Museum of London: Augmented Reality App

A new iPhone app created by the Museum of London called StreetMuseum allows iPhone users who happen to be walking around downtown London to see the world in real time with old photographs overlayed onto street corners and other locations.

From StreetMuseum's website:

"Select a destination from our London map or use your GPS to locate an image near you. Hold your camera up to the present day street scene and see the same London location appear on your screen, offering you a window through time. Want to know more? Simply tap the information button for historical facts."

As cool as it would be to look into the distant past roaming around New York City, I think it would be really interesting to market this app to movie buffs and location scouts. Instead of having photos and paintings from the past, you could have stills from movies and overlay them on their actual locations. (Of course you'd probably infringe on all kinds of copyright, but the idea seems pretty cool.) It'd be much like some of the entries over at the Scouting NY blog showing locations in older movies and how they look today:

Taxi Driver Locations

Rosemary's Baby Locations

Ghostbusters Locations

For those of you unfamiliar with augmented reality apps on the iPhone, here's a quick video of a subway app called Nearest Tube showing how it works:

HTML 5 Sports Illustrated

Here's another example of the future of print, this time using HTML 5 and featuring Sports Illustrated.

What I find particularly interesting are those spaces where you'd normally expect to see a photo embedded with the text, but instead you get a movie file. There's definitely an emerging market for those photographers who not only know how to take photos, but are also capable of taking good short clips of footage. From an editing standpoint, you could make the choice later as to whether or not you want to supplement the writing with a photo or a movie, depending on which you feel will relay the narrative more effectively.

The gulf between stills and motion gets smaller and smaller. In fact, both could be used simultaneously given the right design interface.

Video: Grand Opening of WHO A.U.

After all the talk about event coverage and the published photos, we know you've been waiting for this one. So without further ado, the Grand Opening of WHO A.U.'s Flagship Store. Beware of dancing bears!

Chamber Images Photo: New York Times

Recently, we were invited to cover the grand opening of Who A.U.'s brand new flagship clothing store on 34th St. in Manhattan across from Macy's. All we were expecting was to have a great time taking photos and footage of the event, but it came with its bonuses. I'd again like to thank Josephine Zohny of WeRoqq PR for inviting us and making all of this possible.

Get today's edition of the New York Times, May 20th, 2010, Thursday Styles section, page E4!

Check out the article: Front Row - WHO.A.U., a Korean Chain, Pursues U.S. Teenagers - NYTimes.com

You have to admit, that caption looks pretty good.

Grand Opening: Who.A.U Flagship Store

On Wednesday, May 12th, WeRoqq PR invited us to cover the grand opening of the WHO.A.U flagship store @ 22 W. 34th St. in Manhattan. My favorite PARTs model/DJ, Ms. Farrah Sabado was spinning the turntables with awesome beats, there were lots of hor dourves and drinks, plenty of fresh, young faces helping out customers and there was even a BEAR! The great symbol of California of course. The whole shindig was sponsored by Z100 and Time Out New York. We had a great time and lots of photos and footage to boot! Here's a taste of the event.

Camera settings: f 2.8-4.0 1/50-100 iso:640-1000