My design geekiness went into overdrive recently thanks to this cool and ultra innovative partnership between Burberry and Google that uses new technology to allow users to capture and send a digital imprint of their real kiss to anyone in the world. The experience allows users to capture and share their unique ‘kisses’ with loved ones around the world. In other words, you can send a real lip imprint of yourself to anyone via kissing your webcam or touch screen device. FOR REAL.
How’s that possible, you ask? Kiss Recognition through webcam detects a kiss (pout) in the user’s image: this is a key innovation, as lips are notably difficult to detect. In a digital first, without leaving the browser, users can unlock the experience with Kiss Recognition technology, using a desktop camera or direct lip contact on their touch screen device. On touch screen devices, multi touch detection allows users to create a ‘stronger’ kiss through longer touch screen contact. Before adding a personalised message, users can also select an optional Burberry lip colour for their kiss.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE this because Burberry Kisses blur physical and digital worlds across multiple channels, on and offline. The beautifully-rendered medium serves to connect people and brings together sight, sound and most importantly, emotion. I am ultra floored seeing how a digital experience reflects a physical action and in doing so, technology is humanized.
You must try this out for yourself on either your desktop or touch screen device. Note that Burberry Kisses is best experienced with Google Chrome.
On desktop/laptop computers:
The Kiss Recognition technology in Burberry Kisses allows users to capture a digital imprint of their own unique kiss (pout) on camera enabled desktop devices with Google Chrome. Users must allow their browser to activate the webcam (built in or separate). By ‘kissing’ toward their webcam, Burberry Kisses recognises the contours of the lips and generates an image of them.
On touch screen devices:
The Kiss Recognition technology in Burberry Kisses allows users to capture a digital imprint of their own unique kiss on touch screen mobile devices (iPhone, Android). When users kiss their touch screen, multi touch detection recognises the pressure of two lips and captures the imprint as an image. (I tried this and it worked beautifully!)
Note that the longer you ‘kiss’ the screen, the stronger the colour of your kiss will appear.
Before adding a personalised message, users can select an optional Burberry lip colour for their kiss from one of the five Lip Covers:
Purple colour: Bright Plum No.15
Pink colour: Tea Rose No.08
Red colour: Union Red No.17
Nude colour: Nude Beige No.01
Coral colour: Devon Sunset No.28
This is so incredibly cool and one of the best online initiatives I’ve encountered this year. Even though I feel silly physically kissing my mobile phone screen, I’m extremely fascinated by the technology behind Burberry Kisses! Genius, I tell you… genius! *gush gush gush*
“We’re constantly thinking about how we translate the emotion of what we create and experience in the real world into the digital space, whether that’s capturing the energy and excitement of a live gig, the hum and buzz of anticipation before a runway show, or just the feeling you get when you pull on your trench coat on a rainy morning. Burberry Kisses began with the idea of giving technology a bit of heart and soul, and using it to unite the Burberry family across the world – by telling a story that makes the digital personal.”
— Christopher Bailey, Burberry Chief Creative Officer
I will be straight up with you, when it comes to the big fashion labels and houses, I tend to just gloss over their fashion photos on billboards, magazines or wherever. I do look at them from time to time though to study the visual styling, the photography and lighting techniques, the art direction, etc. but beyond that I generally don’t really give a flying toaster about the collections – not from a consumer’s point of view anyway. From a designer’s point of view, yes – absolutely, I have a “prosenal” (professional/personal) interest in the entire visual campaign. For the last decade and a half or so, with the existence of online platform, one thing I genuinely appreciate about these large fashion houses is the highly creative ways they produce lifestyle campaigns – often involving other disciplines of artistic expressions. For example, the Love Cartier campaign, the Chanel and Prada short movies… just to name a couple. I like these online campaigns very much because it’s engaging, very inspiring and the microsites always make such good use of whatever technology’s available at the time. I love that experiences online are multi-dimensional beyond static images and text. Damn, I wish I have clients like that who are all about pushing the design envelope and have budgets that matches their grand visions. I suppose only the giant fashion labels can get away with the frivolity of their campaigns, coz gawd knows fancy bells and whistles online cost a bomb to conceptualize, produce and execute.
Please try the interactive feature at kisses.burberry.com. Best campaign ever! While you’re at it, send some Burberry kisses over to MBNY13 at hotmail dot com. Ahem. ;)
SWAK,
-MB.
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