Mixed Reality Retail Experiences

The Mixed reality retail experiences project is concerned with exploring new directions for on-site retail experiences, in particular shopping for clothes, taking advantage of recent developments in, and availability of, cheap sensor and networking technologies.

Our focus is on the collective and shared shopping experience based on e.g. various kinds of social media. But how exactly would this experience be designed for and what kind of technologies, modalities of interaction and experiential qualities would come into play? What would the vision of a mixed-reality shopping universe entail? These are some of the questions we hope to start addressing. We take a concept-driven research-through-design approach emphasizing the value of interactive sketches’ as the main research vehicle in our work.

Our work is also rooted in the Internet of Things vision of interconnected everyday objects and self-configuring wireless networks of devices. IoT technologies exist in complex networks of devices, people, and their everyday practices. It is only when looking at the entire ecology of things, people, and practices (i.e. things, people and what they do with those things) that we can harness the potential of IoT technology for, in this case, novel retail experiences.

Project team:
Jarmo Laaksolahti
Tomas Sokoler
Lars Toft Jacobsen