Alibaba - Creating A Smart Retail Experience

Discover how Wall and Wall used the Interactive Wall kit to make an interactive wall with lights.

Wall and Wall is a professional mural painting studio located in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a focus on corporate murals and interactive walls for events and offices. They have previously used Bare Conductive technologies in their Ellucian Live project, and in an installation at the Cal Academy of Science in San Francisco. Their clients range from small businesses to large technology companies, and the projects from smart retail displays, speciality lobby murals, to immersive experiences at corporate events.

For this project, Wall and Wall partnered with Alibaba, one of the largest e-commerce businesses in the world, to simulate a retail store through the creation of an interactive wall. The brief? To create an interactive display to showcase products within a smart store in a simulated shopping mall.

The goal was to create a simple and innovative interactive experience that would showcase popular products and capture customer interaction, using generic visuals that could be applied towards multiple brands and products. A key element was making an interactive display that would provide a more personal and tactile immersive experience than the traditional digital signage and kiosk screens that are commonly found in many shopping malls in Asia.

In order to achieve this, the team at Wall and Wall built an interactive wall using the Interactive Wall Kit with a series of integrated sensors to output light and sound as different visual elements were touched. It was important for the client that each lighting interaction had a unique output, so one of the challenges involved creating distinct triggers for each sensor. This is where the use of Bare Conductive’s capacitive sensing technology came into play, enabling the creation of a range of interactions and gestural interfaces using touch and proximity as inputs.

Each sensor was programmed to trigger a different sound or animation. The lamp has a dimming interface, the phone lights up for the same amount of time as the accompanying ringing sound, and the diamond ring pulses light to resemble a natural sparkle. The remainder of the objects are connected to sounds to bring life to the objects. At 10’x8′ in size, this permanent installation exemplifies how capacitive sensors are easy to integrate at large scale and low-cost.

Feedback from Alibaba indicated that users were impressed by the possibility of creating an experiential retail interface simply by using touch on a seamless surface. Users were excited to try out the interactive wall and were excited with the activation of light and sound when touching the mural. The integration of sensors directly into the built environment without the need for tangible buttons or switches provided a magical quality to the interaction, which is the power of using Bare Conductive’s smart surface technology.

Images & Video: Wall and Wall

Do you want to create your own interactive walls? Explore the Interactive Wall Kit and learn how to create a sound mural.

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