Background
Special Group and 2degrees presented Gladeye with a unique challenge - make 50,000 lights on Auckland Harbour Bridge dance to music as it streams in sync with the Aucklander’s mobile phones around the city.
50,000
Lightbulbs died* to bring
you this bold campaign
*a little bit inside
Another World First
Turning one of Auckland’s most recognisable landmarks into a disco ball took months of hard work and intimate cooperation of several companies in diverse fields. Our role was to make it all come together and snap, which was easier said than done.
The project needed to support the variety of New Zealand ISPs, cellular data networks and mobile devices, each adding their own variables and delays to the streaming sound. The massive light rig itself, designed by 32 Hundred Lighting, contributed an additional latency of a third of second that had to be accounted for.
After weeks of investigation, it became increasingly clear that this kind of project had never been attempted. So we set up a war room kitted out with simulations, test devices, and a handful of our smartest server-side developers. Their mission was pretty simple – invent a way to do this.
With four weeks until launch, the team made an important breakthrough. Taking inspiration from multiplayer gaming, they designed a master clock server that would signal the bridge lights, video feed and consumer devices with a consistent, accurate timecode.
Simple on the outside, crazy complex on the inside.
From a user perspective, requesting a song and watch the bridge lights dance to its beat was simplicity itself. Under the hood it was a completely different story.
Phones talking to servers talking to bridges, servers throwing music back at phones while doing everything possible in 2015 to sync the songs with the light show in every existing device. Oh, and there also was a live feed transmitting for users that weren’t in visual contact with Auckland’s landmark. It was, fittingly, a monumental task.
Simple on the outside, crazy complex on the inside
From a user perspective, requesting a song and watch the bridge lights dance to it’s beat was simplicity itself. Under the hood it was a completely different story.
Phones talking to servers talking to bridges, servers throwing music back at phones while doing everything possible in 2015 to sync the songs with the light show in every existing device. Oh, and there also was a live feed transmitting for users that weren’t in visual contact with Auckland’s landmark. It was, fittingly, a monumental task.
“It’s not often you get to play a significant role in a world-first like this. We’re proud to have been involved.”
The Hydra
A complex, eight-server load balanced platform fed music to the bridge and the networks on the day. We called it the hydra, because it was designed to spawn a new server automatically if any one server failed.
Let There Be Light
In the early hours of morning the bridge was calibrated under the cover of darkness with a single flashing light bulb.
We had the team from Special and 2degrees, some under the bridge with the lighting crew, some with Slipstream and the video feed across the harbour, and the development team in the war room monitoring the platform. You might say there were some nerves in the final hours and minutes, but when the moment came… illumination!
Playing, Sharing, Watching
When the campaign was unleashed on the public, Aucklanders and the country at large took up the disco ball and ran with it. Crowds gathered, tweeters tweeted, network news networks newsed. The website was tapped into Google Play’s vast library of songs, allowing users to choose from over 30 million tunes. The public requested over 20,000 songs to be played on the bridge. And between all the clicks and taps of a captivated city with their mobile phones “the bridge” was played, viewed, streamed, tweeted, listened to or shared 2.6 million times.
Winner
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Gold for Graphic Design at Best Awards 2015
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Gold for Spatial Design at Best Awards 2015
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Finalist for Interactive Design at Best Awards 2015
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Bronze for Consumer Services Award at Effie 2015
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Bronze for Most Effective PR/Experiential Campaign Award at Effie 2015