Collaboration between Igal Nassima and Michael Zick Doherty
Concept
Hotel lobbies are shared spaces for hotel residents and visitors that integrate social spaces such as bars, restaurants, and waiting areas. The hotel provides concierge services for the visitors for variety of information about the area including activities, resources, attractions, etc. Many people gather around tables in the lobby as a form of interaction, as well as for other activities such as playing games, waiting, and getting information from newspapers and other guides.
Concierge table lives on the hotel lobby floor, creating a vehicle for social interaction as well as providing and storing information for each guest. Guests connect to the table through their unique ID embedded in their hotel key card. The guest can put their cards on the table and the table draws the data onto the screen. The table allows multiple users to interact. A user can decide if they want to use the whole table and share their content or use just a section of it. After creating and editing maps and data, users can send this info to their mobile device via SMS or other mobile application.
User story
A Hotel guest approaches the table and on screen text asks the guest to place their key card on the surface. Once card is placed on surface, the guest is shown a menu with options to browse events or view recommended events based on a previous interaction with the hotel concierge. If user choose “browse events”, they are given a sub menu allowing them to choose what types of events they’d like to browse. Venues are aggregated both on the map and as a new menu listing. The guest is also presented with a time range selector that allows further filtering of results. After selecting an event from the listing, details are displayed with the time, location, cost and description of event. From there, guests can order ticket that are charged to their hotel account as well as send event information via email or SMS associated with their account.
Technical
Fiducial markers are printed on the hotel key card to give each one a unique ID. Rooms with multiple guests can also have multiple keys so each guest has their own profile. When key cards are set on the table, it loads the data for that guest from a secure server.Users interact with the table using multitouch technology that tracks finger movement using blob detection.
Implementation
Our final product for the spacial media midterm was a prototype of this table with a subset of features. We were able to implement both the finger and fiducial maker tracking, though had some issues with precise spatial calibration between the camera and projector. We discovered that our infrared bulbs create a light source that was too concentrate and decided future prototypes would need a more distributed lighting solution such as LED strips. We used the Reactivision tracking application which sent tracking data via OSC to our GUI application in openFrameworks. In our next version we plan to use Flash as it integrates well with open source map APIs and has well supported event listening and GUI creation. The events were loaded into the map via XML. We also save data to keycards using XML as well. We were able to enable movement across the map, but the senstivity need to be adjusted to create a more fluid interaction with the user.
We plan to continue with this prototype in the coming two weeks and present our concept to hotels in New York.
