Vixi Launches 3D Social Platform On Super Bowl 50 Stadium Boards
Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
A new 3D social broadcasting platform called Vixi that debuted on large video display boards at Levi’s Stadium during Super Bowl 50 is a new platform for out-of-home marketing that enables event organizers to engage and entertain fans/consumers, and presents new sponsorship opportunities for brands.
Vixi is from Vixi Inc., a Culver City, California-based software company and part of the experiential division of integrated production company The Famous Group.
Vixi is a new real-time 3D social broadcasting platform that is agnostic to any screen and resolution. The boards in Levi’s Stadium at SB 50 were the regular large format display screens. The turnkey platform is patent-pending IP and uses a real-time game engine to display high-end 3D visuals seamlessly integrated with social aggregated and moderated content.
Vixi pulls in social content such as photos, Tweets and videos from one or several hashtags or local sources. The content is then moderated and mapped onto 3D objects into a dynamic real-time 3D environment.
“We use our own CMS for moderation building the program lists and managing the 3D scenes,” says Greg Harvey, CEO.
The first Vixi platform was launched in fall 2013 at MetLife Stadium for a NY Giants game. It was initially a 2D version, Super Bowl 50 marked the debut of the new real-time 3D version.
“The old system was scraped this year when we launched our new 3D grid,” says Harvey. “Visuals are everything! We felt the flat look of our old Vixi and the other competitors software in the social display space was old school and looked like a computer screen saver and was not visually engaging. We wanted a visually stunning dynamic system that looked like high end broadcast graphics. Social is important and brands want to be where the fans are an be part of a premium experience, not flat wallpaper.”
This latest version of Vixi features new proprietary 3D visuals, complete with a 3D grid and real-time rendered 3D environments (in terms of Stadium, Real-time Lighting, Dynamic Crowd System, a proprietary Grass Shader) to display fans’ social content in a whole new way.
At Super Bowl 50, the Vixi 3D stadium template ran non-stop at from 10:30 am to 7:00 pm PST on the Levi’s Stadium exterior concourse boards. The Vixi 3D Social Grid was run heavily during the pregame inside Levi’s Stadium on the 1920 x 650px segment of the boards. During the actual game, Vixi was used during several time outs during both halves. At the peak of the event, specifically halftime, there were over 4 million tweets hitting the #SB50 hashtag on Twitter. Instagram was also flooded with images, with around 500,000 posts.
Actual Super Bowl 50 content moderated by Vixi operator included, from 269 unique submitters, 469 images approved with 268 images featured (ie. one image took over the screen). 107 images were added to the queue through Twitter, with many of these celebrity posts using other hashtags such as #Superbowl50 or #SuperbowlSunday.
“Event experiences and presentations have advanced significantly in recent years, and it’s now time for displayed social content to take a similar leap forward,” says Harvey. “Vixi was developed to transform today’s traditional flat social wallpaper with patent-pending technology to create dynamic real-time 3D environments that integrate social content, sponsors and more. It’s a real-time broadcasting system driven by event-based social content, and is a major shift from current social display software platforms.”
The new Vixi uses the bold graphics of a real-time gaming engine to power socially driven visuals for live events, combining the foreground 3D social content with any background (still photos, live video feeds, 360 video and dynamic graphics).
The use of a mobile game engine to power the real-time graphics means Vixi visuals run and look amazing on mobile devices, as well as in a browser through WebGL. This flexibility to run across browsers and mobile devices is critical.
Vixi works for events of all sizes, including those without multi-million dollar control rooms that run the entire show on video boards. It acts as a turnkey ‘broadcasting’ platform focused around live events, running on a small-form computer.
Event operators can build the broadcasting programs on any web browser through the Vixi CMS and run the programs out to any size and resolution display board.
Another key element to the platform is that the 3D scenes are never pre-rendered, nor does the system ever stop to buffer itself as the social content is dynamically streamed into the 3D scenes. This enables Vixi to display aggregated content of all types in real-time 3D scenes. It’s similar to the real-time graphics used by broadcasters during live sporting events, except social posts drive the content.
The platform offers unlimited possibilities as the environments and social tile animations can be custom built for any brand, sponsor or event. The platform has a variety of 3D social templates (3D Grid, 3D stadium, 3D Voting/Polling, 3D stats, etc).
Each template has a foreground and background (the 3D scene is considered a background and the social content is considered a foreground element), enabling backgrounds and foregrounds to be switched in real-time.
Sponsorships can be integrated across all 3D templates, featured content, Hero images and transitions, enabling event operators to use Vixi to generate additional sponsorship revenues.
Follow DailyDOOH