Absolut Future Bar Experience
IoT-inspired bar experience installation
Launched:
- Spring 2017
Project team:
- SharpEnd
Role:
- Front-end developer
I was approached by IoT agency SharpEnd to help create an installation for The Absolut Company, to be displayed at the Nordic Choice Global Expo 2017. This installation was part of an exploration of the concept of the “future bar experience” and was designed to inspire industry guests with the possibilities of introducing new technology to the traditional bar environment.
I worked on two executions; the first was the “personalised bottles” part of the experience, which involved inserting guests’ names into branded creative and displaying them on a very tall and thin ultra-HD display. My colleagues at SharpEnd created a bespoke enclosure for an RFID reader, which was connected to an on-site mini-PC. Guests scanned their hotel keycards, allowing us to look them up in our attendee database and send a socket message to a front-end app running in a browser on another machine powering the giant display. This would cause the guest’s name to be composited into a variety of branded animations created in the DOM, displayed immediately to the guest on the display.
I built the front-end as a one-page JS app, making extensive use of video and CSS transitions and animations to create smooth and immersive creative. The second execution used RFID tags embedded in cocktail glasses to trigger bespoke cocktail animations on a second screen, with classic cocktails reimagined as retro movie posters.
