Androidify
As part of a global Android brand campaign, we created a cross-media digital campaign enabling users to create their own personalized Android characters on web or mobile, and have them take part in huge, real-time, interactive games on the biggest LED display in the world, in New York’s Times Square.
Users made their individual characters using the native Android app or on the website, sharing them to our custom AppEngine CMS and asset store.
Games and character galleries were displayed on the Times Square board via Javascript/WebGL applications running from custom, local application servers. These co-ordinated with the upstream apps to retrieve remotely-generated Android characters from the asset store, and receive new ones created by visitors to the live installation. T-shirt and postcard stations also connected in and printed out personalised physical keepsakes for visitors to the event.
I directed the technology from inception to delivery, designing the overall architecture, choosing and managing specialist development vendors, managing and negotiating the project’s progress through Google software processes, integrating our development efforts across all platforms, through to installation and launch on the giant board.
The timeline was extremely short - 2.5 months from start to launch. I designed and constructed the tech team from carefully picked partners, organised them into logical units to attack different components in parallel, worked with Google security teams, physical event and network management partners to get the on-site equipment set up, and even dug into diagnosing and providing fixes for low-level code issues in the Android app in the small hours before launch.
Finally, as a core part of the launch team I was on site for the entire duration of the event and made sure the tech side ran as smoothly as possible. We got some great coverage and a huge amount of user feedback.