#blindspotapp

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New blogsite!

Hi there, and thanks for visiting our blog!

We have moved it to another location, so please go to:

http://blog.blindspotapp.com/

to follow us onwards.

Cheers,

The Blind Spot team

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Social media break up

Your social media world is broken. It's cluttered with content you have no real interest in and people you don't really know.

If you want to find great stuff out there you have to go through endless streams of status updates that don't matter to you, and most of the time people don't really have the particular interest you have, but tend to repost other people's stuff just because it's fun.

It makes it hard to find not just the right stuff out there but also the right people. Why spend so much time on otherwise good social media platforms if they can't give you what you need?

In short, social media is ready for its next generation. It should be a breeze to do a simple search and find just the media files you need in a few seconds. It should be a rule, rather than the exception, that you automatically see who is interested in that very same media file you are. And, it should be a natural thing for you to remix your favorite media files into a cool little narrative and share it.

In a world of endless connections, social media should be the place where people get together to actually find what they need and inspire each other with their version of all the great stuff out there.

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Immersive media platform wanted!

Feeling immersed in a great narrative is still a luxury reserved for books, movies and television shows. Rarely does it happen on the internet.

Yes, you can be immersed in being on the internet as a whole, but it's almost never the case when it comes to a single narrative on the internet.

Why is that? It's not that the internet is new. It's been around for 15-20 years. It's not that interactive storytelling is new either. The gaming industry is based almost entirely on that.

In other words, we have both a matured technology and a matured storytelling craft. What's holding us back? Why haven't we taken full advantage of the internet as a media platform?

Life on the edges Because our mindset is still based on the principle of centralisation. Of telling stories from one place instead of from a million places. Of only allowing media institutions to be the bearer of news instead of ordinary people.

The entire premise of the internet is decentralisation and allowing things to arise at the edges of the network. A place where people meet because they share the same interest but are otherwise disconnected from eachother.

Twitter leads Twitter is a great example of it. It gathers people with similar interests across the globe because all these people feel a need to share their point of view with others, and all of a sudden that group of people becomes a decentralised medium in its own right. A very powerful medium with the ability to change people's opinions.

But Twitter is just one platform out there, and it's not really suited for storytelling as such. After nearly 20 years of development you would think there would be platforms that could link text, photos, sound and video together as great narratives. But there isn't.

Blind Spot is coming Not yet anyway. Blind Spot is aiming to fill that space and be that platform, and we are working hard on it. We want to be the place where people are allowed to create their own personal media reality and inspire likeminded people with it.

A place where you can immerse yourself in a whole new media reality that's already upon us.

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The Power of Playfulness

For too long man has been forced to adapt to machines and develop unnatural habits and behaviors that eventually grind us down and destroy us.

But this is a paradigm of the past. With the mobile revolution we have the chance of making machines adapt to humans and how we naturally use our mind and body.

For us this means finding inspiration in physical life and converting it to something digital. Quite simply because physical life is playful by nature if you allow it to be, and we don't see why digital life shouldn't be playful too.

Most of all it means creating narratives. Telling each other stories is how we evolve, get inspired and share our inspiration with the world. Without narratives each of us would be an island of emotional dust with no vision for the future.

To show what we mean, we made this little clay animation, which you will also find on our website.

Enjoy it, and whatever you do - keep it playful!

Playful again from BlindSpot on Vimeo.

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No app for that

As I sit behind the wheel of the fastest Tesla on the market I feel completely immersed in the very essence of an interactive experience.

The big flat screen touch display to my right, the voice response system that obeys every command I give, and the feedback information from the dashboard telling me about my energy effeciency each time I accellerate and break.

The fact that the Tesla is always on the internet and calculates routes to recharge stations and gives me traffic and weather reports in real time makes me feel like I'm sitting in an iPhone on wheels. There literally is an app for everything in this car.

I let my right foot rest slightly harder on the accellerator and crush the speed limit. I fail to notice the police standing on the bridge in time, but instinctly take my foot off the accellerator the moment I spot them. I'm surprised at how the car almost breaks and drops the speed just as quickly as it accellerated.

I pull in at slow speed catching the eye of the policeman. I feel sure I will get a ticket. He sees the car, smiles at me and signals me to just move on.

I'm not sure whether it's the car or just fortunate circumstances. Maybe he saw the natural love for the Tesla in my eyes and instinctively understood that this is so much more than a car, and that we should honor that and give it the proper space in the traffic.

Whatever it was it was human. There is no app for that. But then again, why would you need an app when you have a Tesla.

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Active learners take new information and apply it, rather than merely taking note of it. Firsthand use of new material develops personal ownership. When subject matter connects directly with students’ experiences, projects, and goals, they care more about the material they seek to master.

Harvard Magazine has this excellent article on interactive learning and the benefits of it. Looks like the old lecturing format is finally breaking down into a more modern and efficient approach.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture 

The questions is if this also ties into the development of the flipped classroom and the use of technology in that aspect. It certainly looks like it. Maybe interactive learning and flipped learning should start dating...

For us at BLIND SPOT we have to ask ourselves, how could an interactive media platform such as ours improve learning within the framework of interactive learning and the flipped classroom?

The answer is, in a lot of ways, but our best guess is to curate video lectures and put them together in new ways to enhance your personal learning curve whatever the subject.

Still, it remains to be revealed when students actually try the first version of our app this fall.

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Interactive for art

As interactive is becoming the new black in everything it's nice to understand why something interactive is such a powerful experience.

The simple explanation is given by Artsnapper in this blogpost. It's because you become the experience the moment it's interactive.

http://artsnapper.com/see-art-art-art-guide-interactive-art/

In other words, interactive is the art of becoming. That's actually the reason why we are building BLIND SPOT.

When you immerse yourself in interactive narratives you become part of them, and being inspired by other people becomes so much easier.

PS! We really like the illuminated seats with music project. Which project do you like?

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Interactive is the next big thing

The next big thing in consumer technology is most likely not one thing. It’s a lot of things at once, and that’s part of the dynamics of the world we live in at the moment. It’s fragmented, and it’s going to continue to get even more fragmented. Whatever next big thing out there has to deal with that in some clever way.

Looking at the consumer tech world at the moment it’s lead by great tools that allow spontaneous action. For instance camera apps on smart phones. Sports tracker apps to help us figure out where we have been. And of course the social media to express our pictures, hiking results and thoughts top of mind.

All natural

At BLIND SPOT we believe in being as natural as possible to develop as good as possible. It’s a simple question of looking at what we do naturally as human beings and transferring the core principle of that into the digital world. At least that’s our way of serving people - and not machines.

So what would be the most natural thing to do in order to find your interactive way in this fragmented media world? Well, first of all you have to be able to find the media files you are interested in. Tags and a search engine come in handy there. Then you want to find other people interested in the same subject. They might have a take on it that inspires you. Social media guides you here.

Finally you want to have a simple way of organising and linking the media files you like the most and allowing others to be inspired by them. Preferably people you already know are interested in the subject. Some kind of interactive player would make sense in that aspect.

Linear thinking retires

In fact, we think the next big thing in consumer technology is going to be interactive something in all kinds of areas. The linear mindset is going into retirement at the moment, and non-linearity is becoming the natural order of things. We will only see more interactive products in the years to come - including interactive media.

If there is anything that is all about communicating in non-linear fashion it’s interactive narratives. Your experience of them will be entirely different from mine since we choose different paths through the narrative. It allows us to have something to talk about afterwards. Something to connect on. And, it’s both a very natural way to express ourselves and to absorb whatever is useful to us.

Which is why we believe in interactive media as the next big thing in consumer technology…