Ventana is designed to allow the presentation of any kind of information. It could be used to present fashion, jewelery or even a restaurants menu. Ventana can be installed in any shop window.
For our purposes Ventana is showing two products thematizing the US city New York. By the mere presence in front of the window a user can navigate and interactively experience the digital space.
Through the use of inexpensive technology it is affordable for a wide varaity of shops. It can be used for very small interaction with the shop windows content up to very complex games and e-commerce solutions.
Abstract
Today, retail stores are finding themselves in a fierce competition with e-commerce stores. By bringing the latest technologies to these physical locations, Ventana is trying to provide a solution to this problem. Installed in the shop‘s window, Ventana enables passing potential customers to interact with a digital representation of the store‘s inventory. Now, well informed, the customer is more likely to enter the shop.
Ventana is designed to allow the presentation of any kind of information. It could be used to present fashion, jewelery or a restaurants menu. For our purposes Ventana is showing two products thematizing the US city New York. By the mere presence in front of the window a user can navigate and interactively experience the digital space.
The non-stop availability of the stores inventory breaks the boundaries between the digital and the real world and has the potential to attract many more customers. And as touch-less sensors become more affordable we will see many more applications of this kind, which will open up a range of completely new possibilities. Kinect, for example, would allow us to determine a customers body size and use it as a filter on the inventory and thus tailoring the information to the users needs.
Reducing the Gesture Set for Ventana
Ventana was designed to be used without any learning time. Therefore I had to use a gesture set which had to be reduced to only a few possibles. It should be easy for nearly everybody to use.
Currently there are two possible ways to control the application.One is the bare presence and one is hand pointing gesture. It was an important aspect for me to make sure that the users do not feel silly when using the shop window in public space. Having a reduced gesture set makes it easy for people to learn how to control the system.
Conclusion Technical Solution
The setup I choose to build the technical prototype helped me to develop quickly a running prototype and test the different functions. Having a technology like Adobe Flash for the visual and audio part made it easy to design and develop the prototype at the same time. Using processing together with the SimpleOpenNI wrapper made reading the values from Microsoft Kinect a very easy solutions. Using the micro-controller Arduino to control the light is an easy way to bring digital content in a connection with a physical attractor.
