Elevator Selfies

What is it?

So basically there's a NFC card wrapped up in that thing that–I meant to make it look like a polaroid. You tap it with your phone. You get a little pop up saying it's a URL, you click that, that takes you to...

...a very secret webpage where you can take a selfie, and then post a button posts it to @elevatorselfies.bsky.social .

It's pretty simple, overall. The mobile-optimized webpage I vibe-coded. The NFC business was new to me, and so a lot of unknowns but flashing a url was pretty straightforward. A lambda does the posting to bluesky via APIs. I wish I had taken more time to make the physical item itself pretty, but I got impatient.

Why?

I wanted to experiment with NFCs. I like them. I like the physical touching of your phone to a thing and getting haptic feedback. I also like how...QR codes are great but (and I have a lot of feelings about this, may blog on it another time) it's an awkward flow to get your camera out, and then focus in on the code. The worst is during a presentation when I always feel like, oh, I gotta decide whether to scan the QR code and then by the time I'm going to scan it they change the slide and so I just pretend that I got it in time.

The specific elevator where the elevatorselfies.bsky.social lives is a choke-point but not in a negative way...it's a place where you often run into people. So I thought it would be fun to allow a social activity, taking a selfie, that could kinda break the ice.

I also like in a very artsy-fartsy sense the idea of linking a place in the real world to a place in the ATmosphere. You can participate in elevatorselfies.bsky.social without even having a bluesky. But you can't participate unless you're exactly where the NFC card is.

Lessons

When connected to building wifi, the elevator ascending/descending caused the connection to fail. Once I turned off wifi it worked fairly reliably for me. But didn't think about that at all until I had made it.

it takes a bit of time to take a selfie! I made the website flow as quick as I could (there's just one other page, where you can see your photo and then retake or post to bluesky, which posting then routes you to bluesky. But yeah it sure feels like you're in the elevator for a while, but to decide to engage with a weird art thing on the bulletin board, and then to navigate the UI. It actually takes more time than an elevator ride, really.

Even though not that many people have participated, it has made me feel good when people have participated. And maybe if I do future things like this, maybe I can make the physical object more obvious/intuitive in the experience it's offering/what it's asking you to do.

Call to action: ADD YOUR OWN ELEVATOR!

If there's a special elevator in your life, you have an NFC card/button (you can buy 50 of them on amazon for $20), and you own a smartphone, you can make a node in this network.

DM me on bluesky and I'll give you the magic url you can code into your nfc card/button. All you'd have to do is flash the url, and then make something to hold it (like my polaroid) and put it in an elevator.