The Work

The Project

Rogers - Canada’s largest wireless carrier was opening a store in Toronto’s Dundas Square area. The store was to have a 32 foot long interactive video wall that could respond to the movements of three people at once.

The Brief

In November 2019, my team was engaged by Array of Stars to create immersive content for a 32-foot long interactive video screen reflecting the Rogers brand identity for the first 5G-enabled retail space in the country. Because we are a primarily Unreal Engine shop, we engaged Coal Car Studio in Vancouver to help build and optimize the various technical elements in Unity.

The Results

Ultimately, the Rogers 302 flagship store opened to huge success. Excited shoppers lined up from 2AM onward for an early opening of 6:30AM. On the kickoff day, thousands of curious customers and media toured through the store to take part in the activations and festivities. Hometown sports legends Doug Gilmour (Toronto Maple Leafs) and Roberto Alomar (Toronto Blue Jays) made appearances and signed autographs, and the “Fashion Santa” himself, Paul Mason, came through too.

The opening was covered by the Toronto Star newspaper, Toronto’s top morning show Breakfast Television, the City News website, as well as popular blogs Mobile Syrup and Daily Hive.

The Process

The project was essentially a one month long sprint. The team was fully distributed across North America in two different time zones. Every week consisted of two progress meetings with Array of Stars acting on behalf of Rogers, with status calls happening every day amongst the dev team.

Array of Stars provided my team and Coal Car Studio with a number of tracking hooks for hands, legs, and users’ heads. We then built a modular particle simulation with a number of exposed parameters that AoS could modify on the fly, with the Rogers team to achieve the desired visual identity. At the end of the development sprint, we helped AoS integrate the various parts into a stable application that could run 24/7 in one of the busiest storefronts in Toronto.

The Reference

The Tech

To build the project we leveraged Microsoft’s Azure Kinect device to track the skeletons of 3 users moving in front of the screen, and used Unity’s High Definition Rendering Pipeline to create the physically-based particle simulation.

Credits

CLIENT: ROGERS

DIRECTOR: ANDRE ELIJAH

ADVERTISING AGENCY: ARRAY OF STARS

DEVELOPMENT: SHANE NILSSON + GEO BARJOUD