Souvenirs


Digital photography has largely replaced film for the average picture-taker. This technology allows people to easily take and store numerous photos, and gift-give photos to distributed friends and relatives over the internet. Yet, digital photos have lost many of the affordances for opportunistic face to face sharing within the home.

Souvenirs is a system that attempts to situate and encourage digital photo sharing in the social setting of the home by linking photo sets to physical memorabilia. These mementos trigger memories and serve as social instruments; a person can enrich their story-telling by moving the physical memento close to their large-format television screen, and the associated photos are immediately displayed.

Contents



Download and Installation

  • Souvenirs (Oct 8, 2008) SouvenirsSrc-Oct8-2008.zip: Revised prototype Souvenirs. This version runs as a distributed system over a home network allowing:
    • Bug fixes
    • re-established the mobile device RFID, but its a hack:
      • looks at the RFID Textbox instead of the mobile machine checkbox to see if it should use it
      • doesn't check to see if the remote is actually there; likley will fail if its not online.
      • above is easy to fix, just have to do it.
    • If photos are on the local machine, it does not copy them i.e., uses them directly
    • two size thumbnails are cached to increase performance and looks of images
    • a wiiMote can now be used to control the slide show
    • various user interface improvements.

Older versions of Souvenirs

Installation Instructions

  • Uninstall any previous versions of the Souvenirs program.
  • Download and extract the zip file.
  • Detailed setup and installation instructions are included in the file Installation & Setup.pdf. In short, you will need to:
    • Setup a shared folder (server).
    • Install the Shared Phidgets toolkit Shared Phidgets.
    • Connect the hardware devices (if desired) and setup the Shared Phidgets Server and Connector.
    • Install Souvenirs (Setup.exe), the default options should be fine. By default the program will install to Program Files -> GroupLab -> Souvenirs
    • A shortcut to the Souvenirs program will be placed in the Start Menu under GroupLab -> Souvenirs, and on the desktop.
    • Run Souvenirs and configure it to connect to the shared folder (server) and Shared Phidgets.
    • The Souvenirs program may use the Phidget RFID Reader (Sensor Base), Circular Touch (scroller) hardware devices, as well as a photo printer (consult manufacturers' manual/driver for installation of the photo printer).

Recipes and How-To's

  • (Under Construction)

Tutorials and Examples

  • (Under Construction)

Links