Digitizing college campuses
across America.
Transact WR5000
While putting digital campus ID cards on everyone's smartphone with the Transact app we, together with Transact, looked for ways to amplify that functionality. The result is WR5000: a contactless, wall-mounted card reader with shapeshifting abilities. It can log class attendance, provide secure entry to locked doors, or accommodate any number of other use cases with a simple over-the-air update. We were part of the process from start to finish, defining the end-to-end user experience, designing the product's friendly user interface, and working with Transact's OEM hardware partners to create WR5000's custom, Android-based operating system.
Our contributions
Vision & Strategy
- Product Strategy & Vision
Product Management
- Project Management
Development
- Embedded System
- Android
The reading is on the wall.
WR5000 works with both NFC wallets and traditional RFID keycards to make signing into a physical location as simple as a single tap. Creating that perception of simplicity, however, is an enormously complex undertaking. From the subtleties of real-world campus conditions to the stringent security requirements to the embedded infrastructure that powers the whole system, each piece of the puzzle presented a new seam to hide. The result? A product that disappears into its environment and just works when you need it to.
WR5000, phone home.
WR5000 supports remote administration for painless campus-wide device management. Devices can be configured, assigned, reset, and more all from Transact's convenient dashboard interface.
Android in a whole new flavor.
WR5000 runs a heavily customized fork of Android Lollipop, modified to support advanced features such as secure remote administration, managed networking, and over-the-air software updates. As Transact's principal software engineering partner for the product line, we owned both the architecture and implementation of the operating system.
A platform that stands the test of time.
Like any product designed to be built into a wall, each WR5000 is a relatively permanent fixture. For that reason, it's critical that the devices stand up to the demands of the long term and get better with time, not worse. We designed the WR5000's software systems to enable ambitious feature expansion in the future with minimal impact on performance and reliability.