Making controlling CODA child's play

Our aim at Camvine is to make digital signage as easy to use as possible. Our website interface is often praised for its simplicity, and there's the simple iPhone interface for CODA for when you're out and about. Now we've literally made controlling a screen child's play, using the amazing Internet-enabled Rabbit, Nabaztag!

The Nabaztag is a standalone Internet-enabled rabbit made by the nice people at Violet. It connects to your wifi network and can do things like tell you the weather, the time, wave its ears, and is generally fun to have around. In the latest version, it comes with a RFID tag reader built in, and some RFID enabled mini rabbits and stamps, so that you can trigger events either on your Nabaztag or on the wider Internet. We've created a new CODA web app where you can configure your Nabaztag RFID toys to put different content on screens!

Users with both a Nabaztag and a CODA system can use the stand alone web app we've created at nabaztag.camvine.com to act as a go between between the Nabaztag's web service and CODA. In nabaztag.camvine.com we let you create an association between an RFID tag and a particular CODA display and a particular CODA source. When you swipe that tag on your Nabaztag, the CODA screen will be updated to show the appropriate source. You can see how it works in this video:

This may sound frivolous, but it has a range of applications. Classrooms can use the Nabaztag RFID stamps to tag objects that represent a particular lesson, and then putting that object on the Nabaztag would show set the class room's displays to show related material. Using a similar but more conventional looking RFID reader like the Violet's Mir:ror or Lucent's TouchTag, could be used in museums or factories to allow tagged objects to control your CODA screens.

The Nabaztag interface is a first demonstration of the upcoming API access that we're planning for CODA. Using the open OAuth authentication standard, as a user you'll be able to allow other web applications you use to control your CODA screens and load content into CODA for you, and as a developer you'll be able to free your web applications from the browser and onto screens everywhere.