Driving Interactive Mobility with Microsoft Tag

brentphillips — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:13:00 GMT

If you work with documents, images, blogs, or other digital information, you are probably familiar with tagging. Keywords, or meta data, can be used to describe the information in question (a file, unstructured data, etc) which later helps indexing and searching. The following is a slightly different take on tagging that promises to foster new experiences in interactive mobility. By using coded images (think barcodes) and a small app in a camera-equipped smartphone, users can interact directly with their environment, in real-time, to receive new information, or find new experiences, through their device.

As the FAQ states, anything from billboards, to product packages, to business cards, can be equipped with such an image. As a simple use case, imagine reading a tag on someone's business card, then being shown - on your device - a small videocast describing that person's business. Or perhaps someone who is visually impaired can tag a product to 'hear' a description rather than having to read a small font on a box. The scenario's are endless...I see tremendous potential from a marketing, usability, and even transaction processing perspective. As it concerns interoperability, I see great value in the fact that we are simplifying the transaction between the device and surrounding infrastructure through a discrete and 'simple-to-deploy' component pair. The software is available for most devices today and the tags will be deployed in various media by anyone who wants to use them. The tags won't care what 'reads them' and the devices won't care what produces the tag (screen, paper, etc).

The Tag service is in beta today. For more information, check out the website here: http://www.microsoft.com/tag. If you want to try it out, by the way, visit the site to grab the app. I've created a test tag here that loads my personal blog into your mobile web browser...

2Advanced

brentphillips — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 23:09:00 GMT

I am a big fan of experiential design, particulary as it applies to technology. 2Advanced Studios has done a fantastic job of pushing the envelop of design on the web using everything from data driven Flash and HTML pages, to 3D modeling, to live video. Check them out and drive around if you get a second. Well worth the look. Also - I have not found it yet on the new site, but they should have an archive of past designs. All equally as impressive...

dontclick.it

brentphillips — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:02:00 GMT

This is a great site - and great mental exercise for first time users - that I revisit from time to time to see how work is progressing. Seems that no major updates have taken place since this time last year. The gist is a new UI that does not require mouse clicks. Test your skills...http://www.dontclick.it

Brent Phillips - Interoperability Blog : HCI

Driving Interactive Mobility with Microsoft Tag

2Advanced

dontclick.it