ZooYou
One of our colleague recently had to face considerable embarrassment at a retail store and vowed not to visit any store until her daughter was little more grown up. Right now she is 3 years old. Apparently she got bored and cranky with just walking around with her mother and not allowed to touch or do anything. The kid created such a rukus that the mother had to leave the shopping and the shop .
Most of the parents can connect with the experience. It is surprising that most of the physical store pay good attention to experiences of adults but ignore kids in spite of the fact that adults will spend more time and explore more if they are freed up from worries of their kids.
Zooyou is an installation to engage kids at outdoor locations like stores, events, museum etc. It is a responsive mechanism that mimics a child expression in real-time. Playful animal masks leverage a child natural instincts to make faces to co-create an audio and visual interaction.
With the onslaught of eCommerce, The only way for physical stores to survive is to play on their strength of giving memorable and emotionally rich experiences. New media technologies offers an excellent tool to build that experience. It is no longer a “choice” but a question of “How quickly”.