We all grew up wanting to become techies, scientists, innovators, and what not! It was always a joyous, playful thought to have. Somewhere along the line, we became what we wanted to but – we lost the playful zing which we had inside. The definition of fun got constrained by methods and rules and most things started getting defined as the right and wrong way of accomplishing tasks. When was the last time we involved ourselves with a little bit of ‘PLAY’ at work?
At GIDS this year, Kepler took the visitors back into a reimagined world of Play. How important is it to have fun at work? How interesting things become if we set some rules aside and just explore the world around us without any constraints of right or wrong. We showcased 3 experience where the highlight was on having fun with technology.
The visitors started their journey with UdanChhoo – a simple application with the objective of bringing my drawings to life. The experience was inspired by an older work of Zach Lieberman but with a twist. The basic principle of this experience was that anything painted on a sheet of white paper would get animated by simple hand gestures – nothing short of magic, is it? The first reaction we got was WAIT! How is this even possible? But here comes the magic of Image Processing, Deep Learning and Augmented Reality. All these pieces of technology come together and make this magical experience seamless and possible.
The immediate next question from the visitors that popped up was ‘Hey, this is fun; but how does it translate to something useful for business?’ This is where we ask them to move to the Magic Mirror experience.
Last year, we envisioned a Mirror to be a shopping assistant with the capabilities of a recommendation system. It was seen that inventory visibility directly translates into higher number of sales. The more you show – the more you sell. Kepler took this mirror to GIDS and thrilled the visitors with a live business application of the tech-stacks used for UdanChhoo i.e state of the art Deep Learning in multiple models.
The Mirror classifies Men’s and Women’s clothings, recognises apparel types and recommends similar products, suggests other items that the shopper might like and presents deals to the potential buyer. The Mirror also gives cross-recommendations and this latest feature was a winner with the stall visitors at the summit.
After experiencing the Mirror and UdanChhoo, we directed the visitors over to check their Troublemaker Quotient. This was another ‘fun’, gaming experience which was used to evaluate how much of a troublemaker a person is.
At Sapient, we categorise Troublemaker as someone who takes risks, thinks outside the box, questions the status-quo. These are the people who do things differently and create history. The Troublemaker Quotient is a set of 5 questions with multiple choice answers and based on your answers, gives you a tiny insight into the kind of professional that you are. Kepler decided to ditch the old pen-and-paper question form and create a game using the Unity Game Engine. The game was based on the classic breakout game concept and engaged the player to answer their set of questions while having fun at the same time. The player, instead of answering a quiz or doing a boring web selection, uses a gesture controlled slider to deflect a bouncing ball to register their inputs or answers. The gameplay was transmitted in realtime using websockets onto a large screen for the crowds to see and attract them.
This turned out to be a hit with the crowds as well as they got to experience a short game and engage with something useful at the same time – the complete premise of Play Reimagined.
Summing up the GIDS experience, Kepler was extremely successful in conveying the importance of Play at Work and the visitors at all 3 experiences setup by the team were inspires and intrigues enough to absorb the message. From our perspective, like all previous years, GIDS 2018 was a yet another brilliant platform to interact with thousands of brilliant minds, exchanging thoughts, learning from each other and most importantly – having fun.