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I collaborated with Jacky Lee while in Taiwan on this interactive TV project as part of our ongoing research into interactive and emotionally-reactive television. It was installed at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the Animamix Biennial.

The “Community Vending Machine” or simply “Pepsi Machine” was a project that I completed while at the MIT Media Laboratory that was shown at Wired NextFest 2006 in NYC. I don’t have time to go into details now, but just know that it’s an interactive media purveying platform that uses multiple (14) individual spanning screens, computers, microphones and computer-vision to allow people to interact both explicitly and implicitly.

Most interesting for me is the fact that the machine passively generates knowledge about the specific audience that visits it and can then use this data to inform the content creators or even as a commodity to sell to 3rd parties. To this end the Pepsi Machine has expanded possibilities for generating value… I’ll elaborate more later.

small, medium or large video demos available.

A few weeks ago Natasha took me out for lunch on Newbury St. (Boston’s poshest area). As we were walking down the street a lady approached us and stated that we were the hottest couple on the street (um… ok) and that she and her partner were doing a documentary on the iPhone. She wanted to know if I wanted to say a few things on camera about it. I hesitated but Natasha urged me to do it, so I did.

A few weeks later I get a call from some producer at Moxie Pictures which is an agency that makes the commercials for Apple on behalf of Apple’s ad agency TBWA \ Chiat \ Day. The lady congratulated me and said that I landed the role as the next guy to be in Apple’s iPhone ad campaign! My reaction was like the caveman from the Geico commercial “YEAH, uh… what?” They said that they would fly me to NYC for a 2-day shoot next weekend. I even had to sign and FAX an NDA.

Apparently the documentary was just a cover, and that those people were simply casting for the agency.

Anyways, to make a long story short I am not able to do the campaign because I am not legally allowed to work in the USA.

It is not uncommon to stumble across a graveyard of BBQs in London, Canada. Also as you can see, Canada is all about the propane.