Eight interactive “hives” were created to showcase Accenture’s vision for the future of eight business categories, including Smart Living, Finance, Cloud, 5G, Human Potential, New Consumer, Digital Health, and Life Sciences.

Role

At the heart of Accenture’s New York headquarters in Hudson Yards lies a captivating display of their thought leadership, consulting expertise, and industry experience.

I worked at Future Colossal as Creative Technologist for two of the eight hives to help showcase Accenture’s vision for the future of eight business categories: Smart Living, Finance, Cloud, 5G, Human Potential, New Consumer, Digital Health, and Life Sciences. These hives utilize cutting-edge technology, stunning art and lighting, and engaging storytelling to bring Accenture’s research to life. This project helps to highlight Accenture’s commitment to shaping the future through innovative thinking and digital transformation. All eight hives were designed, produced, and installed during COVID-19 quarantine restrictions.

Demo

Innovation Hives

Smart Living

Project Mission

The installation showcases Accenture’s sustainability efforts through a spherical touchscreen display, a custom fabricated steel map of the NYC, and two 65” TV screens. Users can interact with the globe to learn about Accenture’s impact on communities. Upon interaction, dynamic lighting of the LED lights behind the custom steel map animate corresponding to the specific touch points. Heat maps and data visualization would display accordingly dependent on the

Solution 

The project’s mission is to educate and raise awareness about Accenture’s efforts in these areas. Our installation showcases Accenture’s commitment to sustainability and global inclusiveness through interactive displays. The Pufferfish globe invites visitors to engage and learn more, triggering a multimedia experience across two TVs and an NYC steel grid with LED strips.

How we accomplish it 

We used a Pufferfish Globe to send UDP messages to the main application, two TVs, and a steel grid with LED strips controlled by Advatek and Madmapper, to showcase Accenture’s sustainability and inclusiveness achievements in an interactive way.

Architecture Diagram

This project includes three applications: one Unity main app, one Pufferfish App, Madmapper. Madmapper controls the light behind the NYC grid. The main app listens to the UDP message from the Pufferfish app.

Devices handled by this app

• Pufferfish App
• 2 TVs
• LED lights behind the NYC grid

When a user interacts with the pufferfish globe, it sends out a UDP message for Unity to receive. Although several people can interact with the globe at the same time, or the globe takes more than one touchpoint, Unity would receive the message and display the corresponding media content individually in a timely fashion. There is no queue. When one touches another hotspot right after the previous one, the Unity app will display the second one by cutting off the content of the first one.

Worked with Pufferfish company

I worked with Pufferfish company and learned how to use the Pufferfish within a week and also wrote a script to send out UDP message from Pufferfish and was successfully received by the Unity application. I later documented the whole process for the company for internal purpose to save training hours.

One challenge I encounter was we wanted our button to be animated video with transparent background. We tried different video types with transparent background, they didn’t display through the Pufferfish Application Builder, the app to customize the design for the 360 projected touch-screen globe. I then used ffmpeg to experiment with the HAP Codec for the video and they finally worked.

Led the project

I led the project and delivered the project within 2 months. I made the MVP within 1 month and refined from client’s feedback within 1 month.

I designed and implemented logic for the following features:

• Communication protocol to receive UDP from Pufferfish and send UDP message to the Artnet Lighting system
• Heatmap shader from real time traffic API
• Spout out render texture to MadMapper for light mapping for the Artnet Lighting System
• Asset storage, calibration, and design transitions for agile onsite installation

Finance Forward

Project Mission 

“Finance Forward” offers a unique insight into the ongoing digital transformation in the financial services industry. Through AI-controlled voice and interactive rotating dial, it presents the latest trends in finance, featuring constantly updated information from Wall Street and historic vintage news. Experience the future and history of finance in a captivating, immersive environment. This project drew inspiration from stock ticker installation in a modern structure to display how the core areas of the American financial system were rapidly changing.

User Experience 

Our experience transports guests through the digital transformation of the financial services industry, from the past to the present and future. The Idle State displays up-to-date stock graphs, tickers, and a dial that remains off. The Interactive and Deep States are activated by either guest interaction with the dial or docent control with Collaborative Voices AI technology. Guests can experience different narrative themes and information that dynamically transform the space with a turn of the dial or a voice command. The color of each theme is unique, creating a fully immersive experience.

Solution 

Our solution involved integrating a combination of stock tickers, multiple monitors, voice AI technology (UnityEngine.Windows.Speech, Offline Recognition Plugin), microphone and audio interface, and a MSI PC. This allowed us to deliver a dynamic and interactive experience, utilizing real-time data and voice activation for seamless content presentation.

This project includes this Main Application, MadMapper that controls the Tickers and 10 screens:

• Arduino Technology Solution with Powermate dial
• Voice Technology Solution
• Visual Display System: Tickers + 10 screens

What I did

Architecture Diagram

Idle State

This application displays the latest stock market data from TD Ameritrade API in the form of graphs and charts. The tickers showcase the ticker information of the relevant stock in horizontally scrolling motion.

Interaction State

Since guests can choose a variety of options to display the stakeholder-facing content, I wrote a category manager to store all the relevant info in terms of the name of the topic, the index of the topic, and the trigger method (by dial or by voice). This helps me to display the correct video for the corresponding category.

• Controlled by Dial

I coded to receive the UDP message from Arduino in order to determine the asset being displayed as a whole.

• Controlled by Voice

I integrated the Microsoft Speech Recognition system to listen to the keywords for the categories to trigger the correct video for the corresponding category. We also censored out all potential words that are not safe for work in our algorithm.

Final Mapping

We utilized the MadMapper to do the final mapping to match to the screen locations and do onsite calibration.

Cloud

To explain the advantage of implementing cloud solutions company-wide, we designed free-standing interactive screens showcasing the benefits of cloud technology. Content was divided into six individual benefits across six screens. Strategically placed sensors detect human figures and trigger animations related to these benefits. Guests see themselves represented as a point cloud that is used to visualize key drivers and statistics of Accenture’s Cloud services.

The experience acts as a teaser for a workshop, creating a narrative arc and physical path to bring the guests to the demonstration space.

Human Potential

Long-standing conceptions of work have been destabilized by the pandemic. Accenture is leading the vast shift to the digitalization of work, opening business leaders up to the necessary and exciting reality of onboarding, engaging and maintaining a diverse workforce, operating from home and various locations around the world.

Our experience is designed to display this phenomenon in action; the extraordinary ripple effect that anyone, anywhere, can have on the greater whole. For this we used an algorithm called “voronoi” that allowed us to visualize the workforce as a honeycomb or group of cells. Using position tracking sensors we showed guests the effects of their presence in the honeycomb by organically producing cells that moved with their movements and caused ripples within the structure.

Digital Health

The hive was conceived to dissipate the fog of confusion and misinformation around the healthcare industry.

In idle state, a digital fog covers the interactive area, responding to users’ position and motion. After the user dwells for a short time, the fog dissipates to activate brand messaging that surrounds users’ form and reveals their reflection.

The guests are taken into a journey led by Accenture’s Healthcare Assistant and explore the innovations they’ve been implementing in within the industry.

Life Science

Our experience demonstrates how Accenture pushed experimentation with rich data solutions and state-of-the-art health technologies that lead to the cutting edge new science transforming biopharma and patient care today. We designed this experience as a re-imagined, vibrant, laboratory-inspired space, featuring a custom-designed video LED art installation. DNA spirals and molecule animations are revealed across a series of double-sided LED “test tubes”, the colors change with evolving animations, shifting from a collective cacophony of color to clear, bright, sharp images.

Triggered by a docent, a series of animated videos regarding the foundational, transformational, and aspirational aspects of Accenture’s New Science initiatives play across multiple displays. Guests can interact with the screens themselves, while a custom application allows the docent to “take over” the users’ screens as facilitation requires.

New Consumer

The hive invites the guest to interact with objects that represent retail industry trends to access content. This hive helps illustrate how future stores and retail spaces can engage their customers through advanced technology.

We brought this to life with a museum-like shelf space featuring 16 custom 3D-printed objects. When the user interacts with one of the eight “Smart Objects”, RFID sensors trigger specific content on screen. The other eight “Virtual Objects” trigger content as well, but with an added 3D, on-screen copy of the object. When the guest moves and rotates the object, they can see it replicated on the screen similar to the virtual interactivity that retailers are increasingly using today.

5G

Focusing on 5G, we designed an Augmented Reality “window” that took the static Manhattan view from Accenture’s offices and made it interactive, showcasing the changes that 5G will be affecting in everyday life.

Built to be completely self-standing, this scalable AR window technology allows the user to manipulate the interactive maps, viewing animations that highlight the impact of 5G on these locations. Using a high-definition hidden camera, this touch-screen interactive display shows real-time data of NYC transportation system and additional hot spots detailed other technologies made more feasible due to 5G.