The Memory Project
by Imran Ali
Looks like cellcos and operators are waking up to the need for people to preserve and curate the mobile media. In recent month’s I’ve written about the need for the mobility of messages and some of the interesting companies, like Treasuremytext, that’re beginning to fulfil this need.
Last week Britain’s O2 network, chose to celebrating its Bluebook service - for saving contacts, photos & texts automatically - by launching the O2 Memory Project…
10 foot high cylinder with eleven cameras placed equidistance around its perimeter. Each of these cameras takes a picture in sequence every five seconds, creating a 360 degree, digital panorama of the outside location very minute. Animated lights on The O2 Memory Project’s exterior shell signal when each camera is about to take a shot. These images are then transmitted to giant screens on the structure’s interior. Visitors can venture inside
to view and interact with the images via thermal images cameras. These cameras allow visitors to ‘direct’ which images are displayed – moving to shift the displayed images back and forwards in time, interacting with the location’s memories with ‘Minority Report’ style gestures.
Fantastic. Lovely to see O2 ploughing money into a lovely piece of interactive art, but in just signing up for Bluebook in the last few minutes, the service has failed to deliver the necessary settings to my O2 Nokia N95. I’m hardly going to trust such suckage with precious data and memories when they can’t even register an existing customer!
True to form, cellcos and telcos - to paraphrase Bart Simpson - singularly suck and blow at the same time when it comes to service design.
Try harder O2. In the meantime, stick with Treasuremytext - my guess is they care more about preserving your memories than screwing you with data revenues.
