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(E3 prototype motion treatment)

E3 Electronics Consumer Show

The E3 electronics consumer show is one of the world’s most important trade shows, where major brands reveal the direction their products will take in the coming year. For our client Sony Computer Entertainment of America, Oddly Studios was entrusted with the task of building the site that would be used to reveal the most important launches in the history of the company – their blockbuster game titles, the Playstation Slim, and their newest hand-held system, the PSP Go.

Strategy Effort

Oddly Studios worked hand in hand with the strategy team at Sony, ensuring that eight branches of the company would all be represented for the show. To prepare for up to the minute news releases and content-reveals, Oddly built a modular code system that could be adjusted at a moments notice, allowing for rich media like video, twitter feeds, blog posts, and streaming media. Modules could be dropped in, replaced, moved, or function entirely on their own, allowing for complete flexibility during the rush of news updates, posts from the floor, and streaming reports.

The Design Effort

Starting with concept sketches, the design team at Oddly launched into the creation of several prototypes, pursuing several paths while narrowing down a fresh design that would meet the needs of all branches of Sony represented at the show. There would be reveals of major game titles like God of War. The King of Gamers would be doing twitter posts live from the floor, and Pulse magazine would be uploading latest video footage from the conference. The Playstation network blog would be doing major unveilings, and Playstation Home would be releasing information about their new innovative virtual environment.

The major release at the show would be the launch of two game consoles, the Playstation Slim, and the PSP Go. For this crucial release, Oddly Studios employed 3D software, working on the pre-release CAD files to create ultra-high-res interactive models of the hardware that users would be able to manipulate themselves in the site. Timing was crucial as these parts of the site needed to correspond to press releases during the show. We did a few passes, one clean and white, another tron-like, and a motion treatment.

Concepts

Our original concept was for an interactive directory of the conference. This directory would emphasize Sony as the beating heart of the conference, while also providing a useful tool for visitors to the conference (which is massive). We pictured setting up technology to watch for blog and twitter posts every time SCEA did an announcement. In a 3D environment, visitors would be able to zoom down into the directory and pass through posts, stopping to read any that were interesting.

Development Effort

To achieve the high levels of flexibility the client required for the show, Oddly went with a highly modular system based on PureMVC Multicore. This is a variation on MVC that makes use of multiple cores rather than one single one. In brief, it means that the site is actually a collection of mini-programs, all of which can be loaded or not based on updates at the show. Need a video player quickly? No problem. Need an RSS feed? Easy. But here is where multicore shines: need to have a video play when the user clicks an item in that RSS feed? Also not a problem – the cores are able to easily pass messages between each other.