Uniqlo & Inception: Riding The Data Comet

I wrote a post in January last year about The Data Comet, which was about how…

…the data that we all collect in a comet-like trail behind us (either on purpose or inadvertently) can be harnessed by clever tools that make our life just a little better…

There was even a rudimentary little visualisation.  Aww.

 

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Anyhoo, two things this week made me think of it again.

Firstly, the already much talked about Uniqlo Tweet Show… you enter your twitter account, and it makes a music video from the data left in your comet’s tail:


I think it’s a neat execution (though the music really fucking annoys me). 

I guess it’s an interesting twist on advertising rather than some groundbreaking marketing initiative, but that’s cool… it makes ‘sit back’ just that little bit more ‘lean forward’.

The second thing was the new game for the new Christopher Nolan film Inception.

Now, we work with Warner Bros in the UK, but this has emerged from the US (as a lot of film stuff does), and given the levels of secrecy Chris Nolan usually surround his films with, we always expect things to emerge from nowehere (we found out about all the Dark Knight stuff by registering & playing for instance…).

Anyway, the first level of the game that’s up is a pretty rudimentary casual game based (as far as anyone knows) on the movie… it’s fun to play, yes, but my favourite bit (and the thing that reminded me of the Data Comet) is the fact that when you sign in with Facebook Connect, it uses the names of your friends as the other people in the game…

Here I’m hiding out from Fiona and Mark…

 

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…and here I’m being beaten up by Piers and Gibbo…

 

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Again, it’s not revolutionary, but it’s the subtle pulling in of the data tail I’ve left behind in life to make something more relevant to me that I’m a fan of.

Just think what’ll happen when people get really creative with the comet tail…

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