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![]() Displax and Optimus: Pushing Clicks & Bricks into 21st Century Retail
By Louis M. Brill
As retail moves into the 21st century, much has been made of e-commerce or the setting up of electronic stores on the Internet where home shopping is done via your living room or on the run with your smart phone.
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As much as e-commerce has come into its own as a shopping format and separates itself from a physical store, so is this comparison known as clicks and bricks as a choice of how customers relate to shopping in these modern times. Signage and advertising play an important part in both clicks and bricks shopping worlds, in both promoting brands and products, and letting customers learn about a product and buying it either in a store or on-line. In a dramatic approach to incorporating both clicks and bricks under a single rooftop, Optimus, a leading Portuguese telecommunications company opened a revolutionary retail concept store in Portugal where digital signage became the centerpiece of connecting customers to its brand and its products. They did so by incorporating single-touch screens and a media facade window as a way of enticing customers to their store and inspiring them to purchase the company's products.
The creation of this interactive-based retail concept store involved many players including Rem Koolhaas (Rotterdam, Netherlands), a world renown architect, Kram / Weisshaar, an international design firm, DISPLAX, a leading edge interactive technology company, and Optimus, Telecommunications, the client, whose foresight and vision became the fuel that drove this project to its final click and brick and mortar creation.
Casa Da Musica with futuristic retail
To do this, Optimus's challenge to its store designers was that they wanted one central presentation space that would showcase all the Optimus products and services. They were looking for a way to introduce a new era of high-tech experiential shopping that would as Fernandes put it, "have a life of its own." It was at this point that DISPLAX entered the picture with their user-based interactive technologies and collaborated with Kram/Weisshaar to create The Experience Block, which was an interactive-based retail kiosk that integrated the store's physical space with an Internet shopping experience. It was of the likes of which has never been seen before, and truly looked like it came from some high-tech 22nd century futuristic mall. Although the Optimus store had many other interactive and dynamic features, limited space allows this discussion of only its main highlights.
Interactive Retail: It's in the details
The essence of DISPLAX's interactive technology was its use of a non-conductive thin-film polymer Nanowires grid technology with projected capacitive feedback. This process enabled the screen to transform into a point and touch display allowing the customer's fingers to detect and activate data points on the screen. In other words, to turn your finger into a mouse-cursor inteface. With a strong emphasis on interactive digital signage, Optimus has redefined and modernized the consumer's retail shopping experience by providing on-site access to a digital catalog of its various telecommunication offerings. In doing this, it creates a convergence between its on-line product fact sheets and its in-store product samples for customers to actually examine and test out. At the very least, it presents an evolving format from signs just being passive message presenters to now, interactive displays providing customers with self-selecting information screens on the products they want to learn about.
Armed with better product information, and a chance to review the actual product, it's more likely that these displays would create strong customer inspiration towards purchasing these products. Likewise because of all the digital activity through these displays, it also allows Optimus to track customer queries and develop product audits on preferred customers feature favorites and product sales as purchased through the Experience Block. What is important here is the scale of this interactive workspace, which was composed of 16-interactive retail product information providers. For the users who send The Experience Block technical queries, it acts like a sales concierge providing them with product information of several of Optimus media offerings including high definition digital television, internet services, downloadable music, music videos, ring tones and wallpapers and mobile phones. The Experience Block with its different interactive user portals established on both sides of the retail kiosk is able to assist at least up to 20 or more people at the same time, depending on how many people gather round an Experience portal. And finely there's no getting away from its coolness factor, it's like shopping on-line where you're drilling through a web site for information, but you're also in a store where in most cases you can see the product as a physical sample or talk to a sales rep for more specific information.
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Experience block portals
The phone configurer
Cell phone pharmacy
TV module
Wallpaper's module
Module ringtone
MP3 module As a shopping experience, it's 'out of this world', with a new paradigm of retail sign displays that are interactive, and keyed directly to the products they are promoting. The Experience Block is representative of a new generation of displays categorized as 'smart signs.' Fernandes says, "not only are our interactive displays providing customers with appropriate product information, but doing so in fun and interesting ways of educating and guiding the customer towards purchases of their desired products."
Microdot windows As a further enticement to draw customers in, another exciting part of the Optimus store design was its media facade look that played across the entire retail store window each night. As Fernandes stated, "Optimus gave us another big challenge by proposing their store front window be transparent during the day allowing passersby to see into the store, but at night they wanted the store windows to have some special look that would also attract people and draw them into the store."
"To solve this challenge, DISPLAX developed a special thin film skin that was covered with thousands and thousands of light reflecting microdots. By day in ambient light the store windows appear transparent allowing sidewalk viewers to watch customers interacting with The Experience Block. At night, the microdots act as a projection screen allowing images to be displayed across the entire front window area of the store."
Touch screens: The crown jewel of retail shopping
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