Hybrid Gifts

交换礼物有着悠久的传统，并被广泛认为是社会重要的，建立联系和促进福祉。它还通过推动产品销售为制造商和零售商带来经济效益，预计到2021年全球礼品市场将超过300亿英镑。数字礼品，以数字格式在线赠送媒体（如音乐，视频，图像，游戏和订阅帐户）作为礼物仍处于起步阶段，但市场增长迅速。然而，数字礼物作为礼物，并不像实物礼物那样受到收件人的赞赏，因此很容易被遗忘，也很少反映或回报。公司正在抓住机会，通过支持服务，特别是通过将实物商品与数字服务联系起来，以支持定制或个性化，为有形产品提供附加价值。例如，当使用移动的电话扫描物理产品时，物理产品通过覆盖在其上的增强现实内容来增强。研究人员探索了这些产品的价值如何通过数字化提升，例如让二手商品或乐器能够讲述他们过去使用的故事。在这个项目中，我们将探索这些新型的混合产品如何灵活地支持强大而迷人的新礼物体验，而不是将实物和数字礼物分开对待。为此，我们将开展两个阶段的工作。首先，我们将探索不同的机制，将实体和数字结合成混合艺术品，并绘制定制的机会，以创造有意义的个性化礼物。这涵盖了在移动的手机上运行的沉浸式增强现实应用程序，以及嵌入新物理对象的物联网技术。通过与真实的用户“在野外”工作，我们将改进我们的设计，以获得原则和指导方针，以了解如何将一件事的物理和数字方面相结合，并进行定制，以增加彼此的价值。第二，我们将探讨如何促进混合礼物的创造和与不同利益相关者在他们的一生中分享。为了做到这一点，我们将脚手架：生产商制造混合人工制品;零售商最初配置它们;赠送者制作并个性化这些作为礼物送给他人，然后给予他们并遵循他们;而对于他们的收件人打开他们，享受他们，回报，并最终拉他们从过时的重新赠送，该项目汇集了诺丁汉混合现实实验室研究人员在人机交互和普适计算方面的专业知识，拉夫堡设计学院的研究人员。我们的工作旨在为英国公司创造机会，在全球市场上创新新产品和服务。通过与行业合作伙伴的合作，我们将探索一系列不同类型的产品如何成为混合礼品：快速消费品，如沐浴产品礼品套装，可以与音乐相结合，创造多感官体验;手工制作的高价值工匠产品，如珠宝，充满了关于如何制作一件作品的故事，关于赠送者为什么选择它的思考和接受者使用它的图像;以及包括关于成分的信息但也包括来自赠送者的个人信息以创建增强的打开体验的诸如巧克力的奢侈食品礼物。我们将创造、赠送、启用、销售和研究这些新产品，以了解它们的用途和价值，并生成一个礼品工具包来支持这一过程，供社区使用。

The exchange of gifts has a long tradition and has been widely recognised as socially important, building bonds and promoting wellbeing. It also brings economic benefits to manufacturers and retailers by driving the sales of products, with the global gifting market predicted to exceed £30 billion by 2021. Digital gifting, giving media (such as music, video, images, games and subscription accounts) as a gift in a digital format online is still in its infancy, but is a rapidly growing sector of the market. Digital gifts, however, fail to be appreciated as gifts as much as their physical counterparts by their recipients, and as such are easily forgotten, and rarely reflected on or reciprocated.Companies are embracing opportunities to provide additional value to tangible products through supporting services, in particular by connecting physical goods to digital services to support customisation or personalisation. For example, physical products are enhanced by augmented reality content overlaid onto them when they are scanned using mobile phones. Researchers have explored how the value of these products has been enhanced through the digital, for example giving second hand goods or musical instruments the ability to tell stories about their past usage.In this project, rather than treating physical and digital gifting separately, we will explore how these new kinds of hybrid products can flexibly support powerful and engaging new gifting experiences. To achieve this, we will engage in two phases of work. Firstly, we will explore different mechanism for combining the physical and digital into hybrid artefacts, and chart the opportunities for customisation to create meaningful personalised gifts. This spans immersive augmented reality applications to run on a mobile phone to Internet-of-Things technologies embedded in new physical objects. By working 'in the wild' with real users, we will refine our designs to derive principles and guidelines to understand how the physical and digital facets of a thing can be combined and customised to add value to one another. Secondly, we will explore how to facilitate the creation and sharing of hybrid gifts with various stakeholders over their lifetime. To do this we will scaffold: producers to make hybrid artefacts; retailers to initially configure them; givers to make and personalise these as gifts for others, give them and follow them afterwards; and for their recipients to unwrap them, enjoy them, reciprocate and ultimately pull them from obsolescence by re-gifting, recycling or repurposing.This project brings together expertise in Human Computer Interaction and Pervasive Computing from researchers at Nottingham's Mixed Reality Laboratory with design researchers at the Loughborough Design School. Our work aims to create opportunities for UK companies to innovate new products and services in the global marketplace. Through collaboration with our industrial partners we will explore how a range of different types of product might become hybrid gifts: fast-moving-consumer-goods such as bath product gift sets that could be coupled to a music track to create a multisensory experience; hand-crafted high-value artisan products such as jewellery that are enriched with stories about how a piece was made, reflections on why it was chosen by the giver and images of it in use by the receiver; and luxury food gifts such as chocolate that include information about the ingredients but also a personal message from the giver to create an enhanced unwrapping experience. We will create, give, enable, sell and study these new products to understand their use and value, and generate a gifting toolkit to support this process for use by the community.