In COOKIE WE TRUST

WHY

Capturing and holding people’s attention is getting harder every time. Today, most of the pedestrians walk looking at their smart devices without paying much attention to the environment around them. This phenomenon has changed the way ads and marketing approach their targets. In the same way, we were challenged by NYU to engage their students through an interactive installation that promotes a “wow” moment and apart them from looking into a phone.

What is this...

In Cookie We Trust is an interactive window display that uses the powerful symbol of the fortune cookie to attract and invite people to ask for their future. The interactive installation determines gender, outfit, age, physical features and more of the person who is triggering the experience. This information is used to delivered a fortune based on your persona. A personalized fortune just for you.

The experience was installed at 563 - 599 La Guardia Pl, Manhattan, New York, USA for around one week 24/7 and delivered joy to approximately 550 people who triggered the cookie more than 1000 times.

how…

Using cutting edge cloud face recognition technology, capacitive sensors, 4K cameras, light, sound systems and a big fortune cookie, we were able to catch people’s attention and get a smile of every participant. Their surprise was impossible to hide after they read their future and realized the cookie was able to “watch” them. this awareness promotes that people spend minutes taking photos of their fortunes and themselves, improving our visibility in social media.

This project was developed in 3 months including conceptualization, designing, prototyping, user testing, fabrication, and implementation.

ROLE: Interactive engineer, User experience Designer

DESIGNED BY: Daniel Castaño, Chelsea Chen, Vidia Anindhita, Arnav Wagh

The fact that the installation had so many systems (sound, light, mechanism, software) makes us thing the whole object as a service having to map the climax points over the experience in order to have a timeline that aligns the things we wanted to communicate and feelings we wanted to generate on the user.

After iterating multiple times over the initial timeline with input from all of our users, we got a solid timeline and overview of the experience we wanted to create, we started the fabrication and implementation of the cookie.

One of the decisions taken during the making of the cookie was to have independent systems taking care of every part of the experience. This way, in case of malfunctioning, just one part of the experience would fail, instead of having a general shut down of the window. This set-up also allowed us to debug easily and work in many parts of the experiences simultaneously.