COLUMBUS, OH—The ICX Association recently announced the winners for the 2022 Elevate Awards, held in Columbus, Ohio this year, and The Orbit – HBO Max Retail Experience featuring LED display technology from SNA Displays was selected as the winner for Best Omnichannel Interactive Customer Experience (ICX).
The ICX Association Elevate Awards honor individuals and organizations who set the pace for using technology to elevate the customer experience. The award for Best Omnichannel ICX “recognizes omnichannel achievements in using interactive technologies to create a transcendent customer experience that captivates and engages customers across multiple channels, such as mobile, web and in-store.”
Experience design agency HUSH and HBO Max created The Orbit Retail Experience as an in-person, highly immersive, and interactive retail experience 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. The Orbit Retail Experience was designed to showcase HBO Max’s brand promise of providing the deepest, most high-quality entertainment in an interesting, engaging, and physical way. This was achieved through HUSH’s design which invites guests to have unique, multi-sensory experiences with inputs such as audio, light, and a stunning array of visual content. 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.
The overall strategy behind The Orbit Retail Experience was to create a scalable, destination-worthy retail experience that magically communicates HBO Max’s depth of content, accessible at the speed of 5G infrastructure and systems.
The Orbit immerses visitors in a space where reflective materials, interactive lighting and digital content combine to engage multiple senses. In addition to the curved LED canvas that covers virtually all of the visitor’s field of vision, the experience called for multiple addressable LED strip lighting elements.
SNA Displays manufactured and installed the LED display technology integral to The Orbit experience using 1.5 mm pixel pitch product from its BRILLIANT™ Interior series, which is perfect for extremely close viewing. Likewise, The Orbit’s video screen employs surface-mount device (SMD) pixel packaging technology, where the diodes in each pixel are packaged together, allowing for crisp, clear imagery and a widened viewing experience. The retail experience’s interactive LED display is 8 feet 10 inches tall and 18 feet 4 inches long, wrapping around The Orbit 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 pixels high by 3,584 pixels wide, containing approximately 5.7 million total pixels.
Electrosonic provided visual hardware technology integration services.
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 focus. Indeed, The Orbit sets a new bar for uniqueness, quality, and immersion for destination brand experiences.