It was in my first year of Media & Knowledge science at TU Delft that we held a UMTS phone for the first time. It was a prototype from KPN and would only work for 5 minutes before overheating… It was the start of the pre-smartphone era, together with the rise of wifi.
Our task was to design the interaction between a user and an online service for checking into a Hotel. In the video you can see our concept. Aparantly unaware of QR codes, our design used a barcode scanner with a tradtional barcode. Though most of the interaction could be done more efficiently nowadays, there is an interesting concept in it which is unfortunately still science-fiction: why not open hotel rooms with your smartphone instead of a keycard?
It was a fun project and we won a prize as well. And it is interesting to reflect how much has changed in Interaction Design in the past.. decades..