Breakfast NY, a physical-digital interactive agency, has created a new smart object that it hopes people and brands alike will want to interact with.
Yesterday morning, Breakfast unveiled its latest project: Points. Points is a new kind of street sign that is interactive, real-time and social, which is why Breakfast is calling it “the most advanced and intelligent directional sign on Earth.”
Points has been three years in the making according to Michael Lipton, co-founder and account director at Breakfast. The smart sign has three moving, digital arms that adjust according to environments. There is a menu on Points that shows different categories of content that Points can serve up.
For example, if Points were placed somewhere in New York, in the morning it could point you to the nearest coffee shops, the closest subway station and tell you the weather. In the afternoon the options would shift to lunch spots, and later happy hour specials. Points can pull content from Foursquare, Twitter, local transportation APIs, RSS feeds and many other sources, and it can be expanded to work with almost any online data source and adapt to any location where it’s installed.
“The baseline functionality is really the idea of pointing people to areas of interest,” said Lipton. “There’s room for interesting brand connections there.”
Lipton explained that Points could be used at events like concerts, sports games and conferences. With Points’ social capabilities, the sign could show tweets associated with a sponsor or event hashtag while also showing the nearest restroom or pointing to next event on the schedule. There are lots of ways that brands and marketers could use Points at events or make it a permanent installation in retail environments.
Breakfast is all about creating these kinds of social, Web-enabled devices for enhancing real-world experiences. For example, Breakfast created a cool “mission control” machine for MLB’s Fan Cave, which allowed users to see all different video feeds of live baseball games along with social data, weather information and game stats.
To demonstrate some of what Points can do, Breakfast has set up a live stream from its Brooklyn office. Points will be taking in all tweets tagged with #PointsSign and will point to each user’s location while displaying their tweet. Also, watch the video below to get an idea of how Points works.
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