Sensorium is YDreams’ latest project developed in conjunction with L’Oreal Portugal’s Luxury Division for the cosmetics and beauty brand’s POS at ‘Perfumes & Companhia’ shops in the Lisbon area. The interactive app offers the public a sensorial experience that is here to revolutionize the way customers choose the fragrance, which is right for them.
The video below - the making of Sensorium - sums up how the project was conceived, designed and implemented:
YDreams has been working on natural user interfaces (NUI) for around 9 years. We’ve been using primarily web-cameras for the detection of people and objects, as these are non-intrusive and are a very rich multi-vector sensor.
In the beginning each new application was a copy-paste of source from the previous projects plus, all the customization code and a few more features. As you can imagine, maintenance was a nightmare. From very early on, we felt the need to have a reusable development framework. It would allow us to take less time developing the applications, make them more robust and leave us time to keep innovating. As a result, we have successfully deployed hundreds of applications for our customers, which you can find in museums, stores, events and movie theaters.
The resulting framework also allows us to share our knowledge across the development process. We have great people that are very good at different areas of expertise but we cannot have all of them working on every project. Their knowledge is added to the framework to be used by others. It includes multi-threading, image processing, tracking, 3D real-time graphics and physics, artificial intelligence, Free Frame plugins, Flash integration into 3D graphics, USB, FireWire and IP (Ethernet) video cameras, Microsoft Surface support, etc.
The platform is used in almost all our interactive applications and recently was used on the robots we created for Santander. The platform allowed us to have a 3D simulation of their behaviors even before we had the physical robots. The exact same code that was used in the simulator is now running in the robots themselves.
We recently partnered with Canesta and added support for their time-of-flight depth-sensing video cameras. These cameras can detect the distance of the real objects to the camera.
We already had interactive applications combining real and virtual in real-time. Now it is also registered in 3D, fully complying with the augmented reality definition by Azuma.
This is just one more feature added to many others in the framework. Creating the demo was very simple. Its objective was to show the capabilities of the camera and also perform the first usability tests. We wanted to know how users would perceive the “invisible” 3D objects and what type of interactions are possible. It has been a big success with all the users.
Visit our booth at ARE2010 to try this demo yourself and get more details on our framework.
Joakim Borgström (JAB*), creative director of from Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam offered us a great performance.
All his presentation was focused on interaction and experience. To explain it better, he used some interesting concepts as
“Kansei”: The main ideas are: the product design matching perfectly with the user expectation and create advertising that involves the consumer in an emotional way.
The word comes from the expression “Kansei Engineering System” (KES) that means incorporate emotion and feelings at the design process.
“Kansei Kansei es un término japonés donde la sílaba kan significa sensitividad y sei significa sensibilidad. Se usa de forma polisémica para expresar la cualidad de un objeto de despertar placer en su uso.”
“FFF”: Fast. Immediate Consumption | Forwardable. I want to share it | Fun.(?) Tactile Experiences.
Cross Border Communication
Real Time
Advertising + Entertainment
“Wow Effect”
For each topic, he presented demos and cases (out of the presentation), everything reacting in real time.
There were 2 funny online cases from Carlsberg website, called “Trials of Friendship”
- Please hold my beer: a virtual friend asks you to hold his beer while he goes to the bathroom, you cannot stop clicking the mouse, if you relax your mouse finger, the beer falls in the floor. You can be clicking for hours, and there are a lot of funny situations that appear during it. The record is more than 12 hours without take the finger out of the mouse!
- Don´t touch my sister: it is similar, but the friend ask you that, and the cute sister stays in front of you smiling, if you click, she hits you. If not, you start to have deliriums about her. It is really funny.
