Futurice, demo for Slush
2017
Blog post about the design process
Role: design lead
The project was featured in the in Werben und Verkaufen (Advertising and Sales), one of the leading marketing magazines in Germany, in a print issue on Innovation.
The task was to create a magical demo presentation for Slush, to spread the message of Futurice experimenting with emerging tech. The robot InMoov, which had been built at Futurice previously, was selected for this demo. The idea was to have the robot operate as a croupier at a blackjack table.
To have the robot function as a croupier, a behavior tree was created. This meant identifying all situations that the robot would encounter, and create scripts for these. This meant writing out exact lines that the robot would say, and creating gestures for it. Additionally, I drew the graphics needed for the digital blackjack table.
People were very excited by the robot, and returned to play with it multiple times at Slush. Although a rudimentary experiment, this gave insight and provided learnings about social robots in operation. The key learnings were:
1. Robot gaze direction and hand motion is very effective in directing users’ attention
2. Use people’s assumptions about robots to your advantage
3. The boundaries of a robot are not clearly defined
4. The (near) future of robotics may be in integrated solutions where robot capabilities are synced with mobile phones or tablets
Learnings are discussed in more detail in my blog post here.
Adobe Illustrator, behavior tree frameworking