Squatting Supermarkets

Squatting Supermarkets uses the logos and packaging graphics of products as Augmented Reality fiducial markers. A content management system allows attaching information and interactive experiences to logos, instantly transforming them into open, accessible, emergent spaces for communication. A mobile application allows consumers to use their smartphones to take pictures of the logos on the products’ labels and to use them to access the augmented reality layers of information.

Squatting Supermarkets at Mondovì

In supermarkets very few sources of information find expression: manufacturers deciding what gets published on labels; and store management, deciding everything that customers see, hear, feel, smell, touch and traverse, from the very moment they enter the premises of the supermarket.

People have no control about what gets written on labels and, sometimes, they even have hard times understanding it.

Squatting Supermarkets uses Augmented Reality and Computer Vision to transform products’ logos into spaces for participatory publication.

Once the logo gets recognized through a smartphone application people can publish onto it: texts, images, videos and interactive experiences.

We used it to publish: realtime satellite maps of pollution and environmental issues; open-sourced supply chains to how where products and their components come from; entire ubiquitous TV channels in which people can have their say.