who are used to finding (and rating) businesses on Yelp. … Expect lots of deals to be announced by them over the next three months.”
VB: “For several months, Google has been rolling out enhancements to its Google Maps offering, including aggregated reviews from TripAdvisor, Citysearch and other sources. Most recently, Google Maps began integrating more comprehensive business profiles with its Google Favorite Places initiative, and announced in early December that it was distributing 100,000 window decals to popular businesses with a QR code that links back to a Google Maps listing. Seen at the time as a threat to Yelp, which also distributes stickers to local businesses, the strategy now appears to be the first step towards an attempt to assimilate Yelp’s user base and market share.”
SEL: “In some ways this would be as dramatic or more dramatic than the recent AdMob acquisition announcement. Google is increasingly serious about the local market – from both a content and advertiser/small business perspective (extending into mobile). Yelp helps fill in several gaps for Google on both sides. – If this does happen it will reverberate through the entire ‘local ecosystem’ for many months to come. No, it would be an earthquake.”
Sterling: “Buying Yelp would be a different sort of acquisition for Google – a major one – because it’s not really a technology platform so much as a local brand, community and sales channel.”
Jarvis: “Yelp + GoogleMaps + StreetView + PlacePages + GOOG411 + Google Goggles + Android + AdSense = Google synchronicity“
Gerrit Eicker 07:33 on 19. October 2011 Permalink |
Google: “As digital designers, we often think about how to translate traditional media into a virtual space. Recently, we thought about the bookcase. What would it look like if it was designed to hold digital books? – A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online – many more than fit on a traditional shelf. With this in mind, we designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. It holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books. – The books are organized into 28 subjects. To choose a subject, click the subject button near the top of your screen when viewing the bookcase. The camera then flies to that subject. Clicking on a book pulls it off the shelf and brings it to the front and center of the screen. Click on the high-resolution cover and the book will open to a page with title and author information as well as a short synopsis, provided by the Google Books API. All of the visuals are rendered with WebGL, a technology in Google Chrome and other modern browsers that enables fast, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics right in the browser, without the need for a plug-in.”
TC: “I wrote a while back about the eventual necessity for the internet to become beautiful. The trouble is that the things in the world we consider beautiful in an informational context – magazine and book layouts, typography, etc. – are necessarily limited in the information they have to present. It’s this limitation, the known quantity aspect, that lets designers work effectively. – How should you design something, then, that presents effectively limitless information (say, all the world’s books) through a fairly limited medium (say, a web browser)? Google has one idea. Put them on a gigantic helix. … But is this really something people will want to navigate? Probably not. People like analogs in their digital catalogs, and this one seems a little bit too off the wall. … Anyway, it’s a fun little experiment you can try out here. Note to Mac Laptop users: be careful how you swipe or you may accidentally navigate off the page or invoke some arcane gesture.”
VB: “With tablets and eReaders offering a number of new ways to experience books, the browser has been relatively ignored. However, not a lot of people consider getting into a bubble bath with their nice glass of wine and a laptop book to wind down the day, but you never know. To that end, the virtual bookcase may not be a competitor to the Kindle, but rather to the book discovery service overall. It could also simply be a way to funnel people toward purchasing Google Books, but it’s still pretty cool.“