Motorola Interactives at Radio Shack ‘Store One’
International marketing agency MICE have delivered a brand experience for their client Motorola, with help from Digital Antics, installed at the new Radio Shack partner store called ‘Store One’ and located next to the Radio Shack global headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas.
Motorola took the entire mezzanine level area of this modern store and called in MICE to transform it into an end-to-end user experience. MICE called in interactive technology experts Digital Antics to work with their design team headed up by Victoria Nicholls and Joaquin Picola to realise their creative concepts.
Digital Antics built, programmed and installed computers to run interactive content to two custom built ‘thru-glass’ touch screens and dynamic animated content to six plasma screens distributed throughout the experience.
MICE’s vision was to produce a user experience on the interactive screens that was as close as possible to the experience of using the Motorola V3 phone. For this Digital Antics produced a virtual model of the V3 which was animated in real time on the touch screen, complete with illuminated keypad, working screen and flip action. Users could take their photo and send it to the plasma screens around the experience which were driven from a central media server. All of the installation was supplied, installed and configured by Digital Antics.
An Apple iSight camera was embedded into the centre of the touch screen surface and appeared on the virtual phone screen when taking the user’s photo so that they were not looking away from the screen while it was being taken. This design innovation was suggested by Digital Antics’ Managing Director Quintin Willison and the team jumped at the chance to make it work.
Using low level graphics hardware and software technologies developed for computer gaming (C++ and DirectX), coupled with an industrial PC platform, Digital Antics delivered a robust solution with an immersive, smooth screen presentation; a television quality experience which is immediately visually streets ahead of the content produced by many media companies using higher level tools such as Macromedia Flash.
Digital Antics asked Handy AV to manufacture the specialised glass touch screens. Measuring 1m x 75cm they provided an effective touchscreen area of 48″ diagonal. We also specified and sourced a custom screen supporting rear projection and accurate touch across all but a small square of surface area around the camera in the middle (to prevent electromagnetic interference from the camera to the touchscreen).