My new office is on Marshall Street, parallel to Carnaby Street, London’s hip’n’appenin’ fashion street. I, thus, have cause to walk around the area quite a lot.
Yesterday I was walking by the Orange shop there and thought it was about time I documented the rather fancy screen they’ve got taking up most of the window.
I did you a QIK video, complete with mumbling sound:
The real ARSE with doing QIK videos in public is that people start looking. Within seconds of me streaming live, a little crowd of dumb Londoners had stopped, stared at me, then at what I was ‘filming’ and stopped to watch. In fact if I’d ripped off my clothes and tipped a pot of red paint over myself whilst yelling ‘I LOVE VODAFONE’ repeatedly, I don’t think I’d have attracted so many folk. By the end of my stupid mumbling commentary there were about 9 or 10 folk of varying ‘under 30’ ages, staring with mute attention at me, waiting for me to ‘do something else’.
That’s why I started using this interactive screen then stopped, in short order, after I recognised the crowd I was attracting. You want to be careful, you see, lest some bright spark in some CCTV bureau somewhere send some Police Community Support Officers down to stare at me as well.
It’s pretty neat, the Orange screen. We’re getting near to the Minority Report view of shop advertising, aren’t we? You can manipulate the screen and get information about various Orange services. When the system detects your presence, it says hello and asks you to get involved. No doubt it speaks to you about the services as you’re browsing. I didn’t get that far before I quickly shut off Qik and went about my business.