"In February of 2016, the San Francisco Bay Area hosted the 50th NFL Super Bowl. To commemorate this milestone, the Host Committee created Super Bowl City: a week-long, free-to-the-public fan village that would engage the entire community in the celebration beyond the 70,000 lucky enough to go the game. The centerpiece was SAP’s Fan Energy Zone, featuring three futuristic video games developed exclusively for Super Bowl City using virtual reality and motion capture technology. Our challenge was to design a fan’s end-to-end journey with the event, uniting the standalone games through a holistic, integrated Fan Energy Zone experience worthy of the occasion.

To tie the games together we developed a digital playing card and fan leaderboard, creating an immersive ecosystem within Super Bowl City that spanned the physical and digital realms. After playing any of the games, fans would receive a digital player card in their Super Bowl City app that captured their stats and provided insights into their performance. The front of the card featured their favorite team and beautifully commemorated their participation in the festivities around Super Bowl 50. The back contextualized their performance against that of the other players, and identified areas of improvement for each game. The stats being collected were then visualized on the 50-foot display overlooking the event’s central plaza. We maximized the number of these 'hero moments' through geographic and time-limited leaderboards, and compared the performances of each fanbase to make participants feel like representatives of their favorite teams.

Over the course of Super Bowl week, 1.1 million visitors to the area played 17,629 game sessions. While much attention is showered on the football game’s players, at Super Bowl 50, fans could also see their names in flashing lights, and commemorate their participation in the cultural moment."

"The Future of UX requires thinking beyond the screen; it means creating designs that are contextual and consider the environment surrounding the interaction. Our work for Super Bowl City brought cohesion to a visitor’s end-to-end experience, tying together the three standalone games with the space. Much attention is given to designing for the emerging AR and VR technologies, but it’s also important to think about the transition into and emergence from those environments, and how your actions in the virtual world manifest in the real one. Registered fans were welcomed by name as they stepped into the game station, received stats to their digital player card as soon as they exited and could immediately celebrate seeing their results on the fan wall if they achieved a high score. It was an immersive environment that seamlessly married their digital, in-game activity to their physical presence in the space.

Super Bowl City was created to showcase the people and cutting-edge technology the Bay Area is famous for in an engaging and lively environment. This presented inherent challenges when featuring single-player VR games, with the tendency of technology to de-socialize situations. Dinner tables everywhere are growing quiet as being present battles against online presence. Design should bring people together rather than isolate them; make them more engaged in their environment instead of turning them inward. We looked for ways to leverage the available stats and player information to create content that would interest visitors while waiting in line for a game and make their participation part of something larger than themselves. This led to geo-leaderboards for each of the Bay Area counties that summarized the collective stats of its citizens and highlighted its top performers. We also broke down the performances of each fanbase, leveraging the emotion of historic rivalries to make each fan’s participation matter and create a vibrant, engaged fan village."