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Using a touch screen interface, designed to create and manage all the spontaneous and creative messages you’ll send to your family, Totem is the perfect way to communicate with the people you live with.
Totem is a new, simple and fun everyday-use touch screen interface. It is the perfect tool to communicate with the people you live with, for it allies the simplicity of the post-it note and the efficiency of the answering machine.
Use Totem to leave a message to a roommate you barely see, or to your kids that are already in bed when you get home. This tool can become the memory of your family-life as you’ll keep all the cute and important messages sent to one another at the important moments of your life.
It is a Flash based interface installed on a PC. The PC is connected to a touch screen so you can interact with the interface and draw on it, a webcam and a microphone to record the video messages, a fingerprint reader to log-in your personal interface, and three LEDs used as the “Light Alerting” system.
With Totem, sharing and keeping in touch with the people you live with has never been that easy.
Living with several other people in the same house requires a minimum of organisation. Of course, everyone has its own cell phone, but what do we mostly use to communicate inside the house? The post-It notes are convenient to leave quick messages.
Write it, stick it, read it, throw it away. But unfortunately, you can loose them, or they slide underneath the fridge and you read them just too late. The answering machine is the same for every inhabitant of your home. Leave a message after the tone, listen to it, delete it, and go to the next one. It’s quite practical but there, the problem is that you end up spending more time listening to everyone else’s messages than yours.
This is why we created Totem.
Totem is a prototype of a touch screen interface that acts as the intermediary between each member of your home. It’s a kind of audio/video answering machine that allows you to leave different types of messages (drawings, photos, videos, texts) in a more friendly and recreational way. It’s like the "Next Generation Interactive Post it Note".
When we worked on the concept and the graphical user interface (GUI), we tried to keep all the sentimental and emotional values that you naturally share with the people you live with, by recreating the tools you use in real life. For example, think of the little heart you draw in the corner of a message you intended to leave to your girlfriend. Well instead of drawing this mark of affection on some paper you’ll throw away a couple of days later, you will do the same on our touch screen interface, thanks to our drawing tool. And what is even better is that you’ll draw this on a photograph or video while you’re recorded speaking and virtually looking at her!
The touch screen interface is also equipped with a fingerprint reader that enables each user to access his personal “space” in a quick way. This personal space is fully customizable (colour, background, theme, etc).
One of the GUI’s particularities is the background has been conceived to evolve as the weather evolves, in real time. Connected wirelessly to the internet, Totem receives permanently parameters like the actual weather, time and temperature. This process ensures us that the interface will never look the same, and breaks up the visual monotony that an everyday use could lead to.
In Addition, we designed special sound effects and background sounds for this application, which also changes according to the weather.
Another cool feature appears when you blow right on the screen; it steams up the window pane, and then let’s you write or draw something on it just like you would do on a cold window during winter. The next person that will steam up the screen will get your drawn message.
Even if this tool has been thought of to be used in different type of places such as Exhibitions, Museums, or at work for example, Totem has mostly been designer to be installed at home, to make emotion and information exchange easier. It is a user-friendly interface, an emotion sharing tool, and a modern way to communicate.
With Totem, we attempted to reinvent the in-house communication patterns.
