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Moving World Wednesday

Your weekly round up of news and views from the tech, creative and business world.

Smart devices get emotional

Siri may be a great listener, but it just can’t understand how you feel. Soon, it might. Based on research that acoustic patterns can be used to determine depression levels, researchers from the University of Maryland are aspiring to make Siri-like interactive technology that could provide users with regular feedback on their mental health. Interestingly, Siri has aided the emotional development of some autistic children and similar audio-interactive technologies are in development to support those with autism.

The new Samaritans app uses language and sentiment recognition tech to support their work in the mental health field. Samaritans Radar targets and aids potentially suicidal individuals, mining twitter accounts for potential red flag tweets that suggest extreme depression (although the app has been met with a lot of backlash).

New next-gen 3-D camera technology uses facial scanning technology to detect and read expressions and guess how users are feeling. The gaming industry is excited at the potential for a game-world to evolve in real time, based on the joys, frustrations and terrors of the player.

These developments hint at a future where our emotions can be tracked with the same ease as our physical fitness. Our devices won’t just be smart: they’ll be emotionally intelligent.

Families staying in business

Everyone’s favourite multi-billionaire mob boss we mean business man Rupert Murdoch is in a bit of a strop. At the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.D conference, Rupert claimed that the media industry needed a serious competitor to the online streaming giants Amazon and Netflix, and with his interest in Hulu, maybe the Murdochs are the family to do it.

This notion of family in business is still an intriguing issue. Although it seems very Dickensian to pass the business down the hereditary line, it’s still a successful practise. Even when experts predicted the trend to end (because it obviously makes more sense to hire someone competent over your first-born son), it persists. With 19% of the Fortune Global 500 being family-run businesses, from Walmart to Samsung, they’re thriving on both sides of the globe.

Even when a business isn’t family-run, it can be beneficial to drag loved ones in. After Virgin Galactic’s recent tragedy, Richard Branson defiantly reiterated that no one will travel before the Branson family go up.
 

Honey, I shrunk my computer

As the tech industry continues to aggregate everything into one giant ad-supported feed, apps are becoming much less compartmentalised. The latest iterations of popular mobile OSs save the user from having to dive-down into apps by using notifications that bring important information to the fore.

Intercom.io expands on this trend in ‘The end of apps as we know them.' We can already see examples of this in the design languages used by Twitter and Google Now, which rely on interactive ‘cards’ of discrete information that can embed important content. In contrast, Apple’s Watch UI remains dependant on a honeycomb of app icons, representing individual functions as discrete apps.

As screens become ever-more disparate in size, ranging from the very small to the very big, the scalability of user interfaces is becoming increasingly important. Microsoft has loudly declared that Windows 10 will scale from their newly announced Band wearable to the largest cinema-quality displays.

The shrinking real-estate on displays mean there will be increasingly less space available for brands to create ownable experiences, in the ways we’re used to. Logos will turn into app icons, and all other page elements might be stripped away. Smart brands will leverage a strong identity system, from tone of voice and gesture to sonic cues and beyond, to create ownable digital experiences.
 

LOLS

Harry Potter drops the mic.

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Moving Brands is an independent, global creative company. We partner with established and emerging businesses to design and transform their brands and experiences to thrive in the moving world.

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