SONY Style

Project: Enhansed Listening Station
Type: Interacive Kiosk

Overview:
SONY is not only one of the world's leading consumer electronics brands. SONY is also a media powerhouse, involved in movie and music production, and has selected retail location to support the Sony brand image. These retail locations are known as SONY Style.

In late 1995, Léger was selected as the lead project management consultant to produce a custom application, which has sense become known as a "Virtual Jukebox". The Sony Style store in Manhattan had come up with the concept of creating a system, which would allow consumers to sample any CD in their store through a system of kiosks. Their idea was to allow consumers to either have consumers access their system through a touch-screen kiosk, or simply scan the bar code on the CD into the system to sample the music in the store. With today's technology, this is a feature that can be found in most serious home entertainment packages. However, we're talking about 1995, when a store full of CDs was considered "cutting edge". In this case, Sony requirements meant that delivering their vision would mean creating an entirely new GUI and front end, creating an entirely new bar-code inventory catalog complete with back-end CDA/CMA to report things like song lists and cover art, and interfacing an antiquated store inventory system to report pricing and other critical information. Oh yeah, the hard part? The Sony requirement that ONLY the then, brand new, not yet released Sony CDX-100 CD changers be the only player hardware used. At that point in time, these changers were so new, even Sony could not verify the serial commands necessary to "Daisy Chain" racks of CDX-100s together in an A-synchronous coding environment. And one more thing, just to make it extra challenging? Sony required the entire project, soup-to-nuts in 30 days!

The result was the creation of a completely new software format, which would send pulse codes to each CD changer to control the physical delivery of over 8,000 homes. Furthermore, the GUI, look & feel, user testing scenarios, bar codes and back-end data-base were all delivered, tested and on time. The best part? Go into the Sony Style store in Manhattan today, and you'll still find this system functioning properly, with the exception of new Sony "Superchangers" on the delivery side, and a connection to a third-party database for web-access to the kiosks and e-commerce functionality.

Once again, Léger successfully produced an application "Ahead of its' time", as this entire system had to be constructed on an extremely tight deadline, with technology INVENTED by Léger on the fly. Today, Virtual Jukeboxes can be CREATED by users, using MP3 technology, or off the shelf CD burners. In 1995, the word "NAPSTER" was not yet a part of Generation "NEXT's" Vocabulary, nor was the concept created (and still in operation) by Léger. "Being able to look back on projects that stand the test of time is very gratifying. Heck, the home theater system in my house is more advanced that the daisy-chain we put together for Sony, but in a small way, we were envisioning what technology has allowed the world to become; a place where you can get whatever you want, whenever you want it...as long as it can be digitized, that is."