QRator is a collaborative project between the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and UCL Museums and Collections, to develop new kinds of content, co-curated by the public, museum curators, and academic researchers, to enhance museum interpretation, community engagement and establish new connections to museum exhibit content. It is supported by the UCL Public Engagement Unit under the Beacons for Public Engagement programme – funded by the UK funding councils, Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust.

Finally thanks to the UCL side of the TalesofThings team –  Dr Ralph Barthel and Dr Martin De Jode for working behind the scenes and putting the technology in place. TalesofThings is funded by the Digital Economy Research Councils UK.

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The clothing donated has some very respectable previous owners such as Annie Lennox, Colin Firth, Helen Mirren, Kate Moss, list goes on…Each item in the shop has been tagged with a QR code which links to stories about what the money raised will buy.

Visitors to the Curiosity Shop can view these stories on their own Smartphones or use one of our bespoke RFID readers to scan the item. The readers glow when scanned near a RFID tag and play the associated narrative on the screen. Designed by Jon Rogers from the University of Dundee with tech inside from here in CASA it links direct into the Tales of Things system. Once the item has been scanned the object story will appear on a plasma screen in the store, making the object come alive.

There are some hidden gems in the collection too which have a unique story attached to them from the celebrity who donated the item such as the dress below which Annie Lennox wore at Nelson Mandela’s 90^th birthday party in London.

Over the last few weeks TalesofThings has been working with Oxfam to collect the celebrity stories and tag items in the store with both RFID and QRCodes. In essence this allows items of clothing to tell their story via either our bluetooth enabled curisoity reader or via our free Android/iPhone apps. Once the items have been sold, the owners are able to add their stories – via a mashup of sociable objects meets the antiques roadshow.

If you come into the shop you can try out the curiosity reader, scan Annies dress or any of the other items with codes and see the stories behind the objects. We are in Selfridges until April 10th, come down to grab a celebrity item tagged with their story, help raise money for Oxfam and take a look at the emerging technology behind the Internet of Things.

A massive thanks goes to Oxfam, Selfridges, Annie Lennox and the TalesofThings team who have worked hard behind the scenes, the installation is simply wonderful…

You can see a list of donated items direct via the tales of things site.

The post QRCodes, Sociable Objects & RFID – The Oxfam Curiosity Shop in Selfridges appeared first on Digital Urban.

Its simple to do, just sign up with Tales of Things, upload a image of your building of choice (under 2mb) and add a story. Your building will then go live and your be able to add it to the architecture group. If you want you can also print out a QRCode that you can stick to the building allowing anyone to scan the code and add to the story/history of the building via the free iPhone/Android apps.

Your building will also be able to ‘Tweet’ everytime it is scanned or a new comment/story added, it will also become part of the ‘World of Things’ map – a place to view all the objects added so far to the site.

The project team are working on ways to make the objects more location aware and aware of near by objects, it could be interesting over the next few months to see how this develops.


You can start tagging anything and everything via talesofthings.com

The post Wired Big Ideas for 2011: Chatitecture – Talking Buildings appeared first on Digital Urban.

Its simple to do, just sign up with Tales of Things, upload a image of your building of choice (under 2mb) and add a story. Your building will then go live and your be able to add it to the architecture group. If you want you can also print out a QRCode that you can stick to the building allowing anyone to scan the code and add to the story/history of the building via the free iPhone/Android apps.

Your building will also be able to ‘Tweet’ everytime it is scanned or a new comment/story added, it will also become part of the ‘World of Things’ map – a place to view all the objects added so far to the site.

The project team are working on ways to make the objects more location aware and aware of near by objects, it could be interesting over the next few months to see how this develops.


You can start tagging anything and everything via talesofthings.com

The post Wired Big Ideas for 2011: Chatitecture – Talking Buildings appeared first on Digital Urban.

Rob Walkers article is a good introduction to the potential of tagging and in particular memory. This article has launched many other blogs and tweets that tell our story along with Itizen and Stickbits. Try this: http://twitter.com/#search?q=social%20objects

and these links…

NYTimes1 , NYTimes2 , Read/Write/Web , Inventorspot

The Back Story

By Rob Walker

Ask anybody about the most meaningful object he owns, and you’re sure to get a story — this old trunk belonged to Grandpa, we bought that tacky coffee mug on our honeymoon, and so on. The relationship between the possessions we value and the narratives behind them is unmistakable. Current technologies of connection, and enterprises that take advantage of them, surface this idea in new ways — but they also suggest the many different kinds of stories, information and data that objects can, or will, tell us.

A project called Totem, financed by a grant from the Research Councils U.K., concentrates on the narratives of thing-owners. The basic concept is that users can write up (or record) the story of, say, a chess trophy or a silver bracelet and upload it to TalesofThings.com. Slap on a sticker with a newfangled bar code, and anybody with a properly equipped smartphone can scan the object and learn that the trophy was won in a 2007 tournament in Paris and that the bracelet was a gift purchased in Lisbon.

In May, Totem researchers worked with an Oxfam thrift store in Manchester, recording stories by stuff-donors, for a spinoff project called RememberMe. Shoppers could hear short back stories for about 60 pieces of secondhand merchandise. The used goods with stories were swiftly snapped up, says Chris Speed, who teaches at the Edinburgh College of Art and is the principal researcher at Totem: “You pick up these banal objects, and if it has a story, as soon as you hear it, it becomes something far richer.”

You can follow all updates via the TOTeM Blog

The post Tales of Things: Social Objects in the New York Times appeared first on Digital Urban.

Rob Walkers article is a good introduction to the potential of tagging and in particular memory. This article has launched many other blogs and tweets that tell our story along with Itizen and Stickbits. Try this: http://twitter.com/#search?q=social%20objects

and these links…

NYTimes1 , NYTimes2 , Read/Write/Web , Inventorspot

The Back Story

By Rob Walker

Ask anybody about the most meaningful object he owns, and you’re sure to get a story — this old trunk belonged to Grandpa, we bought that tacky coffee mug on our honeymoon, and so on. The relationship between the possessions we value and the narratives behind them is unmistakable. Current technologies of connection, and enterprises that take advantage of them, surface this idea in new ways — but they also suggest the many different kinds of stories, information and data that objects can, or will, tell us.

A project called Totem, financed by a grant from the Research Councils U.K., concentrates on the narratives of thing-owners. The basic concept is that users can write up (or record) the story of, say, a chess trophy or a silver bracelet and upload it to TalesofThings.com. Slap on a sticker with a newfangled bar code, and anybody with a properly equipped smartphone can scan the object and learn that the trophy was won in a 2007 tournament in Paris and that the bracelet was a gift purchased in Lisbon.

In May, Totem researchers worked with an Oxfam thrift store in Manchester, recording stories by stuff-donors, for a spinoff project called RememberMe. Shoppers could hear short back stories for about 60 pieces of secondhand merchandise. The used goods with stories were swiftly snapped up, says Chris Speed, who teaches at the Edinburgh College of Art and is the principal researcher at Totem: “You pick up these banal objects, and if it has a story, as soon as you hear it, it becomes something far richer.”

You can follow all updates via the TOTeM Blog

The post Tales of Things: Social Objects in the New York Times appeared first on Digital Urban.