rehabstudio – An obligatory blog
- Wonderland
- 77 East Road
- London N1 6AH
- +44 (0) 20 3384 5210
- Beau Monde
- Unit 12, 8 Cromac Avenue
- Belfast BT7 2JA
- +44 (0) 28 9050 1910
We are so hot right now.
Our Google Plus Hackathon team is working away, they don’t care about sunshine or ice cream, or cold cold beers, no no. They have gotten used to hot stuff – our Fußball game is nearing completion, oh yea and its quite hot too.
Check out the latest version of the Fußball+ game here, the 2 week hackathon sprint finishes later this week, going live on the 1st of June – Watch this space!
Mike was at Digital Shoreditch 2012 talking about our sister company Robot Corp last week, maybe you heard him? (He’s quite loud and from New Zealand).
For those of you know don’t know Robot corp is a sweat investment company helping pre-seed businesses concept and refine new digital businesses and products.
Digital Shoreditch is in its full swing, ending 1st June so you still have a few more days to check it out if you are interested!
Finally – don’t’ forget to wear sunscreen lotion, its getting hot out there!
rehabstudio
x
WIP+
As some of you might know we are one of a handful agencies who’s been invited by Google to take part in a two week hackathon to work up some cool stuff for their Google+ hangouts project -Really exciting stuff!!
For those of you who don’t know what we are talking about, here’a s a link to Google’s official blog where they released the news about their latest API end of last week.
This API has a bunch of new features and possibilities to build upon, the ability to respond to facial movements in real-time inside an app for example, and new sendMessage functionality that we’re trying out as we speak.
On that note; We are’re working on a table Foosball game, a game that will take advantage of as many funky features of this new API as possible, you can follow our work in close on our rehabstudio Google+ hangout .
What exactly is an API you may ask? In short, its the interface where development and new code is written. Simple!
Our Fossball game is WIP - Its going well, we’re well excited and … well, we have until 29th May, then we will send our work to Google for a final review, followed by launch 1st June.
This is where its AT rehabstudio G+ hangout page, come hang out!
Laters, rehabstudio
x
Ps. Here’s some more information about this API thing we keep going on about.
BOOOOM!
Our project The Switch is site of the day!
The Switch has been awarded Site of the day today 17th May.
It is also Norway’s national day: Happy Norway day!
AND its Byron’s and Jordan’s (and Josh’s as well – but not really because his birthday
was actually last week - but still) birthdays today – Happy Birthday!
PLUS: Our Photo booth project we have been working on with Google has launched,
check it out on their Google+ hangouts page
Makes a great day for whiskey & cake.
Poor Tim, Karlsson and Mario had to go to The OFFF festival in Barcelona, so they are
missing out on all the fun in the London rehabstudio.
Laters!
rehabstudio Wonderland
Birthday Cakes alright?
Hello!
This is what we’ve been up to the first few months of this fine year that is 2012;
Our creative teams were let loose in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago, to attend the FITC event, all of them came back which was a bit of a bonus.We are still waiting for a report of some sort….
We got some Webby nods on the People’s choice awards with the Subaru First car story project we worked on with the fine folks over at Carmichael Lynch.
Backing that up with a couple of Official Honorees for the Instagr.am Music Video mash up we produced for the Vaccines, and one for the Chevrolet – Ride of your life
We have got some new faces in the London studio; Senior designer Arnaldo B – (Si, B is for Brazil), 2 x Lindas from Sweden (We call them Ericsson and Karlsson, they are both producers and make sure things happen when they should), and our homeboy designer Adam. Check out what Arnie does here and Adams stuff can be enjoyed here
Ericsson is part of the London Rockin’ Rollers crew, and Karlsson is a Hyper Island graduate, who took a detour via Spain before she decided that the British island was the place to be.
Our Belfast Massif has been joined by Rudolfs (Phyton Developer) and Chris (Front-end Developer, here’s an example of what he can do.
Also check out our This is my jam page where we’ll share some sweet music from the Belfast & London studios.
The geekiest way to start the year
The response from the www.therestartpage.com has been super awesome and very geeky.
You can reboot your system through a collection of vintage operating systems, from Windows 1.0 (1985) to Amiga Workbench 2 (1986) or Apple IIGS (1991). The restart page is a tribute to the evolution of the rebooting technologies that is part of our daily life.
The restart page was an answer to an invitation to collaborate with OFFF festival and YEAR ZERO project.
Created and designed by Barcelona agency Soon in Tokyo and produced by rehabstudio.
D&AD Annual
Yikes we forgot about this one – the Life in a Day project gets featured in book, congrats to all the guys who worked on this huge 18 month project!
We’re back!
Apologies for the lack of blogging over the past couple of months, it’s not that we don’t love you anymore – honest it isn’t – we’ve been kinda busy cranking out digital niceness.
In fact, over the past few months the rehab gang have been heads down, nose to the grind pumping out projects for some of the worlds biggest brands and most awesome advertising agencies. We haven’t even had time to pop up for a whiskey.
As proof, here’s a sample of some of the great work we’ve been involved with, we collaborated with Wiedens on Honda, built a great game for Red Bull, set about saving the world with Google Ideas, built the first Instagram music video with Anomaly- and did something super duper awesome with a West Coast Agency and a legendary American brand which we can’t talk about just yet (we’ll let you know more as soon as we can, promise).
In the meantime, we’re back for good – so make sure you check here regularly if you are interested in us, our work – or coming to work for us.
Or whiskey, obviously.
Love rehab X
Google Developer Day HTML5 Competition Finalists!
Woop!
The Google Developer Day 2011 HTML5 competition finalists are in and rehabstudio have made the cut!
The challenge: One week to ‘Doodle’ the Google Developer Day dymaxion map logo using open web technologies and incorporating a cultural reference to the host country of the GDD event we’ll be attending.
“Unfortunately there isn’t an event in the UK this year so the obvious choice was Germany”, sausage lover Tim explains.
As it was an HTML5 competition, we figured a lot of contestants would be focusing on animation. We decided to take a different approach and make use of the unsung hero: HTML5’s audio element!
Chris Kerr put his big, creative head to work and came up with Googlespiel, an interactive HTML5 glockenspiel! With cultural reference and cheesy name in the bag, we got coding. Chris G on the keys, Anto on audio loader, DJ Gary on sound effects, Tom animating, Emma motivating and Kyle to pull the whole thing together.
Finished, with time to spare, Anto added an auto play of Beethoven’s Fur Elise as a little tutorial for the users.
Click the image below to see the final product.
How we did it: The Formers
Lines and lines of code excitement across the studio today about the launch of our latest YouTube channel, The Formers, for Google Ideas.
In a tech first, our Belfast development crew have re-created the YouTube channel experience in full – which will be a first for iPad and tablet users once rolled out. The rich layered animation transition and navigation experience has been designed to be fully accessible through a mobile browser (rather than through a dedicated iOS App.)
The Formers is our first partnership production with the Google’s new think/do tank Google Ideas. The project is designed to provoke a global conversation about radicalism by bringing together an eclectic mix of former-extremists, their victims and counter-terrorism specialists. These ‘Formers’ and their survivors both tell their stories on the channel, letting consumers interact with both sides, sharing their views and experiences. The idea being to turn a complex social issue into a positive movement.
A YT iPad first
The YouTube channel is an HTML5 + Javascript-based app. We decided to make it plugin-free to showcase our work with the latest web technologies and standards. It uses CSS3 to provide smooth, hardware-accelerated effects, and makes use of recent innovative Javascript libraries (Modernizr.js and innershiv.js in particular) to ensure backwards compatibility/graceful degradation in older browsers. We also used embedded web fonts to make our typography rich and in keeping with the design, whilst staying accessible and searchable.
The content of the app is presented on a number of parallax ‘layers’ moving at different speeds when scrolling to provide a sense of depth. We chose this style because of the really strong white diagonal in the design. The parallax code itself was custom-written, using hardware-accelerated CSS3 transitions to smooth out the effect on modern browsers, falling back to a Javascript-only scroll on platforms that don’t support them. When the app loads, the page flow is dynamically restructured on-the-fly to accommodate the parallax layering.
The content is marked up using new HTML5 tags such as <nav>, <article> and <section> assisting search engines and devices.
Videos are embedded in the app via the YouTube Iframe Embed API, which serves HTML5 <video> content to platforms that support it, future-proofing the app, falling back to a standard YouTube player in other cases. Video content itself is served via integration with the YouTube Data API, which returns JSON-based video feed data on-the-fly in response to user interaction with the app. YouTube tagging is used to organize the video content according to extremism type and Former name. We used jQuery transitions in the video pages, and throughout the app, to provide a high-class experience.
The channel app also incorporates Google Moderator functionality to provide a means of feedback and discussion between channel users and The Formers themselves. We also included basic support for touch devices and hotkeys/tabbing navigation, to ensure a friendly and full-featured experience across the widest possible range of platforms.
The entire app will be deployed via Google’s own App Engine platform to ensure scalability and the tightest possible integration with Google support.
Check the channel out here.
The YouTube channel is the main consumer site for The Formers project, launched in conjunction with the Summit Against Violent Extremism in Dublin. Jurgen – our main man in Belfast – was there:
“The Formers project is a real game changer, at the summit we got to meet and discuss the channel with Formers and Survivors which really brought the importance of this project home. Working with Google products is always a delight, it’s our first HTML5 YouTube channel and we had real fun refining the interactions for touch devices. Looking forward to watching this project grow.”
The YouTube channel is soon to be followed by a ground-breaking relationships platform created by us and powered by Google’s latest social tech design solutions. Which will transform the collaborative power of like-minded activists, individuals and experts on an international level.
More on that to come.
Fancy starring in The Vaccines new music vid?
We love a good old API mash-up.
*DRUM ROLL*
We are announcing the launch of The Vaccines new site, created for Anomaly, which is also the world’s first Instagr.am crowd-sourcing video.
Fans who want the chance to have their favourite festival snaps immortalised in the band’s latest music video can upload their Instagr.am photos along with the tag #vaccinesvideo.
All images tagged correctly get displayed on http://www.vaccinesvideo.com and the best of the bunch will get animated into the video for the band’s new single “Wetsuit”.
We’ve been massive fans of Instagr.am since the start, so we’re stoked to be part of the first ever Instagr.am video mash up. Can’t wait to see the final video!
How We Did It
API Mash-Up
We used Instagr.am API to trawl for images tagged with #vaccinesvideo. Our server is then setup to search and find the latest photos every couple of minutes – we then grab the images for use in our campaign.
For those who love a bit of tech
Jurgen (our Tech Partner) says the system uses MongoDB, a document oriented database, to store the data collected.The front end is using jQuery for effects and jQuery Address plugin for deep linking and infinite scrolling plugin. The backend is running on Nginx, PHP-FPM and Memcached – all tuned to make the site as fast as possible.
Get your 15 seconds of fame
Check out the film the band have uploaded showing how to get involved: http://bit.ly/thevacc
Pics can be just of you or a bunch of mates, or stage shots. Or anything which shouts Festival!