Introducing nsquared media viewer

nsquared media viewer 

nsquared media viewer is a digital signage application which allows the public to browse and discover your content on their own. This week, nsquared launched the latest version of nsquared media viewer complete with hi-res camera support and significant improvements in speed and performance, helping to maintain its position as the leader in engaging interactive digital signage.

Using cutting-edge motion sensing technology, nsquared media viewer’s unique gesture- or touch-controlled interface has transformed the digital sign into an interactive digital signage experience. 

Unlike existing technology, nsquared media viewer is intelligently reactive to the presence of people which means a greater potential to captivate passers-by, getting them pay attention to your content and get your brand noticed.

nsquared media viewer gives total power to the small business owner or franchisee. The intuitive cloud-based content management system means nsquared media viewer is also the simplest way for a client to manage their own videos, images, and website signage without a marketing agency in the middle.

Ideal for real estate agents, travel agents, any consultancy based firm or nearly any retail space, nsquared media viewer eliminates the need for any unnecessary expensive and wasteful brochures.

Interactive signage means immediate results. Interactions with your content are automatically measured and analysed to give feedback in real time. This provides valuable insight into what users respond to, helping better target users in the future. 

nsquared media viewer is a Windows 8.1 application with a free demo download available now. Just visit the website here or go straight to the app download page here.

For more on immersive digital signage solutions, or multi-user software, follow nsquared on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube or Facebook.

 

nsquared media viewer: simple to use

Sydney Design Award Winner

We are super excited to have been announced as a winner of the Sydney Design Awards for the nsquared digitable55. Of course we always believed we had an awesome digital table product that we know our costumers love. To have the design validated by a panel of design experts makes the team here at nsquared extremely happy.

As a quick reminder of the product and the process of building the product watch this short video about the the nsquared digitable55.

Finally here is a picture of our industrial designer, Hayley Wood, and project director Neil Roodyn collecting the award earlier this week at the design awards event.

If you would like to find out more about the nsquared digitable55 or other interactive digital tables please get in touch.

nsquared rooms makes booking meeting spaces easy.

Did you know........ 
..........that nsquared rooms is great for finding available spaces for ad hoc meetings?

Being part of a large organisation can be a great thing. In a big company there is always plenty going on and lots of people with whom to collaborate and learn. It is often hard to find available meeting rooms at short notice. The room booking systems can be overly complicated and support personnel won't have time to make the booking for you that quickly. So you then end up in a noisy café, which is not a good scenario for a confidential chat. What if you could search for, and book a room, as soon as you knew you needed it?
With nsquared rooms you can do just that.

You can find out quickly what rooms are available within your timeframes. Better than that, you can book any of the available rooms all by yourself. It’s all connected to Microsoft Exchange so the information is updated immediately, which means interruption-free meetings.

We’ve seen it used in building foyers, at floor entrances by the elevators, and dotted around university campuses and business estates where they’re being used to great effect. Take a look here to find out more about nsquared rooms.

Taking the magic of touch technology to Tamworth

Yesterday nsquared traveled with our partners at Samsung and Worlds Best Technology Distributors to demonstrate the power of touch technology to Tamworth, New South Wales.

The event was hosted at the Tamworth TAFE and attended by a number of key decision makers, all of whom were interested in bringing leading edge technology to their students.

It was great to see the educators literally get their hands on the technology, a Samsung SUR40.

One of the main attractors was the nsquared presenter application. nsquared presenter allows you to collaboratively create and deliver presentations using all the devices you find in a meeting room – tablets, mobile phones, overhead projectors and multi-touch tables. Groups of people are able to come together to build a presentation “timeline” of content including slides, spreadsheets, documents, images and videos from different  files. The staff felt this application had the most potential for their educational environment as it has the ability for students collectively interact with their digital course material over a familiar table setting.

Some of the other crowd favorites included:

- nsquared circuits

- nsquared paint

- nsquared chemistry 

    We are very excited to be working with Team Tamworth and look forward to helping them engage their students through multi-touch technology!

nsquared chemistry on Windows 8

Here at nsquared we’re excited for the future of collaborative gaming and education.

More and more touch devices are being developed with larger and better screens. This means that the encouraging nature of collaborative learning can finally make a return on PC’s and tablets.

This new form factor, pioneered by devices such as the Sony Vaio Tap 20, is more commonly referred to as the “table” computer and it may allow all of your students to play at once on a single device!

We’re proud to announce another addition to our educational suite on the windows 8 store, nsquared chemistry!

As a collaborative game, it encourages learning between players. As the game progresses, players can teach one another how a specific element is made, or which elements the next compound will contain. The game lets players build a working memory of common elements as they build each compound, and teach others what comprises an element or compound. It is an excellent accompanying tool to any level of high school chemistry as the exercises mimic those found in many textbooks.

 

It’s also one of our first games to take advantage of the “Snapping” feature of windows 8 devices. Players are encouraged to snap the app to the side and open a browser to research an exercise if they are stuck.

Also, on a technical note, nsquared chemistry is one of the only apps in the store constructed with DirectX, C++ and XAML interoperation, and also our first 3D Windows 8 game!

Have fun bouncing elements around!

Try chemistry for free here: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/nsquared-chemistry/122ae62d-6c0e-4f2f-878d-25716293959d

nsquared circuits for iPad 1.5

The latest version of nsquared circuits for iPad has just been released.

This update provides support for power sources, capacitors, fuses and has improved the electrical circuit simulation.



You can learn all about the magic of electrical circuits with this clever app that gives real time current, voltage and resistance readings.

Design your own electrical circuits by using any combination of electrical components that you'll find in the slick slide-up menus.

Included components are batteries, resistors, voltmeters, ammeters, signal lamps, filament lamps, switches and motors.

Great for both formal and informal discovery learning settings, this app has delighted everyone we know from young children to skilled electrical engineers.

Buy it now from the App Store.

nsquared thoughts for Windows 7

The popular Microsoft Surface application, nsquared thoughts, has now been recreated and enhanced for Windows 7!
Any multi-touch enabled hardware running Windows 7 can now take advantage of the features nsquared thoughts provides.

-Sketch out ideas on a blank canvas.
-Manipulate shapes and images to organize your thoughts.
-Open and annotate documents and spreadsheets.
-Save the diagram to a network folder or a USB key.

Follow the walk through to explore the features of nsquared thoughts


Find out more about nsquared thoughts.

A week of conferences

Over the last few weeks we have been at a lot of conferences but last week was special. On Tuesday and Wednesday we were at the K-12 National Education Congress in Sydney with 3M, demonstrating our Windows 7 touch applications for education. Then on Friday we were at the Association of Independent Schools conference in the Hunter Valley where we presented a session called "Let's Talk, conversations around digital content". In this session we explained how we focus our efforts on building educational applications to enhance the conversations between students.
If you want to find out more about what we are doing please drop us a line and we can show you our educational applications.

Windows 7 Touch applications on 3M screen

The dev team at nsquared has been busy working on the nsquared education pack for Windows 7 touch. The screen we have been using to test is the 3M multi-touch screen.
In this video we demonstrate some of the applications running on the 3M screen.

iPad learning and fun with nsquared sticker book

While the debates around whether or not iPad will become widely adopted as a standard piece of every educational tool kit, governments, universities and independents schools are voting with their wallets. Some are doing it on a small scale in order to trial and assess the benefits, and others are reported to be engaging in widespread adoption plans.

The case seems clear to us, and whether or not iPads become the newest technology to be incorporated into formal education settings, we're continuing to create and deliver educational apps for the market. We truly believe that touch, integrated with collaborative and competitive learning experiences, highly influences learning retention. While most of the population sees touch as a new innovation, and some see it as a gimmick, I think we're forgetting that touch and physical interaction with our learning environments is not only completely natural, it's also been a part of of our formal and informal learning processes for many years. Even if you take out foundational learning which requires looking at, picking up and manipulating physical objects e.g. basic building blocks, Duplo and Lego; it remains part of our formal learning experiences and information exchange to the highest levels when we use hand writing to record notes, annotate diagrams, sketch out ideas, and even use a keyboard to express ourselves. A note on keyboards and handwriting here - research has shown that learning is better when we use hand writing rather than a keyboard, so it seems we're on the right track with bringing touch back to learning. Our latest touch app to hit the iTunes iPad app store. nsquared sticker book is designed to develop numeracy, pattern matching and object recognition skills. Designed for one or two players, sticker book needs each player to collect the correct numbers of each sticker and place them into their own sticker book. In its initial release, the app ships with 7 themed activities. There are more coming soon, and we're looking forward to sharing them with you and finding out what you think of it.

Surface 2.0 is here and we are Ready.

With today's joint announcement by Samsung and Microsoft that the next generation Surface device will be available this year, we can finally end our required silence on the topic of Surface 2.0.

It's been a privileged ride being part of the select group of Microsoft's Surface partners that have had access to early information as the product has gone through its development phases. It's also been a laughable one as we watched the rumour mill reach some dizzy heights with regards to some of the more outrageous claims around what Surface 2.0 would be.

The new form factor has a 40-inch screen, is only four inches thick and can be mounted vertically or horizontally. It employs Pixel Sense technology which is a camera-less vision system, and there is a major shift in pricing, at least in US dollars. We're hoping this shift transfers equitably around the globe, making it more viable for small businesses and education to benefit from the brilliant attributes of Surface that set it in a class all of its own.

The news from us for new and existing Surface customers around the world is that we're ready to provide advice and solutions for businesses that invest in themselves with purchases of Surface 2.0. We already have market-ready Surface 2.0 apps for the Business, Real Estate, Hospitality, Banking and Finance, Retail and Education markets, and look forward to delivering more amazing experiences for Surface 2.0. Microsoft tells us that that the Samsung SUR40 will be ready for market launch later this year, and we’re looking forward to being able to announce our new product range.

In the mean time, our existing Microsoft Surface customers can continue to benefit from our in-depth understanding of Surface’s unique capabilities, and our long term continuing relationship with the Surface product team.

Touch surfaces want to be horizontal

In the nsquared development studio we have been saying for years that the advantage of touch, really shines on the table top and in the hand because of the orientation of a horizontal screen lends itself to far superior touch experiences.

This morning in his presentation of the new Mac OSX software Steve Jobs made the following statement:

“touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical, it gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time your arm wants to fall off, it doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible, touch surfaces want to be horizontal,…"

"this doesn't work"

Thank you, Steve and Apple for helping to clarify this point in such a concise manner. Let's hope more people listen to this and understand the benefits of horizontal touch surfaces.

SnapSnap, another iPhone app released

Play Snap with your snaps!

This version of "Concentration" lets you use the pictures you've taken with your iPhone to enjoy this long-time favourite game! Minutes or hours of entertainment in the palm of your hand! Get it now from the AppStore.

The release of iOS4 enabled us to start using the photos in your phone. We see this as a big step in the right direction, enabling applications to access user generated content on the device can make each experience unique to the user.

nsquared at the LA Car Show with Lexus

At nsquared we recently helped Lexus show off their new hybrid technology by using our hybrid technologies. Lexus needed an interactive kiosk that would engage its existing customers and hook new ones. We teamed with design and concept studio, Spinifex, to deliver some outright high tech, hands-on goodness to match the image of Lexus’ progressive concept car that they plan to have in production for next year.



Using a Windows 7 Touch kiosk paired with a Nikon D90 camera, we enabled consumers to contribute to the Photosynth project dedicated entirely to the Lexus Concept vehicle, and to decide the colours of the production cars.

The kiosks allow attendees of the car show to get a great feel for the car by using the Nikon D90s to capture the car’s best features. The pictures are then uploaded to the synth. The same pictures were sent by email and shared with friends and family, directly or through social networking sites. By all accounts the kiosks and interactive app took a beating that no one could have planned for, and it came out shining: more zero-defect software that has resulted in highly engaged consumers and high quality leads for Lexus! Take a look at one of the many Lexus Synths here.

Photosynth is a spectacular technology allowing digital pictures to be collected and compiled into stunning 3D experiences. The 3D experiences can be navigated and explored at amazing levels of detail! You can even create your own . We’re looking for more ways to use this fascinating technology to encourage collaboration and engagement in the very near future.
If you have an idea, please drop us a note.