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Hagic Wardrobe: Situated Shopping from gour own Bedroom

Dadong Wan Center for Strategic Technology Research, Andersen Consulting, Northbrook, Illinois, USA

Abstract: In this paper, we describe a research prototype, called 'Magic Wardrobe', which serves as a physical interface between the consumer and the on-line marketplace. This new kind of wardrobe has awareness of what is in it. Since it's connected directly to on-line stores, one can use it to engage in "interactive shopping" by selecting any physical item(s) from the wardrobe. For example, if you pick up a jacket and a pair of trousers, it would look for matching shirts from the online marketplace. While you are not actively interacting with the wardrobe, the built-in screen becomes a window for a personalised fashion show, which leisurely displays clothing products from various merchants that are potentially of interest to you.

Keywords: Interactive shopping; Situated computing; Smart furniture

! . I n t r o d u c t i o n

In the world of shopping, on-line or off-line, businesses are perplexed by two major chal- lenges: (1) how to use what people already own to help with what they are about to buy; and (2) how to transform buying from being an end in itself to reinforcing points of a long-term relationship between businesses and their custo- mers. Today, people going to physical stores cannot bring the content of their living room, refrigerator or wardrobe with them. As a result, they have to remember exactly what they already have in order to avoid buying duplicate products or products that do not go well with what they already have, as in the case of furniture or clothing.

By comparison, on-line stores such as Ama- zon.com have an easier time tracking what their customers have bought. Based on that informa- tion, they are able to personalise their offerings. However, even these stores have no means of telling what their customers are buying from their competitors. It is this lack of access to their complete, up-to-date buying history (we call it "buyer context" [1]) that prevents consumers from having richer shopping experiences and from having longer-term relationships with businesses.

We contend that the unavailability of buyer context in most retail settings is largely due to

the lack of inexpensive, fine-grained means of identifying and tracking product movements between businesses and consumers and in the consumer space. Traditionally, the bar code (Uniform Product Code or UPC) is used to help control inventories and expedite checkout lines. The bar code, however, suffers from two shortcomings. It identifies only the group of products (e.g. XL Style 250 shirt from The Gap), rather than individual products (e.g. the specific shirt you hold in your hand). Furthermore, bar code reading requires a line-of-sight and human intervention.

The next generation of UPC, better known as Electronic Product Code or EPC, is recently proposed by an industry consortium 1. The EPC improves on its predecessor in two major ways. Its 96-bit code can uniquely identify every product that will ever be made, sold or bought. The code will also be embedded in tiny, inexpensive smart tags that can be integrated into products themselves or affixed in packages. Such tags can communicate with remote readers using radio frequencies.

Wi th the advent of EPC and smart tags, it is now possible to track in real-time where a

1MIT Auto-ID Center (auto-id.mit.edu) is a research consortium devoted to developing the next generation of bar code (called electronic product code or EPC) and disposable tagging technology for identifying individual products.

�9 Springer-Verlag London Ltd Personal Technologies (2000) 4:234-237

product is, where it is bought, who the current owner is, and how it has been used. The ubiquitous use of such tags will also allow dynamic linking between physical products and the vast amount of on-line information about them. Ultimately, the convergence of tagging and tracking technologies and smart appliances will extend the Internet from the world of bits and bytes into the world of atoms and physical objects. As a result, it becomes increasingly possible to capture the rich context of people's day-to-day activities, such as how they use products. More importantly, the availability and easy access to such contexts open up new ways by which businesses and their customers relate to each other.

2. The Concept

Magic Wardrobe is a research prototype of what we call smart furniture. The primary thrust is not that it offers yet another way of surfing the Internet from your home. Rather, it provides a new kind of interface - physical interface - to the online marketplace. Specifically, an em- bedded sensor enables the wardrobe to detect what clothing products you have. It can also detect what is just being placed into or taken out from the wardrobe. With this capability, you can shop interactively from on-line stores by using what is in the wardrobe as the shopping context. For example, if you want to buy a dress shirt, you first pull out the pair of trousers and the jacket with which you will presumably wear the new shirt. Magic Wardrobe uses the selected trousers and jacket as the constraints to search on-line stores. It returns a list of shirts that best match with them. You may choose to tighten the shopping constraint by pulling out additional trousers you want to the new shirt to go with, or loosen the search scope by dropping off the jacket.

In addition to supporting interactive shop- ping, Magic Wardrobe also provides a new channel to the everyday space through which businesses and their customers can interact spontaneously and continuously. For example, when you bring home a brand-new tie given to you as a birthday present, Magic Wardrobe immediately recognises it as a new arrival, and asks you whether you want to register it with the store in exchange for a 20% discount coupon applicable to future purchases. Today, people

already begin to entrust their grocers to auto- matically replenish their groceries by granting them remote access to their refrigerators. In the future, we will see consumers allowing their favourite department stores to access what they have in their wardrobe so these stores can deliver exactly what their customers need at their doorsteps even before their customers realise it.

To facilitate the interaction between the consumer and the online marketplace, Magic Wardrobe introduces four constructs:

�9 My Wardrobe. It corresponds to exactly what you already have in the physical wardrobe. You may browse it and find out when and where a product is purchased, and how much you pay for it. You can also view products from the current marketplace that are similar to what you have. When you take out a product from the wardrobe, or put in a new one, My Wardrobe is updated instantly to reflect the current state of the physical wardrobe. �9 My Wish-List. It contains the products you do not own but have indicated in the past that you are interested in owning. Magic Wardrobe periodically suggests products that may be of interest to you based on what you have and what is on sale in the marketplace at the time. You may choose to buy the suggested products or ignore them. Alternatively, you tell Magic Wardrobe you are interested in a product but do not want to buy it now by putting it to My Wish-List. �9 My Store. It contains a personalised list of merchandise from various on-line stores that Magic Wardrobe deems relevant to you, based on such information as what you already have, your preference in style and colour, season and price. My Store is constantly updated to reflect the current offerings from the marketplace. �9 The Market. It consists of a listing of on-line stores that offer products typically found in your wardrobe. At times you may want to shop in the open market, as opposed to just those in My Store. In its idle mode, Magic Wardrobe also randomly displays products from The Market.

Magic Wardrobe is equipped with an embedded Pentium-III computer and Internet connectivity. All clothing products in the wardrobe are affixed with tiny Texas Instruments' Tag-It T M smart tags that uniquely identify these products. As shown in Fig. 1, Magic Wardrobe looks just like an ordinary wardrobe. You interact with it through

Magic Wardrobe: Situated Shopping from your own Bedroom

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Fig. 1. As a physical interface to online stores, M:~gic Wm-dt-obc i-ins ~l bui l t- in touci'i-scrccl'h w+icc output, and sensors for detecting the physical COl~tCDt tip the wardrohc and the people around it.

the touch-sensitive screen, voice output, and the physical products in the wardrobe.

3. An Usage Scenario

After a long workday and a hectic commute, Natalie finally arrives home. As soon as she steps into her bedroom, she hears a voice from her Magic Wardrobe:

"Good evening, Natalie. I have found a pair of matching trousers for your newly bought blouse."

Quite delighted, Natalie walks toward her ward- robe. She sees the small pictures of a pair of brown trousers and a blue skirt on her wardrobe display. She touches the picture of the trousers, which leads to the display of a bigger picture of the trousers, together with the blouse she bought the day before. At the bottom, two action buttons are shown: Buy and Add to My Wish List. The outfit looks good to her, but she isn't sure about buying it right then. So, she decides to put it on to her wish list.

Fig. 2. With M;,~ic- Wardrobe, you can intcmctivcly shop fiom your own bL'droon~ by selecting :my clothing pioducts fiom the wardrobe. The Wmdrohc req~onds by returning{ a list of re:itching products from the m:ukctplacc. You tony choose to }~tly the sugg{cstcd products, or put them t111 {O My Wish- List.

Since the sunnner is around the corner, Natalie is really interested in taking a close look at the blue skirt. She touches the picture of the skirt. Immediately, Magic Wardrobe shows the skirt together with her newly acquired blouse. Natalie is curious about what other clothing she has that will go well with the skirt. She touches the Show All Outfits command. The wardrobe shows two other matching blouses she has in her wardrobe.

Convinced by its versatility, Natalie decides to purchase the skirt by selecting the Buy command. Her Magic Wardrobe automatically debits the amount from her default credit card. It also reminds her that a 20% discount coupon from the store is being added to her online wallet, and asks her to stay tuned with the upcoming summer fashion.

4. Discussions and Conclusions

As described earlier, Magic Wardrobe attempts to address two major challenges in shopping: (1) how to use buyer context to facilitate shopping, and (2) how to use shopping to reinforce the

D. Wan

relationship between consumers and businesses. To tackle the former, we introduce the concept of My Wardrobe, which represents the entire buyer context for clothing shopping, i.e. all clothing products you already have. You can easily use it to constrain or broaden searches for potential products in the marketplace that might be of interest. Each time a new product is bought and added to the wardrobe, My Wardrobe is automatically updated, since each product is uniquely tagged.

Magic Wardrobe represents a new channel through which consumers and businesses can interact with each other. Consumers can selec- tively make available the content of their wardrobe to their favourite merchants. In return, they receive personalised offerings and timely reminders about products that will be of interest to them. Because the wardrobe is in the everyday space, businesses can more easily deliver products/services to where their custo- mers live, rather than having to lure them to their stores.

Magic Wardrobe is another example of situated computing - an ongoing research pro- gramme at Andersen Consulting's Center for Strategic Technology Research (CSTaR) [2,3]. In this programme, we attempt to integrate a broad range of sensory, computing, and commu- nications technologies to create new types of consumer experiences and new channels be- tween businesses and consumers. As demon- strated with Magic Wardrobe, thanks to

technologies like smart tags, future shopping will take place wherever people live, not just in stores or websites.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Anatole Gershman for his help in the conceptualisation of this project and his continual guidance and encouragements; Adam Brody for his contributions in the implementation of Magic Wardrobe; Eric Meidel and Joyce McCarthy for their contribu- tions in designing the user interface; and Joe McCarthy for his critique of the early draft of this paper.

References

1. Wan D. Magic home: exploiting the duality between the physical and the virtual worlds. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI'2000) Extended Abstracts, 1-6 April 2000, The Hague

2. Gershman AV, McCarthy JF, Fano AE. Situated computing: bridging the gap between intention and action. In: Ttlird International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC '99), 18 19 October 1999, San Francisco, CA

3. Wan D. Magic medicine cabinet: a situated portal for consumer healthcare. In: First International Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (HUC '99), 27- 29 September 1999, Karlsruhe, Germany

Correspondence to: Dadong Wan, Center for Strategic Technology Research (CSTaR), Andersen Consulting, 3773 Willow Road, Northbrook, IL 60062, USA. Email: dwan@cstar.ac.com

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