“Far from ‘technology for technology’s sake,’ this impressive project uses technologies creatively and smartly in order to service a user experience that is both magical and practical.” —juror Erika Tarte
“The virtual at the service of creating the reality of your dreams. Smart design and technology applied to a task that would otherwise be difficult to do with the same results.” —juror Fanny Krivoy
Overview: Neither a catalog nor a sample does justice to Marvin’s highly customizable windows and doors. For example, one type of window can have thousands of different color and material combinations. To fully reflect Marvin’s offerings, Boston, Massachusetts–based digital ad agency INPHANTRY created the Marvin brand experience center, a public interactive showroom located in the Boston home-design space 7 Tide. The center has it all, from Moleskine notebooks boasting radio-frequency identification (RFID) to an interactive touch table that has more than 10,000 animated renderings and can track objects placed upon it. Users can design and visualize their projects in real time in this showroom experience.
• The center leverages RFID, tactile recognition technology, projection mapping and a custom customer relationship management (CRM) system.
• Technology included Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Swift for iOS, Swift for MacOS and Swift for tvOS.
• A team of ten to twelve people completed the project in eighteen months.
Comments by Regi Jacob, Kevin Lee, Paul Saraiva and Derek Tran:
What are the project’s core features? “The RFID tracking and CRM systems are integral to capturing each user’s personal journey and preserving the experience so that it can be leveraged in the design process and shared with multiple stakeholders. The ability to render customized products in real time based off of each user’s physical interactions with components like wood grains or paint chips is also key to creating a more personal and immersive experience. Finally, the ability to make size and scale adjustments that can be rendered in real time is a powerful feature that brings designs to life. When users can stand in front of a projection and make adjustments based on their own preferences, tastes and even physical attributes like height, they feel as though they are truly designing the home of their dreams.”
How many videos, images and other media elements does the project have? “All together, including photorealistic renders and 3-D models, literally tens of thousands. A vast amount of material combinations needed to be programmed and rendered for the visualizations.”
Was the topic of the project a new one for you? “Yes and no. We had never worked with the building and construction industry before, and we had no idea how complex the process of choosing windows for your home actually was until we immersed ourselves in the user journey. While it was a learning process to get up to speed on an entire industry, our approach to concepting and user experience—whether it’s for an app, a website or a physical showroom—is pretty much the same. And when ideating for such a specific objective, our background in consumer experiences really helped to bring a more human and emotional element to the concept.”
