Super Bowl 50

How to interact with the NFL

To kick off Hyundai’s new sponsorship with the NFL at Super Bowl 50, Gen City Labs created three cutting-edge interactive experiences that got fans up close and personal with the Hyundai brand, NFL legends and the big game itself.

For the NFL Experience, Hyundai was interested in creating a unique way for fans to interact with NFL greats. GCL created the Legendary Photo Opp, an Augmented Reality experience that allowed fans to get ‘up close and personal’ with the star of their choice. With the option of Steve Young, Marcus Allen, Jerome Bettis, or two NFL cheerleaders, fans could select their favorite and then interact with an AR version of them. The fan would then have the ability to pose in a unique way with the star, resulting in a shareable photo to send to friends and family.

At Super Bowl City, the Human Powered Selfie experience was built to showcase Hyundai’s new focus on sustainability and electric vehicle technology. Using specially designed floor tiles that actually generate and collect energy from individuals walking on them, GCL was able to create a photo experience that was literally powered by the fans. The energy tiles have internal generators that activate when users walk/jump on them, and when a certain threshold of wattage was reached, it would trigger a photo opp.

Last but not least, Hyundai wanted to create a special photo experience for fans at Levi’s stadium on Game Day. At Fan Plaza, GCL created the 180° ‘bullet time’ gif, inviting fans to leap onto a crash pad to show off their receiving skills. GCL captured an image of the fan mid-air during their dive, and rotated the camera angle around them, providing an amazing shot against the backdrop of Levi’s stadium.

Legendary Photo Opp Process

To create the Legendary Photo Opp, we teamed up with our friends at ModeAdjust to shoot the Athletes and Cheerleaders in professional studios in both San Francisco and New York. All talent involved were well versed in stage direction and comfortable in front of the camera which helped the shoot run smoothly. While shooting, we used the same camera, lenses, lighting and setup that we knew we’d be using for the actual activation to maintain consistency and realism in the final photo. Once footage was captured, we keyed-out the green screen background, color corrected and added special effects to make the talent ‘magically appear’ on screen with the guests. Through the Unity app, guests chose the talent to be photographed with as well as their height (child vs adult) whereby a random clip was selected to make each guest’s experience seem unique and spontaneous. The overall effect was seamless and guests really responded to the realism of the experience.

Human Powered Selfie Process

The Human Powered Selfie marked the first time we’d worked with kinetic tiles, and we teamed up with Energy Floors based out of the Netherlands. Challenges included integrating our Unity app with the Energy Floors hardware and working nimbly with the time zone difference. To ensure the experience would be intuitive for guests of all ages, Helios conducted usability testing sessions at their office and collected this user feedback to greatly improve the overall user experience. In the event that a guest was unable to generate enough energy on their own (such as a small child or person in a wheel chair), we added a feature that allowed the brand ambassador to “assist” on a hand held keyboard. In the end, the Unity app driven experience was flawless and proved to be a huge success.

180° Catch Process

For the 180° Catch, Helios partnered with Pixperience in Toronto to stage 18 DSLR cameras in a semi-circle in front of a large crash pad and a 20’x10′ triptych backdrop. The first custom-made crash pad purchased turned out to be too tall and too visible in the photos. After zooming in as much as we could, we found that we still needed to to have another crash pad made that was 6″ lower. This detail made a huge different in the final GIF takeaways and helped maintain the realism of the football catch.