‘Let The Path Be Open To Talent’, MontNapoleone, Milan

Geny Caloisi

‘Let the path be open to talent’ famous phrase from Bonaparte, is very adequate to describe what’s happening at a prestigious street in Milan with the general’s name, Via Montnapoleon.

As we know, the fashion week doesn’t happen just in London, Paris and Milan also have their own. Whether it is to coincide with this Autumn’s Milan fashion week or not, one of the city’s most elegant streets, Via Montnapoleone laden with brands, is updating its digital signage, and this week it should have had a street party!

We have been told that a top jewellery will display its ‘bling’ on a giant video wall (we are awaiting more info on this) and the legendary Gucci has launched an immersive retail experience in its store in Via Montnapoleone. Both stores premiered their new looks to visitors on September 21st.

Hollywood technology design company OOOii, has designed the flagship store’s retail technology solution to give customers the opportunity to interact with the brand in new and engaging. Ultimately, Gucci wants its physical and online retail stores seamlessly integrated. The scheme will be progressively introduced to Gucci’s flagship stores around the world over the next two years.

The immersive display installation in Milan includes almost fifty 45″ and 50″ Clarity Matrix LCD video wall displays from Planar Systems, tiled throughout the store. These ultra-thin, energy efficient, near-seamless LCD displays, together with OOOii’s graphics engine create life-size interactive images.

The OOOii Real Time servers that have been developed to drive all of the displays have been designed to be scalable to allow for immersive experiences throughout the store. The technologies that are being installed not only allow ultra-high resolution 4k and 5k imagery to be displayed across the numerous high-resolution Planar displays, but in a second phase will also give a customer the ability to interact with the content in intuitive ways.

Customers will be able to pause, rewind and search for specific content by making simple hand gestures in front of the displays. Mobile applications will also be incorporated allowing customers to download their preferred items to their mobiles and saved them or share them.

For the first phase, three “zones“ have been developed, as can be experienced in Gucci’s Montenapoleone store: the Immersive Window Display, the Immersive Entrance Display and the Immersive Women’s and Men’s Fashion Show Displays. Each zone will showcase a range of specially curated digital content. The highlight being the Immersive Women’s Fashion Show Display, where customers will experience Frida Giannini’s Autumn Winter 2012 Milan women’s fashion show as though it was happening right in front of them, thanks to 5k resolution film shot by a team from Hollywood on one of the world’s few RED Epic cameras.


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