Intel Interactive Tradeshow Booth Experience at CES

Intel Corporation

Las Vegas, NV

The world's largest interactive lifeform simulation for the world's foremost chipmaker at the world's biggest consumer electronics show.

The Ask

The year that Intel’s processors broke out of PCs heralded the genesis of a fantastic new ecosystem of smart, mobile devices. They needed to make a massive, memorable statement to communicate both the concept and importance of this new direction for the company.

The Journey

Create a booth-filling, attention-grabbing, and memorable experience that was incredibly easy to understand and immensely rewarding. Give visitors "superpowers" to magnify their inputs and leave their own unique imprint on the experience.

The Solution

The Intel “Connect to Life” Experience, a massive-scale immersive interactive environment featuring the world’s largest multi-user, real-time-3D virtual life simulation.

Simple interactivity with a massive payoff

The goal for “Connect to Life” was simple – convey the power of billions of connected devices by letting visitors feel what it’s like to become a part of that world. A very simple user experience was designed to maximize throughput and delight:

Place any object (a hand, keychain, etc.) into a scanning station and have it scanned, then look up to watch the silhouette of that shape fly up to the big screen.

There, the outline would morph into a unique digital lifeform based on the “DNA” of that unique shape.

A CES attendee reaches into the input station to have his hand scanned.
A screenshot of the user interface for the interactive tradeshow booth installation.
A screenshot of the user interface for the interactive tradeshow booth installation.
A screenshot of the user interface for the interactive tradeshow booth installation, telling the user to look up.

The best user interface is no user interface

Insert any object into the station and it's instantly turned into a three-dimensional outline.

30,000+ unique lifeforms created over a 4-day period.

A CES attendee is delighted by seeing her lifeform on the interactive tradeshow booth.

New lifeforms, customized by you

Once “born,” lifeforms would swim off into the immersive environment and interact with lifeforms created by others. The interactions between these creatures were governed the “species” of the lifeforms: some were predators and would chase prey that would run away, others would seek out similar species and do a little dance when they finally encountered each other.

An extremely low-barrier to engagement paired with a (physically) large reward for interaction led to over 30,000 unique lifeforms created by attendees over a 4-day period.

Another attendee i s mesmerized by the lifeform he created on the interactive tradeshow booth.

The magic of the interactive environment was not only watching one’s shape come to life, but to see it interact with the other creatures in the ecosystem.

Photograph of the custom input stations for the interactive tradeshow booth.

Spanning the entirety of Intel’s booth, conference attendees could use any of six custom-made stations around the perimeter of the tradeshow interactive to create a shape.

A technical wonder, powered by Intel

The system was powered by 12 custom-built PCs, all powered by Intel processors. We created an entirely bespoke platform featuring custom shaders and distributed 3D rendering, along with custom capture code for the input stations that turned any shape into an outline to be sent to the 3D system for rendering.

Projeciton mapping setup for the interactive tradeshow booth.

Each unique bioluminescent lifeform was created on a 2200 square-foot projection-mapped surface, using 24 projectors.

Concept art for the various lifeforms.

Early conceptual explorations of the various "species" of lifeforms.

A wide shot of the world's largest lifeform simulation on the interactive tradeshow booth.