NFL Join The Huddle Tour Games

Taking the game on the road

For the run-up to Super Bowl XLVIII, the Host Committee was looking to create an engaging, interactive experience that would help recreate a real ‘game’ experience for their “Join The Huddle Tour”. Gen City Labs created 2 games. The first game, “Speed and Agility Challenge”, allowed guests to use gestures and movement to ‘return’ a kickoff. GCL would track their movements (leaning left, leaning right, jumping, and stiff-arming), as users would receive a kickoff and guide their avatar down-field, trying to avoid tacklers and score a touchdown in the shortest amount of time.

The second experience, “You Make The Call”, put participants in the shoes of a referee. Using the actual physical motions and poses of NFL umpires, consumers would view a play, and be asked what the appropriate call would be. If their pose matched up correctly, their score would increase. A speed bonus would be awarded for time spent making calls. These displays toured the Tri-state area, visiting over 40 locations in the four months leading up to the Super Bowl.

Process

Traveling tours can be one of the most unideal environments for an activation. They are subject to lighting and weather conditions beyond control, yet need to be deployed with very little calibration time, over and over again. We focused on creating a seamless and robust system that would work in all environments, for all ages, and be as simple as possible for tour staff to set up and use. For hardware we used the D-IMager 3106 Depth Camera by Panasonic which allows for gesture data in outdoor environments. After our initial discovery phase we found the skeleton data from middlewares to be unreliable, especially with kids. Instead, we opted to use our own computer vision software to not only detect and calibrate users, but also for detecting the various referee poses in the “You Make The Call” game. We created an OpenFrameworks add-on to interface with the D-IMager while also giving a little back to the community.