Judges for the Digital Signage Experience Awards selected The Orbit Retail Experience as a finalist for the 2022 DIZZIEs in the category of Experiential Design & Planning. The Orbit is one of four SNA Displays nominations to be chosen as a finalist, more than any other company. SNA Displays’ other recognized digital signage projects are the AT&T Discovery District, Grandscape, and Gensler’s Austin office lobby.
“The DIZZIEs were created to recognize companies who are leading the way in harnessing digital signage to reach target audiences and fulfill strategic objectives,” said David Drain, DSE’s director of event programs. “We congratulate SNA Displays on being named a finalist.”
Overview
The in-person, highly immersive, and interactive Orbit Retail Experience was designed by HBO Max and the experience design agency HUSH. Featuring narrow pixel pitch LED display technology by SNA Displays, the installation is composed of a cylindrical dome equipped with thematic lighting and a concave video screen. When visitors step into the experience, they are invited to make a gesture or speak to activate a visual library of more than 150,000 clips of HBO Max content.
Three HBO Max Orbit installations were installed in the United States at AT&T flagships in Dallas, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Each retail experience’s interactive LED display, built with BRILLIANT™ Interior display technology, is 8 feet 10 inches tall and 18 feet 4 inches long. The screen wraps around the small, circular HBO Max room about 180 degrees on a concave radius of 6’9″, almost fully encompassing the guest’s field of vision. With a 1.5 mm pixel pitch, the LED screen’s resolution is 1,584 x 3,584 pixels, containing approximately 5.7 million total pixels.
The Orbit immerses visitors in a space where reflective materials, interactive lighting, and digital content combine to engage multiple senses while visitors discover the depth of HBO Max’s content. In addition to the curved LED canvas, the experience includes LED strip lighting elements.
The Orbit’s technologically rich experience was created with the power of machine learning to process terabytes of content and create new relationships and interfaces to engage with HBO Max’s library. This machine learning incorporates motion capture and voice recognition to create a seamless experience that allows visitors to explore and interact with thousands of iconic moments, characters, and stories from HBO Max’s vast content library in a personalized, intuitive way. The Orbit sets new standards in brand promotion, enabling visitors and customers to experience content from HBO Max in ways they had never seen before.
Electrosonic provided visual hardware technology integration services, and SNA Displays manufactured and installed the LED display technology integral to The Orbit experience.
Design Concept
HUSH designed The Orbit Retail Experience to showcase HBO Max’s brand promise of providing the deepest, most high-quality entertainment in an interesting, engaging, and physical way. The Orbit invites guests to have unique, multi-sensory experiences with inputs such as audio, light, and a stunning array of visual content. One of the guiding principles behind The Orbit’s design was to create a scalable destination-worthy retail experience that magically communicates HBO Max’s depth of content, all while being accessible at the speed of 5G infrastructure and systems.
Despite the complex technological and audio-visual integration elements that make The Orbit Retail Experience possible, the typical visitor is not acutely aware of these elements. Rather, given the user-experience (UX) focus of HUSH’s design team, the visitor experience ranges from awe to entertained to product-focused. Indeed, The Orbit sets a new bar for uniqueness, quality, and immersion for destination brand experiences.
SNA Displays’ BRILLIANT™ Interior line of indoor narrow-pitch digital display products are ideal for applications like The Orbit with extremely short viewing distances, offering optimal pixel densities for high-resolution content. Additionally, these display products are available in assorted panel sizes, various cabinet types, custom corners and curves, and other engineered solutions to fit applications like The Orbit that require a high degree of customization.