The House of Innovation

Under Armour and GPJ created the ‘House of Innovation’ at Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall in order to create buzz and excitement for sports fans in town for the Super Bowl. Gen City Labs created multiple applications throughout the space. At one end, we built an interactive, gesture-based football game entitled ‘No Touchbacks’ in which users controlled an on-screen player through a kick-off return scenario with their motion and movement. At the end of the experience, users were asked to pose for a victory photo which was emailed to them and available for sharing to social media. We then took that score and built a leaderboard that was displayed in larger-than-life, ‘Jumbotron’ fashion on the wraparound projection that surrounded the space. Throughout the environment we created an innovative new retail experience using transparent LCD displays (TLCD’s) that allowed Under Armour to showcase their latest and greatest gear with some of the worlds newest technology.

One of the main technical challenges of UA was the variety of deployments we had to create: 3 gesture game stations, 2 unique 32″ TLCD boxes, 2 unique 65″ TLCD boxes, and a live leaderboard tied into the project. UA was one of the first major deployments to use our ShareStation product for sharing user’s photos easily from event activations. Users would play the gesture game, have their photo taken by a mounted camera, and finally, that photo would automatically upload to a local server. The iPads pulled the latest images off the server, whereby users could select their photo and send it to themselves. This allowed for the most traffic through the game, while allowing the sharing component to happen away from the line itself. When guests shared their photos they were added to the leaderboard which appeared overhead in the ribbon projection to help keep the game competitive over the entire deployment.