The Motion Store® is a fully automated ‘conveyor belt’ for mobile creatives that guarantees quality, consistency, beauty and performance on any mobile device.
The self-service design platform dramatically reduces creative execution time, allowing designers to turn their ideas into beautifully published stories in minutes without software developers, project managers or technical quality assurance teams. Everything has been thoughtfully built around full automation and exceptional quality with vast scale in mind.
Thoughtfully Crafted Freeform Blueprints - Just Add New Pages.
Incredibly simple to use Freeform Blueprints from Adtile Technologies. No coding or technical QA required. Everything works automatically across hundreds of mobile device configurations, operating systems, and mobile web browsers. The most sophisticated multi-sensory, augmented reality, virtual reality, and video creations are ready to be published literally in minutes.
Our pre-designed mobile framework is built right into the design editor and can be easily utilized—all on your own terms. Unlike any other creative cloud, Motion Store is loaded with powerful built-in automated features so you can start creating right out of the box.
Motion Sensors + AR + Photography + Motion Store + Play = Serious Fun!
The combined art of AR, motion sensors, and photography. The real world is about to get really silly! You can immerse yourself in entertainment like you never imagined.
Shake and create AR magic out of thin air. No coding or technical QA required. It just works.
Take full advantage of Adtile’s unique camera and motion software features to make magic in just minutes. Our pre-designed AR framework is built right into Motion Store and can be easily utilized—all on your own terms. Share your creation with a friend or the world.
With all-new features, Motion Store dramatically improves the most important aspects of the self-service design experience. It introduces advanced and simple template navigation system, designer editor support for 11 languages, all-new beautiful templates for dynamic video, and system-wide updates to the core MotionStack sensory software that powers all Adtile native formats and Motion Store templates. It brings your mobile designs to life in more intelligent and expressive ways than ever.
MotionStack® v1.2.0. The most powerful motion software ever.
MotionStack is a motion processing library developed by Adtile Technologies that allows you to integrate motion and spatial computing into your own web and native applications. It is quality tested to function automatically across thousands of hardware, operating system, and mobile web browser configurations. MotionStack is supported: Apple iOS 7.0+, Android Chrome 4.1+, Android Stock 4.1+.
Adtile MotionStack® Recorder. Motion cassettes are used to troubleshoot device sensor data across the vast landscape of hardware, operating systems, browsers, and their versions.
Find out how Adtile Technologies can help your organization with flexible Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA). Contact an Adtile representative at + 1 (858) 349 2055 or info@adtile.me.
Chrome with missing Gyroscope vs. Adtile Software Gyroscope
Find out how Adtile Technologies can help your organization with flexible Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA). Contact an Adtile representative at + 1 (858) 349 2055 or info@adtile.me.
Chrome provided Compass vs. Adtile provided Compass.
Find out how Adtile Technologies can help your organization with flexible Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA). Contact an Adtile representative at + 1 (858) 349 2055 or info@adtile.me.
Adtile MotionStack® is a software library written in JavaScript to provide consistent access to motion sensors across web and native APIs for motion processing and gesture recognition that is the product of over six years of research and development.
It is quality tested manually and programmatically to function across hundreds of device configurations, operating systems, and mobile web browsers. The quality improvement can be seen in the video below, where MotionStack® APIs are used instead of standard browser motion sensors.
MotionStack® is designed to be used for a broad variety of motion-interactive experiences, from registering simple gestures for navigating through a project, to automatic compass calibration, to powering immersive and three-dimensional augmented and virtual reality environments. Not only does the MotionStack® use hardware sensor events and accelerated transitions for the best possible quality, scale, and performance, but it also has a really tiny footprint (under 17 KB Gzipped).
Extensive documentation for using MotionStack® can be found at https://motionstack.adtile.me. Included in licensing MotionStack® is limited-usage of the patented Sensor Control Switch (US patent #9,578,493 and US patent #9,910,057), which serves as the foundation for the quality of the MotionStack® motion processing.
Beautiful all-in-one publisher design system that brings mini-app economy to life.
With the all-new white label Publisher Enterprise CMS from Adtile Technologies, you can get to market quickly with your own branded publisher app, and connect with your customers across the vast mobile landscape. Whether you are Telecom, Operator, Chat App, Media Company or Government agency, we got you covered. No other mobile creative hub is so effortless and natural, It’s unique solutions that lets you focus on what you’re creating — not what you’re creating with.
Technical specs
• Full white-label support
• No design or coding skills required.
• All video formats: Square, Cinematic, Vertical, 360
• Gif support
• Baked-in graphics animation
• Overlay graphics support.
• Full-screen text editing.
• Rich text editor.
• Full font support.
• Color picker and Rich styling features.
• Localization and Publisher editor language support: English, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, Taiwanese, Chinese, Arabic and more.
• App Store deep-linking capability.
• Maps deep-linking capability.
• 10 000+ device, OS and webview configuration support.
In this latest update, we overhauled the Motion Store patented core technologies, including the MotionStack that powers all Adtile-designed templates, reduced template file-size for faster loading, grown our device, OS, and browser reach by thousands with new device and sensors testing automation methods.
Motion Store makes it possible for anyone to design beautiful and sophisticated experiences on the fly. We’ve designed our template framework to include the perfect pairings of Adtile native design and device sensors. In all cases, the result is a seamless, natural and engaging app-like user experience.
Motion Store brings new forward-looking Adtile sensor technologies and unique mini-app economy to life. Everything is designed to look beautiful and work beautifully.
Bring the magic to life with over 100 unique Motion Store mini-apps. It’s why there’s nothing else like a Motion Store. Talk about modern art.
All-new Adtile Video and Graphics Experience that render you speechless. More intuitive, more intelligent. All at maximum velocity.
Tremendous amount of innovation packed in one simple form.
A powerful and patented design system built on Adtile technologies. The Motion Store combines the intricacies of all mobile sensors to deliver delightful user experiences. No other mobile creative hubs is so seamlessly unique and fundamentally intuituve. Learn more
360 video has never been so smooth. Adtile’s patented Motion Technology makes sure interactions–such as rotating the device, pitching the device, tilting the device–are as smooth and as seamless as possible, with zero latency. Accurate orientation and motion processing are accomplished by combining outputs from at least three sensors: the accelerometer, the gyroscope and the magnetometer, which are embedded directly into Adtile 360 video player to create a one of a kind motion accuracy, quality and scale not seen before in 360º videos on mobile browsers.
We’ve already tested our 360° video player on hundreds of devices, debugging our software and ensuring it will work for you. In fact, Adtile 360 currently supports over 600 software and hardware configurations.
With an all-new design and all-new features, Motion Store dramatically improves the most important aspects of the experience. It introduces advanced new template navigation, and system-wide updates to the core MotionStack. It brings your designs to life in more intelligent and expressive ways than ever. No other mobile creative hub is so effortless and natural - with superior performance.
You already know how to use it. And that’s the point.
Video for mobile comes in a variety of different aspect ratios and sizes. The mobile device screen is extremely versatile allowing the user to easily manipulate video playback. The screen can be rotated to play video as full screen portrait, tall and thin, or landscape, short and wide. With the touch of a finger, video can be zoomed, panned, and stretched. In addition, some applications prefer specific aspect ratios such as square dimensions.
The all-new Adtile Mixed-Media templates afford the designer to fit these disparate video dimensions in one cohesive project in an intuitive and visually appealing way. This allows organizations to reuse their existing collections of videos in their project.
New features for designers. New experiences for you.
Systemwide improvements in Motion Store let designers create experiences that are more useful and more playful than ever. With Motion Store, you have the opportunity to deliver an extraordinary product, literally in minutes.
The Adtile Motion Store™ is known as the world’s largest mobile creative hub, with its current library of more than 90 fully editable templates and growing.
Adtile-designed templates have been built upon the core belief that the user experience comes first, and that reliable high quality experiences can be easily generated and maintained at large scale and distributed to a global audience. To achieve this, each template has been designed around Adtile’s patented framework of mobile sensors and carefully controlled human interface.
For more information about Adtile Motion Store and software licensing process, email info@adtile.me or visit https://www.adtile.me/motion-store/
All-new iOS app to sling $100 bills. For the first time ever you can spray away millions with just $1.99. The result is completely magical. It’s the hyperbolic cash-spray performance that’s unheard of in a device this small. You can also set the right mood with cool music tracks that instantly adjust to match the length of your video. Fun stuff! 🤗
SpinMagic Lets People Draw in Playful AR Using Only an iPhone
Adtile Technologies, a company known for its industry leading creative cloud Motion Store, today announced the release of SpinMagic. SpinMagic turns your phone into a virtual paint brush capturing your spatial 3D movement into cool moments that can then be shared in photos or seven second videos through messaging and social media. The iPhone app is available in the App Store.
In a world crowded with VR/AR apps and headsets, SpinMagic is unique in its ability to give users easy access to creative and playful AR experiences with zero friction using the technology they already have and love–their iPhone. As users move their iPhones in the world around them, SpinMagic records the movement in real-time on the iPhone screen as a line which can be viewed in a 3D space.
Using SpinMagic’s animation filters, users can change the original AR line they drew into glitter, butterflies flapping their wings, hearts that twirl, and much more. The 3D graphics can be added to a photo or seven second video, allowing users full control over creating unique spatial animations. As you move your video camera around, the 3D image moves as well, highlighting different views in the video. Once you have captured the video or photograph you can choose from several different filters. The user is fully in charge of creating the spatial animations for greater storytelling through movement in the world around the user.
“We are adding artistic flair into something very abstract. The user doesn’t need to know how to draw in air. The app literally does the magic by itself. SpinMagic turns your space into playful masterpieces of self-expression.” said Nils Forsblom, founder of SpinMagic and Adtile Technologies.
SpinMagic was developed using Adtile’s MotionStack, the company’s core technology built to simplify the development process of sensor-based motion experiences on mobile devices. MotionStack works with sensors in smartphones designed for very specific tasks–such as understanding very accurate device orientation, or counting your steps–and developed a new way to create art through movement while capturing it on your mobile device.
Adtile Technologies, a pioneer and developer of motion-sensing technology for smartphones and tablets, announced that it has been awarded U.S. Patent No. 9,401,100 for selective map marker aggregation, which it invented in 2011. This location-based map marker technology has now become a standard and is widely used by some of the most popular mobile applications available today such as Photo Apps, Social Networks, Live-video streaming Apps, and many others.
Before Adtile developed this technology, mapping applications would show hundreds of pinpoints of information on a map, rendering the content useless and making it impossible to discover any information, particularly relevant information. It is now possible to show content such as photos, videos, live-stream videos, GIF’s, tweets, or emojis, plotted on a map in a smartphone app under one larger content marker showing the number of data points such as photos in that area. As you pinch and zoom in or out of the map, it will show more specific locations, or the data points will aggregate and show as separate pieces of content, saving space and allowing for better accessibility and discovery of the location-based content.
For example, with many photo management apps, you can see the photos you took on your phone on a map by tapping on the location header. All of the pictures from that “moment” or section of photos will appear on a map. You can then zoom in or out to see the pictures in more specific or more general locations on your map.
“In 2011, location-based mobile technology was still in its infancy compared to what we are doing today with the device sensors,” said Nils Forsblom, founder and CEO of Adtile Technologies. “I’m honored that Adtile’s Selective Map Marker Aggregation Technology has gained such huge popularity in the developer community in an effort to build apps that deliver delightful and useful experiences to users.”
This is one of the many US patents Adtile had been granted this year, including the recent issuance from the U.S. Patent Office for US 9,256,358, US D751,574, US D752,062 and many other approvals from the European Union Intellectual Property Office.
360-degree video is a huge opportunity for brands—if they’re willing to give up control
Social media has put consumers in the driver’s seat, eroding brands’ ability to control their own messages directly. Now, a new medium will take that trend even further: immersive, 360-degree video. With 360 video, brands will need to learn how to create engaging, open experiences where they’re not fully in control. For those that can pull it off, the rewards will be immense.
At its heart, 360-degree video is a form of virtual reality. It puts the viewer inside a spherical ball to get the “big picture” of what’s happening in all directions — up, down, and all around. Its biggest potential will be on mobile, where instead of clicking on arrows or manipulating a mouse to pan a scene like you do on a desktop, you simply move your smartphone or tablet out in front of you to change the viewing angle, resulting in a more seamless, intuitive experience. It effectively makes your phone into a small, movable window into a virtual world.
Don’t underestimate the power of 360 video — consumers are going to love it. If you’re watching a political event (like this one), you don’t have to keep your eye on the candidate. You can take a visual tour of the scene, swirling a full 360 degrees to gaze out at the audience or zero in on a reporter—to examine their responses or pick up on something odd, quirky, or highly relevant, happening “out there” in a realm that was previously off camera.
Getting this new medium right takes a lot more than plunking down a spherical camera rig into any old scene. To work, 360 has to be inspiring, like a piece of art. It has to elicit emotion and tug at the viewer’s innate sense of curiosity and give him or her a reason to explore — and that’s not so easy to pull off. But when you capture the right adventure, the panning itself tells a deep, more intriguing story. Take a look at this Jungle Book trailer taken through Mowgli’s eyes, and tell me you don’t want to look around to find out where that scary voice is coming from.
While 2D videos often cut from scene to scene, sweeping the viewer along a controlled, preset narrative, 360 might unveil a solitary, but rich experience that you can watch over and over again, taking in different nuances each time. Movies are already taking advantage of 360. Take for instance this Warcraft movie trailer or this Star Wars one. But a lot more can be done with the medium. National Geographic released a 360 video on swimming with bears. The BBC is doing an entire TV series in 360 called BBC Click. Tourism industries, especially, will find 360 useful in selling hotel rooms or letting a consumer know what it’s like to stand on a pristine, isolated beach, because 360 is all about making you feel like you’re there.
Ultimately for brands, 360 video means giving up the “director’s vision.” You can no longer direct the viewer’s attention. You simply need to capture that one compelling event and let the viewer take over from there, keeping in mind that everyone may experience the same 360 video differently.
As for headsets, they are unlikely to have much impact in the long run. As Google Glass demonstrated, people don’t like to wear funky things on their heads when they’re around other people. And as even Apple watch is showing us, when you already have a screen on your phone, what is the point in having another? Aside from education purposes, headsets are impractical for day to day living.
Right now, some of the 360 videos out there still look a little low res, but once the technology catches up (in terms of computer hardware, camera technology, video codecs, media players, and bandwidth availability) we’ll begin to get really clear, high def pictures of what is happening all around the video camera — as well as seamless transitions between viewing angles in near real time.
There is no doubt this captivating new medium is here to stay. Brands who start getting used to 360 now will reap the rewards of unparalleled user engagement and gain early dominance of a medium. Now is the time to experiment, learn, engage, and to show leadership.
360-degree video, which puts the viewer smack dab in the center of the action, opens up a realm of possibilities for brands wanting new ways to reach consumers on mobile. The trick is, how do you design those experiences with minimal hassle so they run in a broad range of environments?
Sure, Facebook and YouTube let you show 360 videos, but only mobile in-app and on their terms. They don’t allow you to reach consumers outside of their own platforms.
Traditionally, if you wanted to run your 360 campaign on tens of thousands of different apps and websites from different publishers, you needed to create different versions of the ad to fit the platforms and code used to build the apps they’ll run in. You can imagine how much that costs - and the quality can be a hit or miss.
Adtile has come up with a better solution. With our new Adtile 360 we let you create 360 videos that run both in app and on mobile web and on any standard mobile format. Adtile 360 is available through our Motion Store, where you create ads based on Adtile-designed templates, eliminating the iteration and experimentation typically involved with building rich media experiences of any kind.
Motion Store templates are built using open web technologies, which working like a self-contained website, allowing your campaign to run seamlessly across multiple apps and platforms, without having to worry about the native code of whatever app it runs in.
Adtile 360 works like this: You create your own virtual reality video using a 360 degree camera (such as Ricoh Theta, Kodak SP360, or Giroptic 360cam) to record footage from every direction at the same time. You then go to the Adtile Motion Store, select a pre-designed template and upload your 360 video. Next, you add your own logo, graphics, and interactive objects—emojis, images and animations that offer additional information or link to other websites or videos—so what you end up with is a unique, one-of-a-kind application like experience, different from any other. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.
You simply request your standard mobile Web and/or MRAID tags, and the Motion Store platform takes care of the rest. You don’t have to worry about whether or not the ad will render on different devices or screen sizes—it will.
And analytics are baked right in. You can go to a campaign dashboard to get detailed information on how well your campaign is performing in real-time. And you can make changes to your ad at any point in the campaign.
What’s more, Adtile 360 videos are fully interactive. You control the viewing position by moving your mobile device around you. It’s like being in the center of the action but instead of moving your head, you are moving the device itself. It’s a virtual reality without the headset.
360 video has never been so smooth. Adtile’s Motion Technology makes sure interactions–such as rotating the device, pitching the device, tilting the device–are as smooth and as seamless as possible, with near-zero latency. Accurate orientation and motion processing are accomplished by combining outputs from at least three sensors: the accelerometer, the gyroscope and the magnetometer, which are embedded directly into Adtile 360 to create a one of a kind motion accuracy, quality and scale not seen before in 360º videos on mobile browsers.
We’ve already tested our 360° video ads on hundreds of devices, debugging our software and ensuring it will work for you. In fact, Adtile 360 currently supports over 600 software and hardware configurations.
With more people moving to mobile, brands need to find inventive ways to enrich the user experience. Adtile 360 sensor-enabled ads will breath new life into your mobile experiences, so you can reach your customers, regardless of what apps they have on their phone.
We are looking into interactive formats beyond 360, VR/AR and livestreaming videos. Adtile 360 is our video technology foundation. It’s just the beginning.
If you want to keep up with the latest developments, follow us on Twitter or send us an email to info@adtile.me .
Mobile 360° video is giving viewers a new perspective of what future videos can be like. But the technology is still in its infancy. By overcoming a few technical challenges, like how to create software that can detect gestures and motions with greater accuracy for a more seamless viewer interaction, 360° video has the potential to open the doors to new levels of engagement for app developers, media outlets, advertisers, and most importantly to the consumers.
Before we get into that, let’s cover some background. The appeal of 360° videos (like this one of a dinosaur or this one of the Golden Gate Bridge) is they put you smack in the center of the action. You’re in charge. You can pan around to look up, down, behind you, and discover new details every time you watch a video. The viewer is no longer a passive observer, but actively engaging with the medium.
If you’ve got a headset like the Google Cardboard or Oculus, you can engage by moving your head to pan a scene. If you don’t have a headset and you’re watching from a desktop, you can use your mouse to pan the virtual world. Or, if you are on a smartphone, you can simply rotate, tilt, or otherwise move your device to interact with the 3D world before you — all of that is powered by sensors in the mobile device.
Since this article about “lightweight VR” appeared in VentureBeat last year, 360° videos have gone mainstream. Now, social media titans YouTube and Facebook both offer capabilities to upload and share virtual reality videos with the world at large.
Anyone with the right equipment can create their own videos. You just need a spherical camera rig (outfitted with six or more cameras) to capture what is happening from all directions. Next, you need a software like Stitch that can turn the individual videos into one seamless, panoramic view. And don’t forget to add your own metadata. (Some cameras do this for you automatically, but not all.)
For advertisers, 360° video is a watershed opportunity. Over the years, consumers have been bombarded with so many banner ads, 2D videos, and the like that now it’s almost impossible to get through to them. Overcoming ad desensitization is a growing problem for marketers and 360° video may be the solution. The new medium has huge potential to breath life back into advertising through engagement. Because when a consumer engages with an ad, you know you’ve got their full attention.
Now the question for the advertiser becomes: How do you keep 360° videos interesting? How do you create new interactions that are quirky and stimulating enough to grab and hold a viewer’s attention? The answer: make those interactions application like. That requires overcoming a few major technical challenges.
Hurdle #1: Improving the framework for broad distribution
Right now, distribution on 360° video is not great, because the current formats are not designed for cross devices and browsers. As mentioned, the two leading ways to browse, discover, and view 360° video content are through YouTube and Facebook. Both have limitations. On a desktop computer, for example, only certain browsers support 360° videos. Chrome and Opera are compatible, but Safari and Firefox are not. The perspective controls via the browser (which involve clicking and dragging on the video while it’s active) are also less intuitive and immersive than the headset or motion controls using a mobile device.
Additionally, on a mobile device, you can only view 360° videos on Facebook and YouTube in-app. This makes it difficult to reach a broad range of viewers. It is very difficult to create an app that works perfectly on a vast range of devices and browsers — in fact, it’s impossible due to poor hardware and/or software quality. Apps are always limited to working well in some environments and screen sizes, and not so well in others.
Hurdle #2: Getting better data from motion sensors
When it comes to viewing on a mobile device, another challenge with interactive 360° video is making sure interactions (such as rotating the device, pitching the device, tilting the device, or walking with the device) are as smooth and as seamless as possible, with minimal latency. If you rotate your smartphone to view your virtual world from a different angle, you want the video to move as you move.
When you begin to interact with a 360° video on the level of a game, the quality of motion processing technology becomes paramount. The only way to obtain accurate orientation and motion measures are by combining outputs from at least three sensors: the accelerometer, the gyroscope and the compass. All three come innate in most modern mobile devices. The problem is these sensor readings are often inadequately accurate when used separately and result in poor user interactions.
Hurdle #3: Inventing cool new interactions to engage the viewer
One of the ways brands can make 360° videos more interesting to viewers is to incorporate creative and new types of engagements. For instance, a user might interact with objects in a 360° video that can allow the user to engage in a multitude of distinct scenes and different worlds, creating countless unique experiences. Or, brands can incorporate new types of motions in their experience so that, for example, taking steps in the physical world corresponds to the user stepping through the virtual world. Haptic or multi-dimensional feedback can also be used to guide the user to interact with a 360° video using a particular gesture or in another specified way. Or, the user might be able to interact with the video space using the Air Pencil. The 360° video might even give us a whole new social networking medium. The possibilities are endless and you can come up with lots of ideas just by paying attention to what’s happening in the mobile hardware and VR hardware space.
But the key to developing any new type interactions lies in tapping into the innate sensors in a mobile device to detect a viewer’s motion with a high degrees of accuracy—and then make sure the virtual world responds seamlessly to those actions. All of this requires high quality motion sensor processing framework, machine learning, sophisticated algorithms, and design that are all carefully tied into one beautiful user experience.
We are not there yet, but the future of 360° videos and immersive content is very promising. And it may bring a lot more inspiration to mobile applications and advertising by engaging with consumers in a way that pulls them in, instead of putting them off.
If you want to keep up with the latest developments, follow us on Twitter or send us an email to info@adtile.me .
PS: We are working on something called “360° Motion Video” and “Flightpath” —You’ll hear more from us on that soon!
What does the father of modern physics have to do with the tiny MEMS motion sensors in your smartphone? Plenty. A mathematician known for his pioneering observations of nature, Galileo (1564-1642) was the forefather of much of what we know about motion today.
The ultimate disrupter of his time, Galileo challenged Aristotelian theories people held true for centuries. For example, Aristotle claimed a rock fell to the ground because the two were made of the same element: earth. In contrast, Galileo studied quantifiable entities like time, distance and acceleration to explain what makes objects fall, break, and bend.
Galileo showed that force causes acceleration. On the basis of the law of parabolic fall, Galileo found that bodies fall at a constant acceleration, and that gravity is a constant force. In other words, a constant force does not lead to constant speed but to constant acceleration. He also developed the concept of inertia, which states an object in motion only stops due to friction. A hundred years later, Isaac Newton (1642-1726) built on these ideas to develop his first law of motion.
Later researchers expanded on the discoveries of Galileo—and Newton— to develop mechanical devices like the gyroscope and the accelerometer, instruments that play a critical role in navigation systems. The problem was these early mechanical devices were bulky and expensive. So scientist continued working to make them smaller and smaller.
Today gyroscopes and accelerometers have evolved into tiny devices called MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems). Built on silicon wafers alongside the circuits that control them, these are the smallest machines ever made.
It is pretty amazing to think that some of the MEMs motion sensors today are rooted in the principles of physics discovered centuries ago. Let’s take a look at four motion devices on the smartphone, how they work, and their history.
Gyroscope
If you’ve ever played with a top, you know that a spinning top somehow has the power to stand upright. Without torque to change direction, a spinning wheel will always remain pointed in the same direction. A gyroscope is essentially a spinning top mounted on a gimbal, so the top’s axis is free to orient itself anyway it wants.
The first gyroscope was invented in 1852 by French physicist Leon Foucault to demonstrate the Earth’s rotation. Since our planet rotates, the gyroscope’s axis completes a full rotation once every 24 hours.
Electric motors in the 1800s made it possible for gyroscopes to spin indefinitely. And today, gyroscopes play an essential role in inertial guidance systems on ships and aircraft.
Many types of MEMS gyroscopes exist. Each type has some form of oscillating component for detecting directional change. All MEMs gyroscopes take advantage of the (Coriolis effect)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect. And typically, the one on your smartphone is a three-axis gyroscope for measuring roll, pitch and yaw.
Accelerometer
Have you ever wondered how your smartphone knows how you are holding it? It uses a device called an accelerometer, which measures g-force. The first accelerometer was invented by George Atwood in 1783.
If you want to know how an accelerometer works, picture a box with a metal ball inside suspended by a spring. If you move the box up, the ball lags behind, stretching the spring. By measuring the force on the spring, you can measure acceleration.
While the MEMs accelerometer in your phone is more complex than the simple ball and spring model, it uses the same fundamental principles. Inside the chip, engineers have created a tiny triple-axis accelerometer out of silicon that measures acceleration in the x, y, and z dimensions, so your phone always knows which way is down.
Magnetometer compass
Used for navigation, the traditional compass has a magnetic needle that points to the North Pole. The earliest compasses were most likely invented by the Chinese in 206 BC and used for fortune telling. Later, compasses were used for navigation so sailing vessels could set their direction without having to rely on the stars.
The magnetometer sensor in your smartphone doesn’t use a magnetic needle. Instead, it uses an analog transducer to create a miniature Hall-effect sensor that detects the Earth’s magnetic field along the x, y and z axis.
The Hall-effect sensor produces voltage proportional to the strength and polarity of the magnetic field along the axis each sensor is directed. The voltage is converted to a digital signal representing the strength of the magnetic field.
The magnetometer is enclosed in a small electronic chip that often incorporates a three-axis accelerometer to determine which way is down.
GPS
The GPS receiver on your smartphone is a more modern invention—and technically it is not a sensor—but it works with the motion sensors in your device to more accurately determine movement and location.
Originally created by the US for military purposes, GPS (global positioning system) is a space-based navigation system made up of 24 satellites that circle the earth twice a day in a precise orbit. The satellites are spaced so that at least four are visible from any point on Earth at a given time.
Your GPS receiver requires data from at least four satellites to fix a position. It uses three satellites for trilateration to reduce your possible location to two points. The timing code from a fourth satellite is used to narrow down your location to one of those two points. (GPS satellites, by the way, tell very accurate time.)
Working together, these three MEMS sensors (gyroscope, accelerometer, compass) and the GPS receiver in your smartphone provide accurate data to determine navigation and a data on range of different user motions. Next time, you use your mobile device, you can thank Galileo, who opened up humankind to a new age of discovery and ultimately contributed to much of the smartphone’s innate intelligence.
Introducing Project Galileo.
The Adtile Technologies team is planning to release a cutting-edge motion processing dev kit (Project Galileo) that will allow developers to create new interactions and applications. Please sign up for more updates.
Image: Gjon Mili/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
Is it possible to reimagine Picasso and Mili’s work with a smartphone? Light painting enters the 21st Century.
The year is 1949. In a darkened room in Vallauris, South of France, Pablo Picasso is working with a small electric light. The 68-year-old artist’s moves are swift and athletic as he draws lines, curves and shapes on a canvas of thin air. Those images of pure light were captured by the photographer Gjon Mili for Life Magazine.
Mili, an engineer by trade, made a name for himself with light paintings and photoflash photography. Previously, he had attached tiny flashlights to the boots of an ice-skater and recorded trailing lines of light as she waltzed through the air. He showed that work to Picasso who agreed to an experiment of combining art with Mili’s technical expertise.
So fascinated was Picasso by the results of their initial work together he agreed to five further sessions with Mili. The photos generated by those sessions equated to 30 images, all preserved by the camera. Featured were familiar Picasso motifs: bulls, centaurs and Greek profiles.
Capturing light and movement through art was nothing new. It has been repeated in various forms since 1889, but Picasso’s pictures, which appeared in Life, were iconic and transformative. (You can read more about the history of light painting photography here.)
At the time, Mili was using cutting edge equipment and technique to construct his photos. His work of capturing motion on film was a combination of high-tech, skill and finely honed talent.
Image: Gjon Mili/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
Today, you do not have to be a Mili to create these types of images. Adtile Technologies, a company known for its sensor-enabled Motion Ads, has made it possible to capture motion with a smartphone so that anyone of any skill can create these highly technical images.
Introducing the Air Pencil
Today, we’re introducing something very cool that has never been done before—we call it the Air Pencil. Air Pencil (now in beta) that lets anyone capture freeform movement in space using their mobile device. How does it work? Think of your phone as Picasso’s electric light. Move, swing, glide the smartphone through the air and your motions will be captured, not on camera, but on screen.
Additionally, while Picasso and Mili’s light paintings were in 2D, Air Pencil lets you capture motion in 3D, as beautiful lines, curves and shapes you can literally move through and explore in ways never imagined possible in the time of Picasso.
Air Pencil is intuitively easy to use. It is a lightweight app that runs on a mobile web browser. Since it is a web app, the majority of the code powering it runs on a remote server. All you need to get started is a URL.
Air Pencil — a whole new creative freedom.
When you initiate the app, you’ll see a screen with a three-axis helper and a small red position indicator at the origin. On the bottom left and right of this screen are joysticks for panning and zooming. These items are all within the web-browser’s viewport, which you can think of as your virtual camera in the 3D space.
Sketch abstractions. Out of thin air.
To begin recording your movements, simply press down on any point in the the screen and move your smartphone through the air. Release the screen to stop or pause your recording. Want to share your work? You can easily send a recorded 3D space file to anyone as a link in a text message or put it on social media.
Behind-the-scenes technology
As you can imagine, creating an app like Air Pencil requires serious technical engineering. You have to be able to capture three-dimensional motion with a high degree of accuracy, whether the user is swinging the phone in a large elaborate swirl or drawing a tiny circle.
To do this, the Air Pencil taps into a smartphone’s native micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) — namely the three-axis magnetometer, three-axis accelerometer and three-axis gyroscope. It then calls on sophisticated machine algorithms to reliably infer the precise movements of the user based on sensor data.
Adtile Air Pencil
Where would you use such an application? The answer: education, art, and collaboration. For example, you might use Air Pencil in a physics class to teach students about flight dynamics, or how objects move through space. As a collaboration tool, several users can draw independently with different colors and then combine those images on screen. Finally, the application has huge potential in the art world as the images you create can be shown on any size screen.
An art-inspired technology
Picasso and Mili were the inspiration for Air Pencil. Picasso, the father of modern art, liked to experiment with a plethora of media. And Mili brought a high tech element into that instinctive world or art.
The truth is, I wanted to go back in time and recreate the flashlight and camera technique with a phone and see what people would do with it. What kind of art will they create?
At a basic, intrinsic level, art inspires technical innovation. The two are inextricably combined. In fact, I got the inspiration for Adtile in 2013 when I was visiting the Alexander Calder exhibit at the LACMA. At the exhibit, quotes from the sculptor Calder lined the walls: “Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.”
That was my aha moment. That quote influenced me to start working on sensory-enabled motions for mobile devices and turn Adtile into a motion technology company.
When you get down to it, art is about taking something technologically or emotionally complex and turning it into something simple, functional and beautiful. It’s also about making people smile. Or as Calder said, “Above all be happy.” And that is what I hope to do with Air Pencil, make people smile.
Smartphones have gone through an incredible evolution in the last decade. We are moving to an era where our smartphones are becoming more like personal assistants, monitoring our behavior, tracking our movements and anticipating our needs. A large part of this evolution is enabled by sensor technology.
Sensors bring intelligence and awareness to our smartphones. Today’s mobile devices are packed with nearly 14 sensors that produce raw data on motion, location and the environment around us. This is made possible by the use of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). MEMS are mechanical systems built into tiny semiconductor chips.
Let’s take a look at some of the major sensors in the typical smartphone.
Magnetometer and GPS
Your smartphone comes equipped with a magnetometer, otherwise known as a compass. With its ability to sense magnetic fields, this MEMS device detects compass heading relative to the Earth’s magnetic north pole. In conjunction with GPS, it determines your phone’s location. GPS is another type of sensor in your mobile device. It relies on satellites to determine location. Originally developed for the military, GPS was made available for everyone in the 1980s.
Gyroscope
A three-axis gyroscope determines if your device is twisted in any direction. Using rotational force it measures angular velocity around three axes. The absolute orientation of your phone, represented as the angles yaw, pitch, and roll, is detected by a combination of the accelerometer, compass, and gyroscope.
Accelerometer
A three-axis accelerometer in your smartphone reports on how fast your phone is moving in any given linear direction. The accelerometer has the ability to detect gravity as a static acceleration as well as dynamic acceleration applied to the phone. There are various types of MEMS accelerometer hardware available, such as microscopic piezoelectric crystals that change voltage under stress when vibrations occur, or differential capacitance caused by the movement of a silicon structure. The magnetometer, GPS, gyroscope and accelerometer on your phone all work together to create the perfect navigation system.
Proximity sensor
Comprised of an infrared LED and an IR light detector, a proximity sensor detects how close the phone is to an outside object, such as your ear. This sensing is done to reduce display power consumption while you’re on a call by turning off the LCD backlight. It also disables the touch screen to avoid inadvertent touches by the cheek.
Barometer
More advanced smartphones have a chip that can detect atmospheric pressure. But to use it, the phone needs to pull down local weather data for a baseline figure on barometric pressure. What’s more, conditions inside a building, such as heating or air-conditioning flows, can affect the sensor’s accuracy. Barometers are best used in combination with other tools, including GPS, Wi-Fi and beacons.
Other sensors
Your smartphone also has an ambient light sensor to adjust brightness levels in dark environments. A fingerprint sensor can enable secure device and website authentication as well as mobile payment. Add to that list, microphone and camera sensors. Samsung’s Galaxy S6 even has an integrated heart rate monitor.
Sensors raise the consciousness of our smartphones. With mobile sensors becoming smaller and more sophisticated—and new types of sensors coming onto market—what we’re seeing today is only the beginning in the era of self-aware devices. More is waiting around the corner.
Machine learning will play a potent role in the future of mobile devices
As we talked about in a previous blog post, your smartphone is replete with dozens of sensors that collect all kinds of information on three dimensional device movement, positioning and the outside environment. But most of the data those sensors collect comes in a raw form. It has no practical meaning on its own. And that is where machine learning steps in.
What exactly is machine learning? The field is immense with lots of different categories and subdivisions. But let’s start with a common, layman’s definition: Machine learning is a discipline of artificial intelligence that focuses on the development of algorithms that learn from and make decisions based on data.
Or, as machine learning pioneer Arthur Samuel defined it, machine learning is a “field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.”
You may not be aware of it, but almost everything that happens online is driven by a type of machine learning algorithm. When you do a search, machine learning chooses the results you get. Amazon uses machine learning to recommend products. Netflix uses it to recommend movies. And Facebook and Twitter use it to choose which posts to show you.
Additionally, both Google Now and Siri rely on machine learning to recognize speech input and respond quickly to user commands. And facial recognition software Affectiva also uses machine learning.
Machine learning plays a big part in how intelligent our mobile devices are and how they interact with us. We believe machine learning will play an even bigger role in the future of mobile devices — and that is some of what we are working on at Adtile.
As machine learning algorithms become increasingly sophisticated, they will change how our mobile devices interact with us — our mobile devices will recognize gesture, motions and movement to higher degrees of accuracy and respond to our needs in ways we never imagined possible.
Machine learning algorithms have the potential to give personality to our mobile apps and devices. In future blog posts, we’ll talk more about how machine learning and sensors are working together to improve people’s lives, their health and their mobile experiences.
I get a lot of questions about how Adtile Motion Store differs from HTML5 ad builders, so I thought I’d address those in a blog post.
If you’re not already familiar, an HTML5 ad builder is for creating display or rich media cross-screen ads — the static, animated, and video ads you see in mobile apps and Web browsing. You assemble the ad by dragging and dropping simple shapes, imported media, and HTML widgets and gizmos onto a blank canvas.
Now let’s address the Motion Store, why it’s a completely different animal, and why sensory Motion Ads are the future of mobile advertising.
Tapping into sensors
HTML5 ad builders are great for building standard rich media ads that run across screens, on desktop and mobile. But if you want to create a sensor-enabled ad specifically built for the mobile environment, look to the Motion Store.
The Motion Store is a do-it-yourself platform that makes it possible for anyone, regardless of their programming ability or design knowledge, to build an elegant, sophisticated Motion Ad.
A Motion Ad behaves more like a game or mini app than an ad. It does so by leveraging the various motion and location sensors within a mobile device to accurately detect a user’s motions.
When the user moves, whether to push, pull, rotate, twist, shake or tilt his or her smartphone or tablet, the ad responds in real-time, creating a coordinated seamless interaction that is completely intuitive to the user.
Adtile templates ensure high quality UX
With an HTML5 ad builder, you drag and drop objects. The Motion Store, on the other hand, brings an ‘app-store’ style approach to ad building. Only instead of selecting an app, you’re selecting a sensory Motion Ad template.
So far we have over 200 templates in our Motion Store, and we are adding new ones all the time. Each template is a fully coded, fully designed experience, one built on the Adtile Motion Framework that follows our proprietary design language.
You can customize a template with your own creative and storytelling to create a brand experience unlike anything else that’s out there on mobile.
Adtile templates offer several advantages. They save time by eliminating the countless hours of iteration and experimentation typically associated with complex ad building. We only provide proven templates that we have tested live multiple times and they capture strict design constraints to ensure the highest quality user experiences.
The numbers speak for themselves. Adtile Motion Ads generate on average over 30 percent engagement rates, more than 24 second participation rates, and click-through rates of more than 6 percent.
Built for a fast-paced programmatic world
HTML5 ad builders are useful for creating simple rich media ads but if you want to add device specific experiences, like animation, you quickly get into custom scripts. And, because HTML5 ad builders aren’t supported by a sensory framework or design guides, adding any type of even primitive motion detection abilities requires extensive manual coding with poor results.
Due to this, building a complex experience with an HTML5 ad builder can take weeks of back and forth and testing, driving up costs.
In contrast, the Motion Store lets anyone create a sophisticated Motion Ad within minutes. Once you’ve finalized your design, the platform generates a responsive HTML5 build for iOS and Android. You can request standard mobile Web or MRAID tags for your ad server, and analytics are baked right in.
True native experience
While HTML5 ad builders let you create rich media ads, Motion Ads are truly native.
Native ads blend in with the organic experience of the app or Web page they appear on but Motion Ads are also built on a native mobile framework.
The Adtile Motion framework takes advantage of the innate sensor technology found in all smartphones and tablets. It incorporates platform agnostic native code and application agnostic design and it delivers a responsive storytelling experience for both iOS and Android.
One or two of those elements alone would contribute towards generating a successful cross-screen ad. But the Adtile framework brings together all four to create a delightful and highly personalized experience for the user.
Solving the entire problem
If you think about it, developing a high quality Motion Ad from the ground up (without our MotionStack), would require a high level of technical expertise. You’d need in-depth knowledge of advanced physics, math, mobile hardware, sensory pretext, sensor fusion, sensor filter techniques, machine learning, interaction design, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
You’d also have to grasp iOS and the vast Android device and browser landscape. You’d have to hire a unique mix of software engineers, product people, technologists, designers and mathematicians for the undertaking. And even that won’t guarantee a workable solution.
Fortunately, the Motion Store solves the entire problem for you. For the first time ever, building sensor-enabled mobile creative is seamless, simple to execute, and completely self-service.
Keeping it simple
The reason why Motion Store works and Motion Ads are so successful is due to their simplicity. We strip everything down to create a minimalistic, straightforward approach that makes sense to both the brand creating the ad and the consumer engaging with it.
We realize you can’t remove everything from the brand experience and some Motion Ad designs are inherently more complex than others but we strive always to follow the advice of Albert Einstein who said, “Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.”
If you haven’t already, we encourage you to check out our Motion Store and find out why simple makes so much sense.
Movements, gestures, motions and the sensory hardware. That’s the future of programmatic mobile creative, and we want to democratize it. That’s why we created the Adtile Motion Store, a way for virtually anyone to build sophisticated Motion Ads designed specifically for a world on the move.
Captivating Experience to Complement the Hardware
Elegant sensor-enabled Motion Ads are changing the way people think about mobile advertising. No longer is the consumer a trapped, passive observer. Instead, by twisting, tilting, shaking or otherwise playing with the ad—which is more like a tiny app—the consumer becomes part of the creative and device agnostic experience.
Quantity meets Quality
Motion Store makes it possible for anyone to build these delightful yet sophisticated ads on the fly. Modeled after Apple’s App Store, where you go to buy apps, the Motion Store is where you go to choose from hundreds of pre-coded Motion Ad experiences (we are adding more all the time). We’ve designed these templates to include the perfect pairings of design and motion. In all cases, the result is a seamless, natural and engaging end-user experience.
Typically, building a complex rich media mobile ad from scratch can take weeks of back and forth and can cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars. But the Motion Store allows you to create an ad in literally minutes. No coding is required and the templates eliminate the endless iterations and experimentation so often associated with all rich media mobile ad development.
Creating an ad in the Motion Store is a straightforward process. Select the user experience template you want. Now add your own creative and storytelling. Some customization is possible. You can edit images, text, fonts, transitions, spacing, links and even add video and sound files. When you’re done, you can test out the ad on your phone or tablet.
Once you are satisfied with your ad, Motion Store will automatically generate a responsive HTML5 build for iOS and Android that works on any mobile browser or screen size. You can also request standard mobile web or MRAID tags for your ad server.
Analytics are baked right in. Through your account dashboard, you can view details of your campaign along with a variety of real-time performance metrics, such as unique views, actions, engagement time, engagement rates, and much more. At anytime during your campaign, you can tweak your ad, making adjustments along the way.
How does the Motion Store compare to an HTML5 ad builder? We get that question all the time. The answer: Two completely different animals. An HTML5 ad builder is a simple editing tool that allows you to create ads via drag-and-drop rich media widgets and features. You have to come up with your own custom user experience and design, and adding any type of sensory element requires extensive customization.
On the other hand, the Motion Store is all about ready-made experiences that are based on Adtile’s design guidelines. What’s more, Motion Store ad templates are built on Adtile’s proprietary Motion Technology, which uses sophisticated algorithms to interpret a mobile device’s sensory data and respond with precise dynamic visual feedback.
Check out the Motion Store yourself. If you are interested, contact us and we’ll send you back instructions on how to get started.
Start developing for Motion Store
Mobile DSP? Mobile ad network? Publisher? Do you want to deep integrate your service with Motion Store? Get in touch. We’ll help guide you in the right direction and provide you with additional resources you may need along the way.
When it comes to mobile advertising, not a whole lot new has happened in the last five to 10 years. Banner ads and standard full-page interstitials still reign, despite the fact they do little more than disrupt the user experience and leave people feeling annoyed.
The problem is, most of these ads were originally designed for the desktop. They don’t translate well to mobile. Banner ads become smaller and too easy to inadvertently click on. And people resent having their mobile browsers hijacked and taken over by ads.
Next year, mobile ad spend will top $100 billion, according to predictions by eMarketer. If companies want to grab people’s attention in a positive way, they will need mobile ads that offer a uniquely mobile experience. One way to create this type of ad is to tap into the innate intelligence already in most smartphones today.
What Your Phone Knows
Your phone already knows how you are holding it and where you are headed, in what direction and how fast. Your phone even knows when you are holding it up to your face to take a call. This awareness, and more, comes from sensors inside the phone.
Most modern phones are packed with dozens of tiny sensors. The sensors we hear about most include the accelerometer for detecting movement and orientation, the gyroscope for measuring rotation around three axes, a compass to detect magnetic north and a GPS to plot your position on a map. Together, these sensors open the door to a new, refreshing type of mobile advertising.
Ads That Take Two to Tango
you look at what people do on their phones, aside from email and texting, they spend a huge amount of time on apps. People love their mobile apps. They value them for their entertainment and utility. Apps are also seen as nonintrusive. So why not create ads that behave more like apps? If you look at what people do on their phones, aside from email and texting, they spend a huge amount of time on apps. People love their mobile apps. They value them for their entertainment and utility. Apps are also seen as nonintrusive. So why not create ads that behave more like apps?
That is the idea, at least, behind sensor-enabled motion ads. By tapping into the data from smartphone sensors, creating well-defined algorithms, motion ads can engage users in a whole different way. You will be asked to twist, tilt, bend, push, pull, shake, rotate or otherwise play with an ad.
Take for example, a motion ad with an image of a milkshake. The ad is minimalistic and visually beautiful. It asks you to shake your phone to blend your own milkshake. When you do, you get a coupon for the milkshake, which, by the way, you can redeem at the restaurant directly around the corner from where you are standing.
An airline is offering specials on flights from a nearby airport. By rotating your phone left or right, you can view the offers: one to Las Vegas, one to Hawaii and so on. If you see an offer you like, you can tap on it and download a coupon onto Apple Passbook or Google Wallet for purchase immediately or later when you get home.
The key to getting motion ads right is simplicity. A good design speaks for itself. Motion ads also offer a clear value exchange. Instead of having you click through to another website where you have to find the product and put it in a shopping cart, motion ads take care of everything for you in as few steps as possible.
Overcoming the Hurdles
As you might expect, creating motion ads comes with its own set of challenges. Ensuring a completely natural and intuitive experience requires some technical heavy-lifting. For instance, the ad needs to respond to user feedback in real-time. This requires sophisticated machine-learning algorithms that can recognize different types of motion and respond appropriately. Another challenge is creating these complex ads on the fly.
Additionally, so that Motion Ads work on iOS, Android and whatever else is out there, they have to be platform-agnostic. They also have to display on any type of a device or a screen size. To accomplish all of this, ads have to be coded in open source languages (CSS, HTML and JavaScript) and presented in WebViews.
As the world transitions to mobile only, marketers need a new type of premium programmatic mobile ad, one that contributes to positive brand experiences. These capabilities are all available today, as we’ve figured out here at Adtile. It’s now up to marketers to start taking advantage of the new opportunities available in mobile to create ads that establish real human connections because they were designed specifically with mobile in mind.
In just five years, smartphones have transformed our lives. It’s hard to imagine how much they will change in the next five years, but one thing is for sure: Publishers and advertisers have just begun to unlock all of the potential of what smartphones can do.
Our phones will become increasingly aware of their surroundings. And they will become platforms for rich media engagements, where we interact with 3D environments through gestures and movement. Believe it or not, much of the technology for making this happen is already sitting inside your phone.
Your phone knows a lot about you
Many people don’t realize how smart their smartphones really are. Modern phones are packed with dozens of tiny sensors, some as thin as paper. Every year those sensors become smaller and more sophisticated.
To begin with, your phone has three accelerometers for sensing gravity and tilt, a gyroscope to determine orientation. It has a compass for sensing direction, and several environmental sensors for measuring ambient air temperature and pressure, illumination, and humidity. There is also a proximity sensor for recognizing when you move your phone up to your face during a call and an ambient light sensor for boosting brightness levels in dark environments. The list goes on.
New sensors—and there are many—invite new possibilities. Apple’s iPhone 6 uses its barometer to track vertical movement. Chemists at MIT have developed a smartphone sensor that detects when food has gone bad. UV light sensors now being tested by ROHM may one day tell you when to wear sunscreen. What about detecting carbon monoxide levels or air quality? All of it is possible with the right sensor.
VR brings new levels of creative engagement
A major field of innovation in smartphones will be VR. The phones of the future might look something like Oculus Rift meets iPhone, only without the clunky visuals. Instead, you’ll have a lightweight VR, practical for more casual everyday use.
Lightweight VR won’t offer the full immersive experience of a headset, but you won’t need that either. What it offers instead is convenience. To use it, you simply extend your phone out in front of you like you are taking a selfie. When you look into the screen, you see another world. And when you move, the 3D image on the screen moves with you.
Lightweight VR has numerous practical applications. You can use it to navigate any type of complex space. Imagine the advantages to using interactive 3D to help you find your way through a confusing airport? A lightweight VR experience might guide you to your departure gate, the baggage claim, or a nearby restaurant if you have a long layover.
Additionally, lightweight VR will play an increasingly important role in how companies market their products. Instead of bombarding consumers with static ads, marketers can use VR to invite customers to engage in a experience. You can explore a vehicle, restaurant or hotel, or visit a faraway resort. VR can tell you volumes more about a place or even an object than a video or a high-res photo can.
Mobile VR comes with difficult challenges, however. To offer a natural, convincing experience, the user interface needs to be completely intuitive. Sensor data and machine learning will play a large part in making that possible. Sophisticated algorithms will enable your smartphone to calculate your precise movements so that the 3D image on your smartphone screen moves with you with a minimal amount of latency.
Over the next few years, mobile VR will likely be developed to a greater extent. Your smartphone will get to know you and your habits like a close friend. Interactions between you and your phone will be smooth, natural and intuitive, and VR will be right there, ushering in a world of new experiences.
Annoying and disruptive. Those are the two words that best describe the mobile advertising experience today. Tiny banner ads you can barely decipher and end up clicking on. Those clicks take you to far-away web pages that take too long to load. And let’s not even talk about those unwelcome videos and sounds that trigger automatically.
The problem is most mobile ads are nothing more than mini-desktop ads. They provide no entertainment value or utility, and they fail to take advantage of the things that make smartphones unique. On the other hand, people love mobile apps. What if mobile ads were more like apps?
Tapping the ‘smart’ in smartphones
One of the things that make smartphones unique is their built-in intelligence. Unlike desktops, smartphones are packed with dozens of tiny sensors — an accelerometer, gyroscope, digital compass, to name a few. These sensors collect all kinds of data on us and the world around us.
By putting that native intelligence to work, it’s possible to create a genuine interactive experience for the user. That’s the concept behind the work at Adtile Technologies. We create native-mobile ads and experiences that engage people in new and delightful ways. Adtile products include Motion Ads and Adtile VR.
Creative that invites the users to play
You can think of Adtile Motion Ad as a tiny app or a game that provides a clear value exchange to the user. You interact with an ad by tilting, shaking, turning, or otherwise playing with it, and you are aptly rewarded with a coupon for a drink, discount, or whatever.
For example, a coffee shop asks your to tilt your phone to fill up a virtual cup with coffee. Another ad encourages you to shake your phone to create your own milkshake. And yet another asks you to press on a virtual button and hold it until 150 users join you in doing the same thing simultaneously. In return, you receive a coupon for a product. The ad also tells you exactly where to go to redeem the coupon: the coffee shop 200 feet away, for instance.
Event sequencing and dynamic visual feedback is the key to these experiences. As you draw a heart in the air with the phone, the heart appears on the screen. As you tilt the phone to fill up a cup with coffee, you see coffee pouring into the cup with zero lag between the movement and the action. The result is a completely natural, intuitive interaction between the ad and the user.
The ads are also non-intrusive, appearing as a natural extension to whatever content a user is viewing. You never feel like an ad is hijacking your phone.
Adtile’s motion-sensing software is built using standard web technologies — HTML, CSS and JavaScript — and delivered as WebViews via Adtile native SDKs, standard mobile tags or MRAID compatible SDK. The Adtile Motion Framework has a very light footprint, only around 15 KB, and comes with a full set of design and developer guidelines, similar to what you would get from Google, Apple or Windows when developing apps.
Constructing your own ad is easy and straightforward. Adtile’s Motion Store provides a vast number of pre-designed and pre-coded consumer experiences to choose from. You simply add your own creative media and storytelling. The responsive ads work on iOS or Android and adjust to any size screen.
Virtual Reality: One step beyond
Mobile VR takes the notion of user engagement a leap further. Some refer to Adtile’s VR framework as lightweight VR because it doesn’t require the awkward goggles as does traditional immersive VR. You simply hold the phone out in front of you, look into the screen, and you see a window into another world.
And you are connected to that world. Adtile VR uses sensor technology to calculate your precise movements in space so the 3D rendering on the smartphone moves with you. Walking, turning or pitching the phone up or down changes the view on the phone with a minuscule amount of latency.
By incorporating the Adtile VR framework into their native or web-based apps, developers can create a world where users can explore places and objects in a new manner. You can literally walk around a car in a showroom or an art piece at a museum, examining the object from every conceivable angle.
Beyond advertising, lightweight VR is useful in helping people find their way around a complex area, such as an airport, shopping mall, sports stadium or even a museum. You can use VR to explore a place you plan on visiting, such as a hotel or resort. Combining mobile VR with iBeacon technology unlocks even greater mapping and navigation potential.
Adtile VR overcomes tough challenges to work on a smartphone. The technology is able to detect movements with a high degree of accuracy and translate those into smooth motion on the screen. This is done with sophisticated algorithms that precisely capture everything from gestures and arm movements to the number of steps a user is taking in real time.
With today’s busy lifestyles, most people spend only a few minutes at a time on mobile apps. Lightweight VR is intended for that sort of casual use, so you don’t have to worry about it draining the battery or generating excessive heat the way immersive VR does. Also, lightweight VR uses minimal bandwidth. The Adtile VR javascript framework is around 450 KB.
The future is mobile-only, not mobile-first. By engaging mobile users through interactive Motion Ads and mobile VR, brands will stand a much better chance of winning over customers’ hearts, instead of annoying and alienating them.
Location Based Marketing Association is predicting that Apple and Adtile will have big success in 2015.
Check out their latest podcast, “The grand 2015 location based marketing predictions.” This is their annual predictions show—a look ahead at the key trends and companies to watch in 2015:
Adtile touch experiences are human-to-human, brand connected ads that are aimed for long engagement times due to ever changing audience participation and the surprise effect at the end.
In order to activate the ad and get the reward, user has to press and hold until the end of the story. The elevated engagement, human connection and game-like use case benefits the brand and makes the user experience feel less like advertising, but rather an ambient interaction with other people. Touch experience is designed to fit Adtile’s Motion Ad technology, which makes it easy to add more interactive elements to the story flow—the possibilities are endless.
Mobile advertising matters to the success of any great company today. It creates a culture of brand innovation and sets the creative standards higher.
We all know that native ads must behave consistently with the user experience and design. But is it anything really new? At Adtile, we have simplified our native solutions into 4 clear segments—the quintessential parts.
Hardware Agnostic: Sensors
Platform Agnostic: Native code
Application Agnostic: Design and experience
Context Agnostic: Contextually relevant
On their own, some of these segments may work extremely well in terms of app installs or other type of platform agnostic engagements. But once they all work together, they create a more dynamic relationship between individual elements and a better, more delightful and personalized experience for the user. Storytelling in the true essence of the word, is back.
We at Adtile have a core philosophy that focusing on the end user will ultimately resonate back to the advertiser and publisher as great results. In order to win over customers’ hearts, you need to deliver a simple, beautiful and emotional experience. Even the best mobile ad targeting technology in the world can’t deliver results if the experience is too weak, over designed or too complex.
Minimalism
The great benchmark for mobile ads lies in minimalism. The concept of minimalism is to strip everything down to its essential quality and achieve simplicity. The idea is not completely without ornamentation, but that all parts, details and joinery are considered as reduced to a stage where no one can remove anything further to improve the design. Learning from minimalism will force us to keep creatives constrained when it comes to wording and graphics on small displays.
When creating mobile ads, remember that people are not searching for ads on their mobile devices, but looking for new experiences and entertainment. Our world moves at a feverish pace. We are too hurried, too rushed, and too impatient. Give people something they truly want to experience. Keep things clear and understandable.
It takes time to create something meaningful. Simplify, create a connection. Minimalist marketing transcends both online and offline—it’s everywhere around us, and it’s here to stay.
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. —Hans Hofmann
Kinetic Ads™ encompass a variety of overlapping Adtile Motion Ad technologies and designs to elevate the storytelling. They are designed to automatically connect with beacons, NFCs and other sensors around the user. Instead of just delivering another way of doing native advertising, we give a beautiful motion-rich experience that brings something delightful and useful to the users.
The Adtile Kinetic Ads interface is purposely simple. Anything that doesn’t add value has been entirely cleaned away, and the focus is on what matters most: The Experience.
We think of smartwatches as a secondary device. Something where people can retrieve and digest small pieces of information on the go. The form and function of advertising has to be useful and location aware to make sense on a tiny screen.
We at Adtile are passionate about building a powerful next generation mobile ad computing platform, that enables to take advantage of all of the devices sensor’s coupled with real world data to breathe life into them.
Since the launch of Adtile Motion Ads we’ve been continuously developing them to be more aware of the real world. Today, we’re excited to introduce Weather Aware Ads.
Weather is universal—sun, rain, wind, snow or just beautiful days have the power to change our moods and emotions. We didn’t approach the weather as a mere targeting option, we saw it as the perfect fit for the Motion Ads and their human centric design.
Not only can advertisers match the current weather with brand stories based on user’s location, but they can also use it as a method for predicting the future, engaging with something that will surprise and delight people. We believe that weather feature is going to be a great source of inspiration for creating new brand experiences—whether they are to drive commerce, brand awareness, app installs or other forms of engagement.
Location Based Marketing Association covered our new Motion Ad technology in their latest podcast, check it out:
We are currently working on the next iteration of Motion Ads that will make them more aware of real world around the user, which will resonate back to the advertiser as new user experience targeting features.
We all know that mobile advertising needs to be dramatically different from current industry standards. Static in-stream ads in vertically scrolling feeds are not the real answer. We’re also familiar with current interactive ads on the web—they’re interactive, but not really capable of delivering emotion.
With Adtile, we want to change all that. We want to bring mobile advertising to a level where it doesn’t feel like advertising anymore, but a beautiful brand experience—something that people can truly relate to. We want to set a new bar for mobile ad user experience and deliver something unique, where there’s not always click required. That’s Adtile’s core mission. That’s why we exist.
To learn more about Adtile Motion Ads, check out our previous article.
Advertisers deal with eye-candy and interaction with their audience, and therefore want access to the coolest features of the smartphone’s hardware and software. Today, we’re introducing something very cool that has never been done before—we call them Motion Ads.
Motion Ads are an entirely new solution to Adtile’s native iOS SDK, Design Desk and ad serving technology that transforms mobile advertising to support it’s native promise—being truly mobile. This is a huge leap from the standard static ad images, GIF’s, videos or app installs that we all experience daily.
Motion Ads look and feel beautiful—truly the first creative that moves the user, literally.
Adtile Motion Ads are uniquely designed to take advantage of the smartphone’s GPS, gyroscope, motion coprocessor, accelerometer and digital compass for the motions and gestures. We are also extremely proud to announce our technical partnership with Yelp to support location-based functionalities through their powerful API. This means that our ads will feel like tiny applications with much more utility and functionality embedded into them.
Simple Activation and Dialogue
Designed to Complement the Native Format
Users will get the familiar entertainment and discovery they are seeking from their mobile devices. They can get a full Adtile motion experience without the need to leave their app, which keeps running quietly in the background. The advertisers will get superior brand engagements as they can reward and drive delightful stories that touch people’s imagination. Motion activations can be one or combination of many for the same ad—the possibilities are endless.
We are also experimenting Adtile’s Motion Ads technology with Google Glass and other wearables where we see interesting opportunities, stay tuned for more!
Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.
Instead of pushing out multiple mobile ad units—we designed one native Adtile SDK to support 10 beautiful presentation styles. Most apps and sites have their own requirements for ads with regard to design and functionality. We believe that advertising has to part of the user experience—seamless visual extension of the app or website. Everything has to be in perfect harmony.
Adtile is a tiny yet ultrafast “app within an app” that silently renders behind any content. The SDK has multiple functionalities—it supports images, gifs, videos, app installs and location-based ads to drive purchases both online and at nearby physical stores. Adtile is precisely designed to fit any app.
If you want to join companies that care about their user experience and content, get Adtile today.
Currently, most of the players in the mobile advertising space have lowered the standard of mobile ads because they truly don’t understand intuit form and beauty of the medium. The dismal practice of just slapping a crappy 300x50 banners into a tiny screens or badly inserting in-stream ads into apps and websites and calling them native is their “best answer.”
These ads represent the current state of the art in mobile advertising – and they just don’t work. Few people interact with them. In surveys, four out of five people report disliking them. Today’s smartphones are incredibly sophisticated from their hardware to software, yet the mobile advertising industry has not made much progress. Innovating from the ancient banner and display jungle that hijack and annoy us on our mobile screens on daily basis has been a real challenge due to the poor quality standards offered by industry leaders and organizations.
At Adtile, we believe that the potential for mobile is so much more. We want to give publishers a beautiful and eloquent end-to-end ad serving and creation experience for their brands and clients by focusing more on the user experience. This gives users and publishers full control over what happens, allowing results to resonate back to advertisers – after all its only good karma.
To accomplish this, we have redesigned mobile ads from the ground up
We started by making a design desk and offering guidelines on how the ads should look like. This guarantees great quality, which ultimately leads to the best possible outcome for all – brands, publishers, and the end users. After all, the mobile screen is such a limited and content sensitive space. Ads are almost always over-designed, completely unreadable, over pixelated and have too many messages in a very small space.
With simple guidelines, we also make sure that the ads have specific safe areas to ensure responsiveness, and that they look beautiful in any context. While our ads match the form & function of any mobile app or site, they also tend to draw in the user, thus making them more effective. Adtile’s design desk also allows for changes mid-campaign, such as testing multiple versions of the same ad, testing different campaigns, or using the metrics we provide to gauge success.
A New take on mobile ad presentation
We have taken a completely different approach to building Adtile’s SDK, compared to the rest of the industry. Instead of taking over your application or website, we embrace it and extend it without harming design or hurting the user experience. Not only do you get the best possible performance and speed due to Adtile’s proprietary technology, but you get a look and feel that matches your beautiful application or website.
We provide SDKs for both Mobile Web and iOS. Each SDK embraces it’s host platform and is 100% natively built for it. The user experience has been specifically designed for each platform so that it blends in seamlessly, feels smooth and works just right.
Adtile’s design elements are easily customizable to match your application or website. Launch an ad from any action you choose, or display beautiful and native in-stream ads with ease. Choose from multiple pre-built and elegant presentation styles, or design your own – after all, its your app.
PS: We are also working on something called “Motion Ad” and “Silent Interaction”—You’ll hear from us soon!
With Adtile, we’re slightly obsessed of redefining people’s broken relationship with mobile advertising by re-imagining the entire medium, and we are just getting started!
