Google ”Beat the Boot”
July 6th, 2011
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Case Study / LG Good News Billboard
LG Good News Billboard
Last October Y&R New York came to us with an intriguing proposition. They wanted to make a digital billboard for LG Electronics in Times Square – but not just any billboard, an interactive billboard with a digital creature living on it.
OUR ROLE
Last October Y&R New York came to us with an intriguing proposition. They wanted to make a digital billboard for LG Electronics in Times Square – but not just any billboard, an interactive billboard with a digital creature living on it. The idea was that this creature would be fed on Good News (because, as LG tells us, “Life’s Good”).
CHALLENGE
We only had until about 8 weeks (2 weeks R&D, 6 weeks production). We would have to create a robust solution, integrating with external sources of “Good News” including an SMS service and building a CMS allowing for real-time moderation, as well as design a 3D character. The character would need to feel really “alive”, requiring hundreds of animations. The system would also need to be flexible enough for us to expand it in the following 2 years, and the design and interaction design would need to be carefully thought through to attract attention in the clutter of Times Square. Also, the board was huge – and had a curve in the middle, which was another challenge for the design team.
SOLUTION
We decided to use Unity 3D so we could work with realtime rendering and a high enough resolution. We also decided to create our character, called Gil, in both a “live” mode (using a costume) as well as in 3D. We then integrated our Unity 3D app with SMS messages, RSS feeds, and Tweets via a custom human-moderated Content Management System. We also decided to create a “puppetmaster” mode so we could control the character sort of like a video game character for greater flexibility. We built a web app on an Amazon cloud server that took care of all the sources of Good News and then built a CMS that controlled all that data, statistics, settings and the schedule. And last but not least we split the daily schedule into 5 minute segments, all customisable in the CMS, and mixed them with video “bumpers” and created a large library of animations and props that could be pulled into the Unity client from “The Brain”, an app we created to run on a local Linux server.
PARTNERS
Y&R New York, Mikael Emtinger, Motiviti/Pangaea, Zoink Games, Tobias Allanson, D3 LED, eModeration, Redrum
