Meet Veronica, Revel’s Digital Mannequin

July 8, 2015 by Dave Haynes

Ted Rosenbaum from Fargo, ND-based RevelDigital called the other day to tell me about Veronica, a digital mannequin the CMS and solutions company is using to showcase its capabilities.

It has touch, beacons, pattern detection, NFC and on and on, all pretty much running off a slinky silver fashion mannequin. The goggles have LEDs in them and change colours based on the gender detected in front of them, using real-time face pattern detection and analysis.

The tablet communicates through WiFi to the web and talks to a little Arduino microcontroller via Bluetooth. The Arduino, says Rosenbaum, is wired to a capacitive chipset that is installed in the hand – so just touching the hand sends signals to the tablet and can change content.

The tablet shows age/gender numbers on visitors on its graph on the bottom as people stand in range of the camera on the tablet, the analytics being generated with Revel’s cloud-based platform.

A smartphone at a nearby table can display the “profile” information of all participants within range of a BLE beacon associated with the mannequin. There’s also an NFC tag that creates a bridge with user phones.

All of the tech, says Rosenbaum, is controlled and managed by the Revel CMS, which has built-in reporting and analysis.

It’s an interesting approach to marketing a company’s capabilities at trade shows and other events. The mannequin has that “What is THAT?” factor that will draw people over, and it acts as a hub for showing off a range of different technologies, instead of a more typical approach of showing how A works, then switching up and showing what B does, and so on. 

It’s not at all likely you’d actually see something like this in a retail environment, but this is a way to generate some ideas. Already, we’re seeing retailers putting BLE beacons in mannequins to communicate with shoppers.