I've talked about video scenarios and sketching before. Well, now that ThingM is up and rolling, i figured it was time to practice what I was preaching. Today we put the first of our Technology Sketches, which are video scenarios we use in the rapid prototyping of interaction ideas. We did this one in a little more than 3 days, including all technology, design and video work, and learned a ton from the process. Here's the abstract:
WineM is a Technology Sketch of a smart wine rack. It's designed to locate wines in a wine rack using RFIDs attached to bottles and to display which wines have been located using LED backlights behind the bottles. Collectors (or anyone with a large wine cellar) can use it to search through collections, track the location of specific bottles and manage inventory with a minimum of data entry. Linking bottles to networked databases can provide information that would otherwise be too time consuming or difficult to obtain (for example, the total value of a collection, or all the wine that is ready to drink).
A full description of the ideas and technologies behind this sketch are available on the ThingM Site.
Aaaah the famous winerack in action... :-)
This is a neat device. Where was it when I had a client with 36000 bottles a few years ago?
It still might take a while to find that pesky bottle in a real cellar unless you move the LED to the front of the rack.