These United Arrows Storefront Robots In Japan mimic customers movement. The store has placed "MarionetteBots," two robots masquerading as mannequins, dressed to the nines in United Arrows clothing, in its storefront.
This piece of point of purchase magic was brought together by United Arrows, in collaboration with their advertising agency TBWA\Hakuhodousing. Using Xbox's Kinect technology and a series of 16 wires. They allow the mannequins to copy the movements of those who stand in front of the display.—similar to a marionette.
On the one hand, big ups to anyone making creative use of puppets these days to increase your customer footfall and to increase your online voice. It also creates a new way to innovate for POS/POP from the off-putting, and rather boring department store mannequin into something for the public's amusement.
Be honest, if you saw a crowd of people in front of a store door, would you try to enter it? Or stand and stare for a few seconds then move on? Perhaps the placement of these would have been better on a faux runway near the store of in the store. At least Uniter Arrows had the good fortune place these mannequins in a polite culture. I can imagine this type of advertisement in an United kingdom, they would have ended up doing some rather comically or riskque positions as soo as they were up and running.
A short video for United Arrows Marionette Bot
The video is courtesy of Nikolay Slavov
