LONDON, England – Last month we had a look behind the new Nokia homescreen, and spoke to the Nokia designers on the frontline of innovating this aspect of our devices. That story struck a chord with many of you, with heaps of great comments flooding in, so we thought we’d follow up with this new video that sees designers Juliana Ferreira and Lee Cooper explain how Nokia went about designing the new homescreen as seen on the N97 and the methods and prototypes they used in their research. Click through to watch the full video behind the new Nokia homescreen.

Nokia gesture design video (and live research in London)

LONDON, England – Designing gestures to help you interact with your device in intuitive ways is a challenge that Nokia is grabbing with both hands and welcoming with a respectful bow. Younghee Jung is one of Nokia’s explorative designers, and she’s keenly leading the design investigation process into what makes a gesture work in real life and what it means to real people from different countries and cultures.

In this video Younghee explains more about what goes into designing gestures for Nokia devices, and conducts some live research on the streets of London, speaking to local people and equipping them with a plastic mono-block phone prop, to find out how they would use gestures for certain tasks. Click through to catch the full video and find out how folk reacted.

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Nokia Image Space update and video

BARCELONA, Spain – We’ve written about Nokia Research Center’s Image Space project before. It’s a photo sharing service that creates a navigable, immersive interface to images, maps, and video. Using data from a phone’s GPS, compass, and tilt-sensor, the service builds a 3D representation of the images.

What’s new is not only the ability to hear sounds and see videos, but a new 3D Point Cloud View that aggregates photos from a single object into a very cool three-dimensional model of all the images. Well, you have to see it to get it, so I’ve made a video (below) of Severi Uusitalo demonstrating this and all the other cool stuff in Nokia Image Space.

More after the jump.

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Head of Nokia Research Center video interview

BARCELONA, Spain – The head of Nokia Research Center is a guy called Henry Tirri. He was in Barcelona this week spreading the message of what Nokia Research Center is doing and what the future will look like. We caught up with him and he kindly stepped in front of the lens for a video interview.

Click through to watch our video interview with Henry Tirri, and for all the highlights of our fascinating chat with one of the key people responsible driving innovation from the frontline within Nokia.

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Nokia Fellows – innovating, but not in broad daylight

HELSINKI, Finland – Here on Conversations we’re always on the hunt for those engaging untold stories behind a product or service, the unlikely heroes pushing innovation, and ultimately stories that we hope give you a genuinely interesting glimpse under the increasingly transparent skin of Nokia. With this in mind we want to tell you about the Nokia Fellows, a collective of unsung minds within Nokia who’d normally (and now here’s the exception) go about their business untouched by limelight.

A bunch of the brightest and most influential technological experts working within Nokia, read on as we briefly shine the torch on how the Nokia Fellows affect widespread innovation within Nokia, and watch a video interview with Valtteri Niemi, the latest person to be named a Nokia Fellow.

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Cool survey results from Nokia Maps guys!

COULD BE ANYWHERE - The Nokia Maps guys commissioned a really smart study into navigation and maps, where 12,500 people in 13 countries were asked about their sense of direction and navigation habits. In one finding, they saw that one in ten people find it impossible to navigate around London. Plus, to make it worse, one in three Londoners admit to deliberately giving people the wrong directions.

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Hollywood Nokia lab dissects mobile entertainment DNA

HOLLYWOOD, USA – A new Nokia Research Center has sprouted Stateside in the country’s entertainment capital. Echoing the theme of the location, NRC Hollywood’s core focus is on exploring new entertainment experiences and technologies that fuse the digital and physical worlds for the sake of fun.

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Six degrees of smartphone separation

GLOBAL – Multimedia computers, as Anssi likes to call them, are vastly complex devices. Go beyond the standard voice, text and camera and you’re in a world of maps, Internet, email, GPS, WiFi, music, video not to mention third party apps, services and games. To work out how popular these functions are, and what users like and don’t like Nokia likes to do a bit of research. Using a software app called Smartphone360, it can track usage of functions and features, combining data from myriad devices to work out exactly how popular certain phone features are.