Smarter Apps for a Connected Living
2013, Feb- 2013, Jul
This project at MediaLAB Amsterdam wanted to answer the next question: “How can Connected TV help convergence and increase user engagement?”
The Widget Company (TWC) gave this assignment to the MediaLAB Amsterdam. TWC is a leader company in making TV applications, for both TVs or gadgets that are connected to them, like a set-top-box or consoles, and they found problematic: People buy smart TVs (or devices that enables a connection to the TV) but they didn’t use the smart part of it, just the linear TV.
This project wanted both to help convergence, which is the union of the different devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops with the action of watching TV, and increase user engagement, we wanted to people use the smart part of the TV. TWC told us to build a concept using the linear TV to activate the smart part of the TV, but during our research we went a step before: we decided to use the physical world.
Everyone knows the stickers, so we move into that direction. We decided to make a TV app were you can have your sticker album digitally, simply by scanning the stickers you gain with your smartphone. Even more, if you scan doubled stickers then you can trade them with the world, trying to be the first in finishing the album. And the reason to do it in the TV is because, for each eleven unique stickers you get in your digital album, you get a new episode of a mini-series. In our case, we choose football stickers to show the concept, so in this case the mini-series is about learning football. Kids who collect stickers are still willing to be a football star one day.
My role in this project was the main developer of the front-end of the TV application. It is build using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. To help me I use Bootstrap 2.3.2, with a custom width to make the webapp fixed to 1280px, and jQuery. I also helped in the design decisions and in the back-end server, with the database and app logic.
