I made a new image yesterday for our front on North Kingdom. Only because we have been really bad the last years to update our site with new cases. Yeah, you know how it is… However, here are some of the cases we have done lately.

n°1 — Vodafone Netguys, Vodafone Germany, November 2011. (Robert Lindström)
n°2 — The 5 Experience, Tribal DDB South Africa, May 2011. (Jakob Nylund)
n°3 — Daybreak, AT&T / BBDO, May 2012. (Jakob Nylund)
n°4 — Google ROME & 3 Dreams of Black, Google Creatve Lab, June 2011. (Robert Lindström)
n°5 — Build with Chrome, Google / Mark, June 2012. (Robert Lindström)
n°6 — ONLY - The Liberation, ONLY / UncleGrey Copenhagen, April 2012. (Jakob Nylund)
n°7 — Vodafone BufferBusters, Vodafone Germany, September 2011. (Jakob Nylund)
n°8 — Daybreak, Jack Boxers, AT&T / BBDO, May 2012. (Robert Lindström)
n°9 — Weetakid, BBH London, September 2011. (Robert Lindström)

In brackets I have mentioned who was Art Director from North Kingdom.

Please visit North Kingdom to find more information and links.

North Kingdom project — This spring I was involved in a really fun project for a Google Maps and LEGO® as a Art/Design director with focus on the build section. The whole concept is about you building LEGO creations on a map of Australia (LEGO turns 50 years in Australia this year), where you claim your own spot on the map. It´s called “Build with Chrome”. I have always been a huge LEGO fan so it was a great project to be involved in! The result was pretty OK, specially the “builder” that rocks big time with an amazing programming solution, but the limitations of how we could use/hack the Google map pulled down the result a little, I think.

Direct link — Build with Chrome
More information — North Kingdom

A rough mock up by Alfredo Aponte, our User Experience Designer. He was the guy solving the seemingly impossible.

LEGO Digital Designer is a program you can download for free to build complex LEGO models. A program that became a close reference about what we was going to build. However, this program was in our eyes to complicated and to hard to use, so our focus was to make our “builder” much more easy and playful to use.

Klas Kroon, our programmer and the brain behind the builder, made lot of different prototypes and developments. These prototypes helped us to early see what we could do and not. The client described his work as ‘like Christmas morning waking up to see what North Kingdom had delivered next’.

“Having recently worked with particles, my mindset was set to that.. So my initial idea was to treat the LEGO bricks as particles or several particles makes up a brick, etc.. The idea is to use a sprite/particle of the smallest brick and so on. 1 vertex = 1 sprite. So this is not “real” 3d, but more isometric/ortographic, no perpective. Here´s the first test, so you can see what I mean:

…

One of the early ideas was to have some sort of terrain variation, here´s a test of that:
(Mousedown and drag left/right to rotate, arrowkeys to pan)
Isometric 5 (flipped)

… So I tried with the more classical approach, that is more on par with the LEGO Digitial Designer, which is really nice, but it’s more advanced and more “cad” than what we were aiming for here.
Builder 2

One that tested autosaving with local storage.
Builder 4

— Klas Kroon, North Kingdom

Read more about his explorations around this project at OutsideOfSociety — Build with Chrome

Above are my first mock ups on the same screen. We all wanted a very simple solution regarding “the builder”, therefor I thought a clean open design would match that idea when we also had Google to think about. Some big juicy LEGO bricks would make it more playful and interesting, we still want it to feel LEGO right?

Final interface design by Jonas Eriksson.

We also did a LEGO version on the Google mnemonic; a 3 seconds 3D animation. Conceptually; very simply idea with a Google logotype explode into LEGO bricks that would go around its core, but it was for sure little tricky to get correct. Above you see my rough direction of how I saw it would work.

Mathias Lindgren, our 3D artist, put it alive in 3D Studio Max.

North Kingdom project — An online 3d game utilizing the hardware acceleration introduced in Adobe Flash 11.

The ATL developed by Jung von Matt focus on visualizing the possibilities and power of the Vodafone network through four main characters – The Netguys. These Netguys can be seen in TVC, Print, Out of Home and also in an interactive experience. In the interactive channel Vodafone wanted to give their customer a fun, casual and engaging game experience centered around the Netguys characters in the browser.

Our idea to communicate was that Vodafone customers have access to the Network of Tomorrow (im Netz von Morgen) but it is really up to them to make use of all the possibilities with Vodafone as a mobile provider.

More information — North Kingdom.
Play Netguys — English version

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For a couple of month ago I worked on this project as Art Director and designer. Netguys was a big challenge for us when we where working with the new 3d engine in Flash 11 with a very small team and a very tight time limit. However, this kind of projects can be really fun to do!

What is really cool in this project is that the 3D blocks in the city appears randomly so you never know what’s coming up, you never know how the city will look like. More about this later at our Behind the Scene section.

These 3d images have I done in Cinema 4D, just to make the screenshots from the game little more interesting. I bought the display model at TurboSquid.

A poster I did most for fun, but later on become the splash page you can see below.

   More pictures and information here.

NORTH KINGDOM PROJECT — Weetakid, an intergalactic mobile gameplay for kids, is a concept made by BBH London for Weetabix, which is a popular whole grain wheat breakfast cereal in England. The assignment for North Kingdom was to create a mobile game with an AR solutution connected to the cereal package.

I myself wasn’t so much involved as I use to be in this kind of projects when BBH London was in charge of the overall feeling, Yum Yum (London) made the characters and 3d, and Zoink Games (Gothenburg) took care of the games, including game bible.

My role was pretty much to take care of the first look and feel, concept designs, covers and some interface design/ mock ups. The final production was so so in my eyes… but it has some cool visuals so I thought it could be fun to keep it here on the blog for the future. The image above, with the three iPhones, have I done in Cinema 4D.

   More pictures and information here.

This spring we at North Kingdom did a small web project including both an iPhone app and five movies with Forsman & Bodenfors for Volvo. We created an online guide with the 25 most spectacular winter adventures in Scandinavia, a project called Volvo Cross Country Travels. With the app you can receive special designed badges from each location. Forsman & Bodenfors made the concept idea, my role was Interactive Art Director.

To mock up the first design (B) I received some rough sketches (A) from Forsman & Bodenfors, who wanted a clean magazine so it could run on an iPad. Therefor we chose HTML5 as a platform.

Some screenshoots of the final result (small changes have been done since launch).

We created some cool badges for each location which you could get digital if you checked in at chosen location. Our idea was also make them physical so people could receive them by post so people could put it on their cars. Illustrations by Anton Eriksson, directed by Jakob Nylund.

We also sent two guys for 3 weeks of filming. Jakob Nylund and Riccardo Tagliabue made five beautiful spots (above). I sold in the idea and really wanted to go with them, but the time issue made me to stay at the base.

You can read more about the filming here — North Kingdom is filming for Volvo XC Travels

The total result turned out so so I think except for the badges and the videos that had higher level. Some annoying tech problems with external partner cut down almost all love. Instead of doing the whole thing with HTML5 we ended up with a hybrid solution (Flash) the last two weeks of the project.

However, it was great to work with my old friend Staffan Lamm at Forsman & Bodenfors again. They are doing such excellent work these guys! Mathias Lindgren (North Kingdom 3D) and I was working inhouse at their Gothenburg office the last week. On the picture you can see Mathias at their total orange place, 8.45 PM, Friday night. We where the last one leaving. (Photo taken by iPhone)

Concept art by North Kingdom (Robert Lindström & Mathias Lindgren). Deer by Mirada.

Three screenshots from the final work and the landingpage of ROME, everything made with webGL.

Read more about the project here and check out the huge making of article at our North Kingdom blog here. This post on Designchapel only concerns my involvement and my personal notes.

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A couple of weeks ago we launched a little different project from North Kingdom called ROME, an interactive music video made in webGL from Google Chrome. To learn more about the technique you can read more at ROME technology site.

I wasn’t so super involved myself unfortunately when it was the music director who was in charge of all the visual stuff. I only did some early concept drawings together with our 3D artist Mathias Lindgren and some design directions on the website. These pictures will I show here below.

The beautifully Norah Jones, one of my favorites, is singing “3 Dreams of Black” in this interactive music video with Jack White from Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi’s album ROME.

Some really early concept drawings. I had an idea of a mirror world underneath the surface, a more twisted version of the dream world.

“A dark world is found under the surface, as if you would look under the water’s edge. This dark, odd, bizarre world contains a mirror image of the “real” world but within another shape. Here will you find the dark soup. A soup that could have same style in all three dark worlds.”

   More pictures and information here.

A first rough body tracking test from out little lab project Woodbot Pilots. We have used a 82-inch display from Samsung, Unity 3 technology and a camera from a local Skellefteå company called Fotonic, who manufactures 3D cameras, based on time-of-flight (TOF) technology.

The difference between Xbox Kinect and our camera is that we are using TOF when Kinect is using a structured light and can maintain tracking through a range up to 3.6 meters when Fotonic have a max range of 7 meters. The Kinect sensor is built for use in living rooms and our camera has been optimised for industrial and demanding environments. Both cameras are using imaging CMOS sensors

The huge display was sent to Skellefteå today where we will finish the work within the next two weeks. More stuff will be posted soon.

Link to Vimeo.

NORTH KINGDOM, WORK IN PROGRESS — For the moment I’m working as a Creative Director/ Art Diretctor / Designer with a little different project then I am used to. It’s an interactive installation that will be placed at Skellefteå Airport this winter. An installation where we will use a very interesting 3D camera technique and a huge 82 inch one-touch screen. If you have seen Microsoft’s Project Natal you maybe know what I’m talking about, it’s a 3D technique that can be used both in games and installation like ours, but also for instore installations, interactive shop windows and much more.

The 3D camera is developed and made by Optronic in Skellefteå and it’s using Time-of-flight (TOF) technology (can be explained as radar operating with light). More information about the camera at Fotonic.

“With the technology, the time it takes for a very short laser pulse to travel to a certain object is measured, allowing distance to be calculated with great accuracy. Using a unique sensor chip, the distance to each individual pixel in the scene can be measured, creating a complete three-dimensional image.”

Video — Proof-of-concept of hand controlled car game
Video — 3D camera test

The basic idea behind the concept was to make something pretty simple (orders from the 3D cam tech guys) and focus on the visual, because we don’t want any bugs when it will be a public installation. That gave us directions to use as few joints in the bodies as possible. Therefore I had to figure out how to make them so simple as possible but still interesting. The first sketches I did were these fluffy things, which was made for one of our first ideas around an interactive mirror. From the beginning our ideas were mostly to make something arty, focusing on something we called Flight DNA (when every flight trip is unique), and digital mirrors with avatars (which is still on the track in another shape). However, it felt little lame, so we ended up with a game instead that anyone could easily understand. During this period I was working a lot with Per-Mattias Nordkvist, Improove (who I worked together with at Paregos in Skellefteå, way back).

(These fluffy characters are now moved to another ongoing project).

When we moved over to the game idea I wanted characters with more attitude and possibilities to fly. When Skellefteå is famous for its wood culture, what would be more right to do the characters in wood? And what would be cooler to make these wooden characters into robots? Above is the first concept sketches I made in Illustrator, showing the different bodies, heads, etc. It is also showing some first ideas of how the environment will look like.

Here are we working with the texture, colors and placement of the fabricated logotypes (which will give the characters a racer attitude). Pawel Wilkos from Ars Thanea is helping me out with the 3D when Mathias Lindgren, our 3D master, went on paternity leave. So big thanks to our old friends at Ars Thanea! We are own you one!

When I came up with the idea of these wooden robots/pilots it felt like we could do something more around them. Could we make them like a brand, could we take them further to other platforms? It’s some ideas we now are looking at, so I really hope we will see them in other platforms soon. Right now we are actually doing some first tests on iPhone (something I have been dreaming about over three years now). My intention is also to make a shop so people can order them as 15-20 cm high design wooden characters, limited edition. I hope to connect our local wood companies together to make it happen. If not, let me know if you have any ideas how to sponsor the project.

   More pictures and information here.