Ok, first off, this has got to be the funniest thing I've ever experienced... this girl patiently waited in line, a decently long time, a line meant for USE of the interactive mirror. She was next, got her turn, and commenced to use the mirror - AS A MIRROR! She had every intention to "interface" with the mirror, but not in the way I would have guessed. She did her hair and make-up for a solid 10-15 minutes. Bravo. Lesson? When trying to present users with unexpected interfaces, expect unexpected uses. It was a priceless moment for me.
Please continue reading article and see attached photos...
The event was the Bamboozled music festival. I, with and via the fine folks at Interference Incorporated, were invited by Wonka Candy (sponsor of the concert series) to attend Bamboozled Left (west coast) and Bamboozled Right (east coast). We brought 4 interactive mirrors out, they were called the Wonkavision, quite cool by anyone's standard, brilliant name for such a device. I was psyched, I'm a fan of the classic film and the candy brand. The software suite was really well suited to the task : A photohunt game, a maze game, and an art application whereby drawn imagery gets uploaded to Wonka.com for later download. All the software and the whole menu system had a very Wonka aesthetic. Special super thanks go to
Seth Sandler (aka Cerupcat) for his assistance (assistance is an understatement) on AS3 coding, late hours, and remaining onboard way past his paid requirement. Mr. Sandler gets high marks around here. I encourage you to visit his blog and follow his experiments and contribution to
NUI at large.
It was a real challenge designing an installation for an environment with so much multi-sensory over-stimulus. food vendors everywhere. merch vendors trying to fill your bags with tshirts. 8 stages simultaneously running bands for 3 days with schedules spanning a pretty large map of the concert grounds. How to entice the kids over, have them use the mirror, and then maintain their attention? In the end, we changed the design of our tent to better the usefulness and we got 4000 users on the last round! I kind of used the 2 weekends as a study, I'll be authoring a document on the topic soon. In the meantime, enjoy some of my camerphone pics 
