Welcome to our interactive demo of IMP. Please feel free to have a play around to get to grips with how the App. works.

Grab a coffee, sit back and relax while watching our video of IMP in action in an everyday buying situation.

We were asked to explore what assets students have, how they managed their assets, what their transactions were, and what they aspired to have. Our challenge was to then design a mobile web service to help students with the issues we discovered.

Our first port of call was to research as much as we could about students, and their assets. We also looked into what technologies there are available for mobile web services at present, and what is expected in the future.

All of our findings from our research can be found on our blog

http://www.imd.dundee.ac.uk/~rcolsell/skintassets.

We covered a large amount in our research, but we really wanted to focus on one or two. Thinking about what other groups would be concentrating on, we wanted to try something different. From our research, a couple of points we wanted to take further were that students tend to 1. Spend much more than they really needed to on items,

2. Students tend to gather a lot of stuff that they have no use for. (As seen in this video from our research)

Thinking about these points, we decided we could create some kind of marketplace. We had researched a lot of location based technology which we really liked the idea of, mainly based around GPS and mapping available on the iPhone. We had also researched about augmented reality, and the use of the camera on mobile devices in applications. With these, the basis of our idea was born.

After much brainstorming about what kind of features we thought our Application should have. The best way of laying this out was using a flow diagram.

and from there to some sketches,

and eventually we were able to come up with a view concept screens using photoshop.

Before moving into heavy prototyping for the final outcome, we wanted to finalize a brief summary of what our application does. Here it is:

ÒIMP is a unique and fun way to buy and sell goods, based on your location. IMP allows you to list items that you want to sell, mapped to an area of your choice. When you are in an area that has an item assigned to it, you are encouraged to use the camera to search your surroundings for the listing. When you find an item you would like to buy, simply click on the listing and make an offer.Ó

To present our idea, we created a website with an overview, interactive demo, and concept video. We wanted to present our idea to the Internet as if it were already in production. (this section of the website will be made hidden after the NCR presentations). This means we can generate some buzz on the internet, and gain people's thoughts and opinions on the application. Our concept video was created using motion and after effects, to allow us to create the look of the application as if it were being used in a real life situation. Our interactive demo was created using flash to simulate the application in use. This also links into a database using PHP with the details of the adverts used in the demo - just as it would in the real application on the iPhone.

Thinking about what we've achieved with our project, there's a few things we should note. We've learned different ways to prototype ideas using concept videos and demos etc. And by taking the plunge and aiming high using unfamiliar programs like motion and after effects, we've each gained our own technical experience from the project. PHP for example, was something only a couple of us had tried before this project. We feel, as a team, we worked well together and have produced a concept idea, involving current technologies that could realistically go into production in the future.