failure derived from diverse fac-
tors, such as overflow traffic (the
store designers weren’t expect-
ing so many visitors), technical
failures (RFID wasn’t 100 percent
accurate), and interaction design
flaws, such as non-intuitive
controllers (e.g., floor pedals to
an RFID-tagged shoe and watch
themselves inserted into real-time,
virtual scenery related to the type
of shoe they were trying on. Our
design had the following char-
acteristics: As a shopper walks
around the experimenting floor,
the shoe’s RFID tag is read by the
views of the streets or sidewalks
that are typical of the city that
the virtual scenery replicates. For
instance, the photos show a shop-
per trying a shoe model that had
a design inspired by modern life
in Tokyo. Therefore, our interac-
tive mirror displays scenery based
control the opacity of a glass
wall in the fitting room). The fit-
ting room included an interactive
mirror with a motion-triggered
video camera that recorded the
shopper and played back the
video after a pause. With Prada’s
vast budget, we clearly agree
with Brooks’s statement: “We
might think that the limiting
factor on many design projects
is money, but that’s not true.”
In a similar project, we designed
and installed an interactive mirror
for a shoe shop, illustrated in the
image here. The client’s expecta-
tions included the following: The
shoe shoppers would step inside
reader, and then the model’s attri-
butes are fetched from the product
database and sent to the multime-
dia server that displays two syn-
chronized scenarios—one for two
top-down projections (left photo)
and one for the front, “mirror-like”
view (right photo).

May + June 2011