T-Mobile Signature Store Holiday Pop-In

Client: T-Mobile
Technology: TouchDesigner, SensorControl (proprietary person-detection application), React.js, AWS Electric Beanstalk
Role: Lead Developer for TouchDesigner & web applications

T-Mobile Signature Stores are unique among T-Mobile retail locations for their blending of traditional media and innovation technology to create meaningful brand moments. During the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic in December 2020, the Razorfish physical/digital team built a multiplatform, low-touch, immersive experience for T-Mobile's new Signature Store in Plano, Texas. This project presented a challenge as we were not allowed to be physically co-located with one another or go onsite for install, so the full experience build and install was done remotely.

The Holiday Pop-In Experience was centered around the Holiday Gift Station located in the center of the space, where customers could make a pop-in--the T-Mobile equivalent of a PopSocket, with content activating on parts of the two walls adjacent to the table, corresponding to the location of the customer and the stage of the Pop-In creation process they were in. The space was divided into six zones, tracked by Second Story's proprietary SensorControl system and several Orbbec Astra cameras.

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There were two PCs running TouchDesigner--Primary for the three projectors covering the larger, left wall, and Secondary for the two projectors covering the smaller, right wall. As the customer walked around the space, zone trigger data was sent via UDP (using a C++ application built by another RF dev) from SensorControl to the TouchDesigner patch, and as each zone was triggered, TouchDesigner kicked off zone-specific audio and PNG sequence animations on different parts of the wall. Each animation played in, cycled in an "activated" state for a certain amount of time, then played in reverse to return to its "attract" state.

Once the customer's pop-in was finished, a nearby sales associate remotely triggered the "Gift Pick-Up" moment via the wall notification web app, acccessed on a mobile device. The app sent a message via TCP to TouchDesigner, triggering a special animation and a snow particle system generated by TouchDesigner. After the customer was finished retrieving their pop-in, an "untrigger" notifcation was sent via the web app to deactivate the "Gift Pick-Up" animations.

I developed the TouchDesigner patch and web application, and was responsible for animation alignment, sizing, placement, and projection mapping and blending, animation timing on zone trigger and web app trigger, snow particle system, and message processing from the cameras and the web app, all in TouchDesigner, as well as coding and deployment of the gift giving wall notification web app with React.js and AWS Electric Beanstalk.

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