Milky: On-Product App for Emotional Product to Human Interactions

Do you remember Milky the little charming milk carton running around the city in Blur’s video clip Coffee and TV? We decided to push the idea of this anthropomorphic milk carton a step further, by presenting a new way of emotional interaction of and with products. We will present this approach during the Mobile HCI 2013 Poster session.

We concretized this vision of an on-product application based on the rapid prototyping platform – Microsoft Gadgeteer.

What is an On-Product App?

The heart of Milky, the intelligent milk carton, is a GHI Electronics Spider Board, that runs the .NET Framework. Combined with a 3,5 inch touchscreen display in front of the milk carton enables users to interact directly by gesture.

Milky shows immediately a corresponding feedback to the touch-inputs in the form of emotions and animations. An inbuilt application controls the shown actions based on concrete sensor information. Just imagine: Milky displays its emotions over the touchscreen and once the product is no more consumable e.g. due to an expiry of the eat-by day or because the customer has completely used it, Milky goes into the “Dead”-state. In this mode three options are displayed on the screen: the first one displays a Google Maps with the nearest recycling stations assuming the milk carton knows its location over the GPS module – so that the recycling chain will not be broken. This is particularly interesting for optimizing the product’s carbon footprint. The second option allows the customer to share his “product-experience” over Facebook with a virtual “I like it” button so that he can tell over his social network that he loved the product he has just consumed!

And the last one – you guess it – will enable customer to buy the same product again. Nice feature isn’t it ? That’s our vision of the product of the future!

Short Video Clip:

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