Hybrid Gifts

交换礼物有着悠久的传统，被广泛认为具有重要的社会意义，可以建立联系，增进福祉。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GB。数字礼物，即以数字格式在线赠送媒体(如音乐、视频、图像、游戏和订阅账户)，仍处于初级阶段，但是市场中一个快速增长的领域。然而，数字礼物不像实物礼物那样被接受者视为礼物，因此很容易被遗忘，很少被考虑或回报。公司正在抓住机会，通过支持服务为有形产品提供额外价值，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。例如，使用手机扫描时，增强现实内容会覆盖在实体产品上，从而增强了实体产品的功能。研究人员探索了这些产品的价值是如何通过数字技术来提升的，例如，让二手商品或乐器能够讲述它们过去的用途。在这个项目中，我们将探索这些新型混合产品如何灵活地支持强大而引人入胜的新礼物体验，而不是分开对待实物礼物和数字礼物。为此，我们将分两个阶段开展工作。首先，我们将探索将实物和数字结合到混合文物中的不同机制，并绘制定制机会，以创造有意义的个性化礼物。这包括在手机上运行的沉浸式增强现实应用程序，以及嵌入到新物理对象中的物联网技术。通过与真正的用户合作，我们将改进我们的设计，以得出原则和指导方针，以理解如何将事物的物理和数字方面结合起来，并进行定制，以增加彼此的价值。其次，我们将探索如何促进混合礼物的创建和在其一生中与不同的利益相关者共享。为了做到这一点，我们将搭建脚手架：生产商制造混合艺术品；零售商对其进行初始配置；送礼者制作并个性化这些礼物作为礼物送给他人，给予并随后跟进；接受者打开它们，享受它们，回报并最终通过重新赠送、回收或重新利用它们从过时。这个项目汇集了诺丁汉混合现实实验室研究人员和拉夫堡设计学院的设计研究人员在人机交互和普适计算方面的专业知识。我们的工作旨在为英国公司在全球市场创新新产品和服务创造机会。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物：快速消费品，如沐浴产品礼品套装，可以与音乐组合在一起创造多感官体验；手工制作的高价值手工艺产品，如珠宝，其中包含有关物品如何制作的故事，反思为什么被送礼者选择以及接收者使用它的图像；以及奢侈食品礼物，如巧克力，其中包括配料信息，但也包括送礼者的个人信息，以创造更好的打开体验。我们将创建、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，并生成一个礼物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.