Enabling urban explorers How do you create local excitement about the launch of a global shoe line? For the launch of the NMD shoe, adidas engaged Your Majesty to build nine interactive LED cube installations to showcase the work of urban photographers in nine European cities. Today’s successful urban photographers may shoot locally, but they share globally, thanks to Instagram and other apps and services. We built the cubes to give these artists an interactive canvas to showcase their cities, and we placed them on busy streets in London, Berlin, Stockholm, Milan, Barcelona, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Frankfurt and Munich. Passers-by could use their smartphones to control which city displayed on the cube in front of them. More than 150,000 #NMD pictures were shared on Instagram, and the shoe sold out internationally on the first day, making it the most successful launch in the company’s history. To run real-time motion graphics in nine parts of the world simultaneously, we built custom software using Unreal Engine. Doing so allowed us to output 60 FPS in the visualizations, even with real-time updating of text, image and livestream content.
