Award-winning branding. Advertising. Design. Interactive. Social media. Broadcast. Print. Outdoor. Identity. Packaging. POS. Direct mail. Media planning and buying. Production. Not to mention the Tip. All in one action-packed agency in downtown San Francisco.
Judge Rachel Pasqua pretty much hit the nail on the head when she described the interface, created for the new generation of Hard Rock Cafes, as “an innovative combination of social and touchscreen technology with a tactile twist on the old restaurant booth jukebox that lets users thumb through the memorabilia and cast their vote for the next video.”
Hard Rock runs a massive video system to coordinate the displays throughout its cafes, hotels, casinos and live venues worldwide. Duncan/Channon collaborated with artist Erik Natzke to create a series of trippy, dynamically-generated animations to display when music other than music videos is playing (live bands, a DJ, etc.). Animations are paired randomly with whatever music happens to be playing at the time and each resolves into a specific visual revelation. Here’s a six-minute sample (you’ll have to supply your own mushrooms).
Music: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Mysteries” / Cut Chemist, “(My 1st) Big Break” / Manchester Orchestra, “The Only One”
It all started with a groundbreaking little Deep Zoom website, conceived and designed by Duncan/Channon, that enabled rock fans to get extremely up-close-and-personal with Hard Rock’s memorabilia collection without having to travel. The site, now featuring 1,100 priceless pieces of rock history (en route to thousands more), was an immediate popular success – and a critical one, too, winning D/C two Webby honors.
But even as development continues on still more amazing editions of the site and its widget, Hard Rock management threw down the gauntlet: get the technology “out of the box” and into the properties, starting with the new flagship cafe opening today on the Las Vegas Strip.
Working with Hard Rock’s crack technology, property-development and memorabilia teams, and our friends and software development partner Vertigo, D/C designed three new interfaces for the cafe. These include two apps for Microsoft Surface – the multi-touch, multi-user, interactive tabletop – as well as a touch-based interface for the restaurant’s 38 booths, where guests can manipulate memorabilia, peruse merchandise and vote on what video plays next in the cafe. The agency also consulted with Obscura Digital on the Rock Wall™ – a massive (18 x 4 ft.), interactive display that enables six simultaneous guests to explore Hard Rock memorabilia with their fingertips.
There’s more. And more to come. But, honestly, isn’t that enough?
2) Share your favorite items on Facebook. Zoom in on any item you like and click on SHARE in the info panel to post that image and story back to your Facebook wall. Facebook?! Connect?! Yeah. I know. Friend my pal Watermelon Gum to see it in action… or go to the site and try it for yourself.
3) The Facebook Connect stuff is aided by a lightweight (invisible) Facebook app. Click the Fan button at the top of the page to keep in touch.
4) Filtering/searching via URL queries. No?! Yes! That’s what I’m telling you. Here’s an example of each of the link types we support as of today. Try ’em…
5) Filter-based embeddable widgets. Shut up! This is a bit of an “expert” feature for those in-the-know, and may only be used by Hard Rock for now, but – for you adventurous types – here’s a how-to page for custom widgets. And here’s a sample – every item that mentions the word “autograph.”
And there you have it. As the man said, Rock is King.
PS: Hidden bonus feature, just for kicks… Go to the site, enter v in the search box and then zoom out from there.
The groundbreaking, Deep-Zoom-able Hard Rock Memorabilia website and widget – conceived and designed by D/C and built by Vertigo – have been designated an Official 2009 Webby Honoree in two categories: Music and Best Use of Photography.
As the Webby folks explain, Honorees are the “top 15% of all work entered that exhibits remarkable achievement… with nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 states and over 60 countries.”
Hard Rock has a cafe at the brand new Yankee Stadium, and, along with the prime real estate, gets thirty seconds every game in front of 50,000 fans on the hi-def Jumbotron. Not surprisingly, they tossed the opportunity to agency of record, D/C, which cooked up a modern mashup of the old chestnut “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” as sung by New York-area rock stars.
The spot was mostly shot at the stadium the day before it opened. And the musical cast included Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, en route to a plane to Cleveland for his induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame; Bronx native and Yankees fanatic Ace Frehley of Kiss; Scott Ian of Anthrax; Little Steven Van Zant; the Bacon Brothers (Kevin and Michael); the Dictators’ Handsome Dick Manitoba, another Bronx-bred Bombers fan; and Bernie Williams, the retired Yankees star – and hot-shot guitarist – now making his own promising play for rock stardom.
In addition to the scoreboard, the spot will be aired on the TV systems at both the Yankee Stadium and Times Square cafes.
Microsoft has officially launched a Seadragon app for the iPhone. Which means you can now browse high-resolution photo collections on your iPhone – including the Hard Rock memorabilia collection (as seen on the Hard Rock memorabilia website, conceived and designed by D/C and built by Vertigo).
So if you’re out and about and overcome by a sudden and insatiable need to see Morrison’s ripped leather pants, you totally can. Here’s how:
Monday at midnight, Hard Rock International launched an online application that enables music fans to break off a favorite collectible from the Hard Rock Memorabilia website and place it on their own blogs and sites.
Conceived and designed by D/C (natch) and built by the agency’s development partner Vertigo, the memorabilia widget works much the same as a YouTube widget, giving users all the functionality of the parent site, but in a small portable app. The memorabilia widget allows fans to zoom in on images to an extraordinary level of detail – for instance, reading marginal notes in a handwritten Paul McCartney letter from 1964 or seeing the fingerprints on Bo Diddley’s custom guitar. It also allows them to open an information panel that recounts the history of the piece and play videos related to the item.
The Hard Rock widget was launched in coordination with the official release of Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 plug-in, the underlying technology for both the acclaimed website and the new widget. Look for it to migrate soon to a music or tech blog near you.
|
Link to this post | Email post
| Comments (0) | Make a comment
Site RSS feed