Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab recently got a peek of our “reading around the breakfast table” future imagined by The New York Times Company’s Research & Development Lab. Using Microsoft’s surface technology, this touchscreen kitchen table allows sharing of the morning news with your loved ones. More than that, it is “highly personal and highly social”, interacting with everyday objects and making sharing of news easy. Wonderful.
I put my phone down, I get these little red radials coming out of it. And now I’m presented with a list of those articles that have been shared with me. I can tap that last one that’s been left, and then it comes right back. I can take a look at that and see what’s been left for me. And that could have naturally spawned some sort of an alert on my phone, or on my laptop at work, in a couple of different ways.
And certainly we can have the table react to other objects, as well — you know, it is a table, first and foremost. So you might be eating your breakfast or having a cup of coffee. That gives us an opportunity to be a little playful with the ad experience, as well.
