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Holy Broadband
Batman!

Wasserman / Sky

Project

An Interactive
Experiential Installation

The brief

We need an immersive game
& we need it fast!

Every two months Sky hit the country’s shopping centres with an experiential activation drawing attention to their latest offer. January’s was their best ever offer on fibre optic broadband, with supporting messages about their Service Superiority. To draw attention to the campaign they partnered with The Lego Batman Movie. TVCs and OOH ads featured ‘Legofied’ versions of their Tech Team, and their retail activation stands were designed to look like sets from the movie.

Our challenge was to use the Lego Batman characters to create an immersive game for their shopping centre activations, which could also live online to encourage players to share it with family and friends.

Our solution

A 360° shoot ‘em up
installation

As is often the case, we turned to a pre-digital game for inspiration; the fairground duck-shooting game to be precise. We synced four screens, positioned in a 360 circle around the player, so that The Joker and members of the Tech Team intermittently popped up on one of them, before disappearing and popping up on another. The objective was to shoot The Joker, but not the Tech Team.

Now for the shooting mechanism -  we needed a way of detecting which of the four screens the player was shooting at. The answer lay in our pockets. Smartphones’ accelerometers detect where your phone is pointing at any one time, horizontally and vertically across a full 360 degree range. Perfect for controlling a Batarang shooter, which you fire by flicking your finger across the screen.

1/5

And One More Thing

A true 360° mobile
experience

The online version of the game followed the same premise, but condensed the experience into a single smartphone. The screen shows a cityscape, which you navigate by turning in a 360 degree circle. Once again, The Joker and the Tech Team pop-up intermittently, but this time you tap the sighter on the screen as they appear, rather than flicking a Batarang.

The biggest challenge in both versions of the game proved to be avoiding getting so dizzy, while chasing The Joker around the 360 degree environment, that you fall over!