Oh this is awesome. Six riders have taken this camera down a slope – “Each rider is doing their own awesome tricks, none of which you can see with just the one camera angle so you have to keep re-watching it,” says Tom. The camera’s atop a giant triangular frame (you can see the shadow if you scroll around – it looks wonderfully silly).

The technology to view and control complete panoramas has been flitting about over the last year, taken around festivals over the summer. Dancing people in fields was all well and fine but it’s so much better taken up a mountain doing something I love (technically I’m a skier – I’ve tried boarding twice and both love and hate it). Crunching about in big boots in the snow this weekend was already making me yearn to be hurling myself down a mountain. This has made it x10. Watch/play with it.

Much like the best writers (as a rule) read lots of books, the blogs I love are often written by people who like to read books*. I spend my time filling a little book with words I do not know. I may not remember them all but one marked result is the word ‘accoutrement‘ occasionally littering my sentences. But this is neither here nor there.

I get excited by words and MichaelJon is an ad planner who puts words in good orders. I suspect he reads books. It’s a good combination. He once gave me some marvelously written advice about ad planning, both helpful and a little joy to read (“I am flanked by planners who drink industrial sized vats of coffee, and I think people respect them more for it.  Like they need it to keep up with their own mind.“).

So when he talked about two Nike & Adidas efforts recently, it made me smile a lot:

“On recent travels around London I couldn’t help but notice a new advertising trend in angry illiterate exclamation by sports brands adidas and Nike. And at first i didn’t think much of it.  Just, you know, it’s that sort of slightly wack attempt at building a “community” by repeatedly hitting people over the head with a message utterly lacking in substance.  “WE ARE LONDON!” it screams, “ARE YOU?”.  Obviously it’s nonsensical, but it’s got slightly “edgy” youngsters staring straight at camera so you’re tempted to mutter, “yes, yes, ok, i’m London, ok, fine, just leave me alone, i don’t want any trouble”.  Then you think, oh, maybe they don’t want you to “be London”, so you whisper “no, obviously i’m not London, no way am i cool enough for that”, by now quite confused and scared, like Dustin Hoffman’s Babe in Marathon Man, repeatedly being asked “Is it safe??”.”

*A love of Paxman is also a common theme.

Some days I want to be a skinny boy pulling off some good shoes (or perhaps just have smaller feet). Vans seem to have stepped in a different direction for a moment, away from heavy skater shoes. Green suede, leather laces and some pretty sharp embroidery. These are some beautiful things.

Snowday building a snowman was lovely. The first time I’ve wanted a jumpsuit to wear in winter. I’m probably confusing modern fashion with love for an 80s one-piece ski suit I used to have when I was a kid though.

This is a pretty sweet concept, building on apps like Zombie Escape which, in a mix of fitness meets zombies, lets you run around the real world chased by location-following zombies on your iPhone. Despite angry geeks reviewing the red dots indicating zombies as “not zombie-ish enough (sic)” it’s a pretty awesome concept – a sort of new geeky accidental fitness game that never really exploded.

Coke’s building on the legacy that is Tron, with a new app letting you play a branded variation of the simple zombies battling real people, rather than imaginary red dots. LiveCycle by CP+B lets players “move around to create their Light path” taking the concept of Tron into the real world. Stake out areas, gain points, and unlock achievements is the gist, with a nice twist for those travelling too fast (i.e. car) having their power zapped. (So, if you’re looking to cheat, the key message is opt for bike over car.)

LiveCycle’s toted to not only reflect the movie but also “actually help blow it up,” says VP Dave Sciff at CP+B, and he’ll be right if it’s taken up by a significant number. Unfortunately it’s only available on iPhones, and only on IOS 4 at that, so I’ve been unable to have a play. As an Android user I actively borrowed an iPhone solely to test the app out and was disappointed.

It’s the second big brand attempt in as many months that prompts people to run about whilst trying to focus on their iPhone (a pretty mean feat), and both Coke and the Mini Getaway Stockholm effort – “stay at least 50 metres away from everybody else in Stockholm city between October 31st and November 7th 2010. If you succeed, you win the new MINI Countryman” – have been pretty swish in their production.

As Alex Burnard of CP+B says: “To date, nearly 95% of the marketing executions that involve location-based technology are built on existing platforms. Foursquare deals etc. So in many ways, the location based marketing boom hasn’t really started yet.”

So, whilst this and the Mini Getaway are cool ideas, will this end up being a showy but ineffective way of promoting a brand through a Youtube video of what could have been? Whilst winter’s not exactly the best season for it, are Tron geeks (and curious game-player types like me) going be spotted leaping about your local streets fretting about being derezzed?

It’s a case of ‘will this go viral?’ or perhaps ‘are we ready for it?’ Regardless, it’s a joyful example of brands not just bumbling onto platforms for the sake of platforms but trying to do something a little bit cool and hopefully it’ll be paving the way for more engaging apps that take things outside.

This appears over on Bitchbuzz Tech.