The first working prototype focused on the technical solution. How can I track the user passing by, how can I track when a user gets control and how can this change the setup.

I ended up having two levels of interaction. The first level is the passing by When someone passes by at the shopping window a city pops up in the display. Having such a big change in the shopping window attracts automatically the users attention. In this mode I also added a parallax effect. Having such an effect in place made the test users already moving back and forth just to see if something happens.

The second level of interaction with the system is the hand control. With a simple wave gesture can a user get control over the system. In the current prototype users can point at real products in the shopping window to get more information about them. Technically I build this prototype using SimpleOpenNI, a processing library for Kinect. In the processing code I only track one user and send the “Center of Mass” coordinates to a processing socket server. To get the hand coordinates I use SimpleOpenNI as well and send this values to a socket server too. To display the information and animations I used Adobe Flash. Flash because it’s in my opinion  a good solution to display interactive information, animation and build user interfaces. Flash is quick to develop and test different ideas. Set up the exhibition construction The museum team from our university build me the construction for our exhibition. The setup is currently located in the basement and allows me to work and test the application in the final construction the way it will be displayed at the exhibition.