A playful, immersive experience to educate people on smartphone usage insights

Statistics

Client: Google

Awards: Red Dot Design Award; European Design Award – Silver

Deliverables: Interactive installation

The challenge

Since 2011, Google and CLEVER°FRANKE have partnered in data-driven projects, creating a range of tools and products around Google’s market research.

For this particular project, CLEVER°FRANKE was asked to create an exciting experience for visitors of Google’s experience center The Foundry, which would show to what extent consumers use mobile phones when making purchasing decisions. The Foundry is Google’s first customer experience center outside the US and houses a 360-seat auditorium, meeting rooms, and numerous interactive installations. We developed a gesture-controlled game that engages visitors in a dialogue with Google about the role that smartphones play in our day-to-day lives and our purchasing behavior.

Value delivered

A modular and interactive game educating visitors of The Foundry about the impact of mobile technology on our daily lives.

Solution

Leveraging various researches on consumer behavior and smartphone use, we created a gesture-controlled game that engages visitors in a dialogue with Google about the role that the smartphone plays in our day-to-day lives.

We focused on creating a product that is insightful for business and marketing professionals but also entertaining for the general visitors of the Google Experience Center ‘The Foundry’.

Case video

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Phases and toolkit items used

Stakeholder strategy workshop

Data inventory

Concept design & visualization

Content strategy & editorial outline

(User) testing & validation

Design

Capturing Google’s visual, accessible and playful style was key. Another important aspect — personalization — was achieved by allowing the assets to be changed according to the ‘country level’ on display.

By involving Google employees from 36 countries, we were able to use realistic character names and check typographic styles for storefronts to add relevance to the different nationalities visiting ‘The Foundry’.

Interaction

We created a setup where five users can simultaneously interact with the installation by using their hand gestures. The learning curve could not be more than a few seconds. This requirement requested an effortless interaction design.

Designelements

The game framework was set up in a modular way. This enabled the application running the game to draw from a library of design assets such as background scenery, shops, street furniture, countless characters, and clothing combinations.

Varietyofsceneries

For the interactive installation to be relevant to different nationalities visiting the centre, it is personalized by changing assets such as background and street scenery, shops and characters.

Technology

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Hardwaresetup

The video wall is located at the heart of ‘The Foundry’, in the central hall to the auditorium. At 7 meters wide, it consists of 10x 55” screens equipped with 5 PrimeSense motion-tracking cameras.

An eight-core media server with 32GB of RAM generates the video output. Input comes from five separate clients that parse the depth-information from the cameras and transmit it in near real-time via a LAN network to the media server using Google’s Interactive Spaces framework.