Se.my.tone: See me. Hear me. Feel me.
The se.my.tone service allows you to send and receive virtual gifts. Using its website, a sender ‘wraps’ songs, images and messages, together with a gift voucher. Through the ordinary post, the receiver receives a virtual key – a Semacode, a kind of 2D barcode. He or she photographs this on a mobile phone and sends it to the server. This allows the receiver to ‘unwrap’ – via the phone and its screen – the songs, images, messages and voucher . The voucher can be exchanged for the gift, chosen and paid for by the sender, at a real or online shop. The virtual gift is thus associated with its traditional physical equivalent.
The project developed from my anthropological analysis of gift ceremonies. The most difficult task was to translate the emotions connected with gift giving – anticipation, suspense and surprise – into the virtual and non-physical world of two interfaces: one for the computer, the other for the mobile phone. I designed part of the website and a mobile prototype using Adobe Flash Lite, trying to give the same logical coherence and graphic feeling to both.
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