Passage Keeper

Project Overview

The stranger sitting beside on a long-haul flight, the hum of a city waking up in the rain, the warmth of a café tucked in a quiet alley—memories once vivid, now softened by time. But what if a forgotten boarding pass could bring them back?

This project imagines a future where someone finds an old, dust-covered ticket, only to realize it’s more than a record of transit—it’s a portal into another’s journey. By scanning it, the system extracts location details, generates an AI-powered travel story, and displays it on an OLED screen, offering a fleeting glimpse into the traveler’s past. Blurring the line between memory and fiction, it lets a long-lost trip resurface once more.

My Role

Interaction Designer

Type

Individual

Date

January 2025 - February 2025

Tool

Discover

Concept Map - Why boarding passes?

Tight/Loose Shoulder Straps

Storyboards

Interaction Process Diagrams

Delivery

Hardware Preparation & Connection

Process

User Interaction

  • The user presses a physical button to start the system.

Through sketches and ideation, I explored different ways to bring boarding passes to life, from RFID-triggered displays to AI-generated narratives and soundscapes. I experimented with various interaction models, considering how travelers might engage with these artifacts in unexpected ways. Ultimately, I combined the strongest elements into a system where scanning a boarding pass would extract its location details, generate a unique AI-powered travel story, and display it dynamically on an OLED screen.

System Architecture Diagram

Sequence Diagram

Define

Brainstorm

Loss of Personal Narratives - Boarding passes are often discarded or kept as static mementos, failing to capture the depth of travel experiences.


Forgotten Context & Emotion - Over time, the emotions, encounters, and atmospheres of a journey fade, leaving behind only the destination and flight details.


Lack of Interaction - Traditional travel memorabilia are passive objects that do not engage users in a meaningful way.

Image Capture (ESP32S3 + OV2640)

  • The onboard camera (OV2640) captures an image of the boarding pass.

Text Recognition (Google Vision API OCR)

  • The captured image is sent to Google Vision API, which extracts the city name from the boarding pass.

Story Generation (ZeroWidth LLM)

  • The recognized city name is sent to ZeroWidth LLM, which generates a travel story based on the location.

Display Output (OLED Auto-Scrolling)

Final Deliverable

  • The ESP32S3 processes the AI-generated story and displays it on an OLED screen in an auto-scrolling format.

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Wish-To-Go