As IoT (Internet of Things) technologies and infrastructures become more mature, opportunities for engagement with representations of digital object memories (DOM) in the real world increase. Digital object memories can provide added value and pave the way for new consumer-oriented IoT products and services. However, our research experience of employing digital object memories in different systems for reminiscing, mediation of second-hand retail environments and augmenting digital heritage experiences (e.g. in museums) also point to some significant challenges as to how people can interact with DOMs in situ. Based on this work we will put forth some of the key user experience challenges that we encountered when employing representations of DOMs in the real world in the course of the last two and a half years and discuss some alternative routes we wish to explore through future research.

Emergent Internet of Things (IoT) based technologies offer the potential for new ways in engaging with places, spaces and objects. The use of mobile and tablet computing linked specifically to objects and memory, comment and narrative creation opens up a potentially game-changing methodology in user interaction above and beyond the traditional 'kiosk' type approach. In this position statement we detail the QRator project in the Grant Museum at University College London. The QRator project explores how handheld mobile devices and Internet enabled interactive digital labels can create new models for public engagement, personal meaning-making and the construction of narrative opportunities inside museum spaces. The project won the United Kingdom National Museum and Heritage Award for Innovation for exploring the cultural shift that is anticipated as society moves to a ubiquitous form of computing in which every device is 'on', and every device is connected in some way to the Internet.

For a long time, the second-hand retail market was the preserve of the charity shop. However, the advent of services like eBay has massively increased its prominence. In this paper we describe a novel Internet of Things-based approach to enhancing the second-hand retail experience by augmenting items with their provenance. After a discussion of the underlying technology, we shall describe its deployment in two related case studies conducted in collaboration with Oxfam charity retail outlets in which we tagged donated items with RFID and QR codes, allowing shoppers to hear the story behind the donated items. Finally, we discuss the impact of the deployments and their implications for the second-hand retail sector.

Software applications to share and remediate video have become ubiquitous and interacting with video has developed into a mainstream cultural activity in many societies. Like other media video has benefits and limitations for learning. We describe in this paper Video Pathways, a social Video Environment for learning through creation of multi-path online video. Our research assesses whether creation of video narratives multi-path representations, based on ubiquitous video from popular video hosting sites, is an effective way to represent knowledge. Initial formative evaluation with Video Pathways has revealed good usability and desirability and shown the creative potential of Video Pathways.