Details

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• Date: Oct 2013
• In: Installation
• Skills: Concept, Pitch, Budget, PM, Research, UX Design, Wireframing

Visit Project

Designercafe is a fashion house in Utrecht that creates luxurious basics for elegant women. We created an interactive shopping window for them that would engage and interest people passing by the store after opening hours by use of an infrared camera, custom-made software and projection mapping.

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Attract attention and engage passers-by

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Designercafe requested for something that would allow their beautiful collection to catch the attention of passers-by in the city centre at night. The installation would have to attract attention immediately, be engaging enough for people to remember at least the next day and show off the Designercafe collection of basics in a meaningful way. This project was a collaboration with Mr Beam, who took care of the animations and visuals for the projection mapping.

Interest should be rewarded.

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We had to make sure to create something that would grab enough attention to interest people who are not thinking about shopping at all when it was active. The technology and hardware of the installation should also be subtle and not noticable in the store itself or the store window during the day. I also wanted to engage passers-by who showed the potential to become future customers. So I created what I called the 'sweetspot'. Users standing on the 'sweetspot' longer than a few seconds were rewarded with additional music, lighting and a call-to-action trigger that invited users to visit the website.

The Making Of

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We developed our own custom software and hardware for this project. By use of a camera with infrared filter and a strong infrared light we used blob-tracking software technology to make a very subtle interaction possible without screens, buttons or other specific interactive objects.

Increase in Attention

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The result of this is that passers-by would start interacting with the shopping window even before they were aware of it, making it almost seem like ‘magic'. We added a feature that would count how long people would stand still in front of the window while the installation played. The average ‘attention span’ increased from 2 seconds before the installation was active to 24 seconds after launch.

Active Runtime

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Living dress was active and running for a year from 2013 to 2014, turning on automatically at night and turning off again in the morning, until Designercafe moved to another location where the same setup was no longer possible. The organisation funding the project published a post-mortem booklet, documenting the experiences and thoughts of all parties involved.