Creating ‘Experiences’ using technology
As a technologist, we tend to focus more on the inner working/technology of the project but…
That’s what I have been doing at Kepler Lab, SapientRazorfish(earlier SapientNitro). This post is about key highlights of my work and the delightful experiences that have been delivered to clients over the past one year.
At Kepler Lab, very first thing that inspired me was ‘Touche’ — a refresh-able braille display. Paul D’souza — an inventor based out of Bangalore was working on ‘touche’ for the past 8 years. During 2015 Bangalore Mini Maker Faire, Kepler team got to know about Paul & his work and our team decided to do pro bono work for touche. Apart from software development, I got opportunity to contribute to user testing of the device as well by visiting various blind schools. Before I worked on touche, I had very little knowledge of visually impaired’s world. Touche is a wonderful example of how technology can change and improve the way visually impaired children read books.
By nature, I am a curious soul and along with touche work, I was looking for something new to explore. Out of couple of options, chatbot excited me the most and I started exploring various chatbot frameworks, Natural Language Processing Engines and various chatbot platforms. After getting enough hands-on experience, I started building proof of concepts chatbots (food ordering bot, wine ordering bot, FAQ bot, hiring helper bot and more)for various clients for their Facebook Pages.
When studying something new, teach a friend about it. Let them ask questions. If you can teach something well, then you understand it well.
I am not sure who wrote this but I strongly believe that if I can’t explain my work to someone, I do not understand what I am doing. I have been sharing my knowledge in the form of conference presentation, magazine article/tutorial and books. I thought one of the way to share my knowledge is to conduct a webinar on chatbot so I and Ram Murat Sharma— who was also extensively working on chatbots, prepared hands-on tutorial using which anyone can create their own chatbot in 45 minutes. It was widely appreciated and opened up lots of business conversation for us. For our US hiring/marketing team, I built a messenger bot ‘Billi’ which can predict where you might fit at SapientRazorfish based on your Snapchat prowess. Again it was a huge hit and one of the most talked about post on our facebook page. If you are a designer/developer working on chatbot or planning on chatbot, checkout amazing book “Designing Bots by Amir Shevat” which my chatbot designer friend Jayneil recommended.
ICEGOV — an international event to promote electronic governance, was the most challenging, at the same time most rewarding work of the year. Our challenge was “How might we help delegates understand various Indian govt. digital initiatives in an interactive and engaging way”. Designers leveraging Human Centered Design processes should be aware of ‘How might we..’ questions. Based on the insight that stories lived are better than stories told, we decided to create a wall of stories showcasing how the life of Indian rural family has changed due to various digital initiatives. This installation uses a blend of projection mapping, sensors, computer vision and a story management engine to leverage animation, sounds and physical interactions to create an interactive storytelling experience on a seemingly mundane wall. The wall was inaugurated by honorable India IT minister. During this time, I got opportunity to work closely with multidisciplinary team, Mayank — computer vision scientist, Vasu — product designer and Harry — electronics geek.
After the grand success of ICEGOV, we were brainstorming on new way of interaction with the wall/projection. We already experimented with gesture based devices like Microsoft Kinect, Intel RealSense and our insight was - gesture based devices won’t work in all the scenarios or use cases that we are working on. One of the idea that excited all of us was — what if we can use daily objects as a medium of interaction and we decided to use ‘torch’ as an interaction medium. We did few experiments with ‘torch’ until opportunity from a renewable energy sector came. It was for REI — Asia’s largest renewable energy conference. Using torch as energy source, goal was to light up the city by adjusting panels on the wall. It was something new, something different experience for energy conference’s audience which was built using computer vision and game engine.
Constant experimentation is our philosophy. During one of the lab walk-through, one of the retail business executive challenged us to think of an experiment which can be conducted in retail industry. Interactive Mirror idea sparkled the creativity in all of us and after long brainstorming session, we had few ideas around what we wanted to build. Today most of the digital powered mirror have been typecast-ed as virtual trial tool which has not been so much successful so far. Based on the insight that ‘people tend to buy more when a larger amount of store inventory is showcased’ and ‘parents give their phones/tablets to kids while they shop’,we developed IMI(Interactive Mirror Installation).
It has two modes: First one is of bringing store inventory forward by giving personalized apparel recommendation which was built using machine learning algorithms and computer vision by Saikat — young machine learning researcher and Mayank. Second one is playful entertainment function which can answer lots of kids questions in a funny way. Apart from designing User Interface and building Amazon Alexa Skill for Amazon Echo, in this technically complex project, I had fun time integrating all the pieces together to create seamless experience for end-user.
One of the perks of working closely with marketing team, I got opportunity to participate and present our work at various conferences/events — TEDxGurugram, ZeeMELT, GIDS, Adobe Symposium
I believe enthusiastic community is an integral part of anything new that succeeds. Parul Bansal — versatile developer and AR/VR enthusiastic, was able to create Microsoft Hololens community by conducting various online/offline session and by allowing interested people to experience some cool demos. For chatbots, I and Ram were able to create enthusiastic community by multiple online training sessions. Other community initiative which I am really proud of is CreativeMornings Gurugram — a breakfast lecture series for the creative community. More about CreativeMornings in another post.
Apart from this, whenever I had some bandwidth , I worked on small experiments like ‘Before 2017 ends’ art project and Project Chameleon
Truly, an amazing year — full of creating ‘experiences’ using technology!
NOTE : Checkout ExperienceSutra to know more about amazing work done by Kepler Team led by Alok Kumar.
#Kepler #Chatbot #Echo #Voice #IoT #Experience #Technology #Design #Digital #Innovation #AR #VR #Creative #Journey
