High-tech photo booth tracks user behavior - howellproself

A pic booth that can track user behavior exploitation a Microsoft Kinect-equivalent sensor and mine social group information could assistant marketers gain worth information about audiences at recreation events.

Mobile services company Mobiquity, based in Massachusetts, installed the first FanShots kiosk in the Sun Life Courtside Club at Hub of the Universe's TD Garden for Celtics hoops fans to take pictures of themselves and share them across social media accounts. The close club holds about 50 mass per game, and in the six location games as yet this season about 260 fans have old the simple machine.

Suchlike a traditionalistic photo booth, users stand in front of the unit and have a serial publication of photographs taken. There's nary publish-out, though, since the images are emailed. Marketers bottom tell when the email is opened, who is first step it, World Health Organization the prototype is being forwarded to and where the image ends up on social networks through unique hashtags.

Users correspond to the damage of service at the end of the photo session when the picture is emailed. Email addresses aren't currently sold-out or stored for marketing purposes. During user interaction, the kiosk is watching its users with an Asus Xtion Favoring motion and depth-sensing camerasimilar to a Kinect sensor.

"The detector allows us to be able to track World Health Organization is expiration by and who is approaching the device," said Skylar Roebuck, a product manager with Mobiquity. "You could create a skeletal frame of a person's body and you can chase away their hand. What could you do with that kind of functionality?"

Roebuck aforesaid there are a number of possibilities. For one, the car could mold the traffic flow in a certain area. If it notices someone walking close to the machine IT could call out to the passerby and assay to lure him towards the machine.

It took the company about three months to get going from concept to a finished product. The building block consists of an HP touchscreen computer, a Logitech webcam to take the photos and the Asus depth sensing camera. When fans fare upfield to the device they'll novice a chronological succession that will take four different photos of them and their friends. Before emailing the result they butt MBD borders to the photo, which admit Celtics mascot Lucky.

The kiosk installed at the Garden is wall-adorned, merely Mobiquity has made a unhampered standing version that could be set in general concourse of an scene of action, according to Roebuck. Approaching development plans admit more direct hardware sourcing indeed that rather than being self-collected of three whole separate products, the product send away be more tightly integrated.

Roebuck said that other arenas that host basketball and football game games are considering installment the unit, but he wouldn't say which ones. The cost of the FanShots kiosk hasn't been announced.

Nick Barber covers unspecialized technology news in some school tex and video for IDG Intelligence Service. Electronic mail him at Nick_Barber@idg.com and conform to him on Twitter at @nickjb.