The Digital Sommelier: Interacting with Intelligent Products
We present the Digital Sommelier, an interactive wine shopping assistant that provides an intuitive multi-modal interface to general product information as well as to particular attributes of a certain product, such as its current temperature. Wine bottle
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DFG - Collaborative Research Centre Resource-adaptive cognitive processes Saarland University PO-Box 15 11 50, Germany {schmitz,baus,rdoerr}@cs.uni-sb.de 2 DFKI GmbH Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 (Building D3 2) 66123 Saarbr¨ ucken, Germany {michael.schmitz,joerg.baus}@dfki.de
Abstract. We present the Digital Sommelier, an interactive wine shopping assistant that provides an intuitive multi-modal interface to general product information as well as to particular attributes of a certain product, such as its current temperature. Wine bottles sense their state via attached wireless sensors and detect user interaction over RFID and acceleration sensors. Visitors can inquire information either through physical interaction with products or a natural language interface. We describe a framework and toolkit for efficient prototyping of sensor based applications as the foundation for the integration of different sensor networks utilized by the sommelier. We further introduce our concept of talking products, an anthropomorphic interaction pattern that allows customers to directly talk to products with personalities.
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Introduction
Emerging sensor technologies that go beyond RFID recognition are becoming cheaper and smaller, paving their way into objects of everyday life. The potential ubiquity of wireless sensors will particularly affect future generations of products as elements of production, processing and delivery chains, enabling them to sense and record their state and communicate with their environment. The prospective immediate benefits for manufacture and retail are an essential factor that is increasing the chances for research work in this field to get adopted by industry - just as RFID technology has already made the step into the commercial sector, as it provides economic values by facilitating process automatization such as product tracking or inventory stocktaking. The end consumer does not directly benefit from this technology, as long as the introduction of RFID technology does not transparently result into price reductions. Sensoric and communication technology that continously sense and observe the state of a product open up possibilities for new services that also benefit end consumers: One simple example is quality assurance of sensitive food such as fresh fish, by monitoring C. Floerkemeier et al. (Eds.): IOT 2008, LNCS 4952, pp. 247–262, 2008. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
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M. Schmitz, J. Baus, and R. D¨ orr
the continous maintenance of the cold chain. By providing information about the temperature history to end customers, their trust into the product could be increased. Temperature is only one product attribute that could provide useful information to the customer: We envision that products will be able to record a complete digital diary with all relevant information, particularly regarding their quality and operation. Being able to communicate with their environment it is further important to allow humans to access such a product memory. We developed a demonstration application, the Digital Sommel
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