We are no strangers to cross-device interactions. As a side event at a marathon, novu was commissioned by the Generali insurance company to communicate how fast marathon runners really are.
This was achieved through an in-house developed 2.5D game experience, in which the visitors could compete with the fastest marathon runner in Switzerland (Tadesse Abraham). For this, we created animated pixel art and were specifically inspired by the video game legend Outrun.
23 km/h
Bürorekord auf dem Laufband
198
Einzel gezeichnete Pixelgrafiken
3.7 m2
Belegte Bürofläche
How fast is a marathon runner?
Tadesse Abraham, the fastest marathon runner in Switzerland, set a Swiss record of 2:06:38h for the 42.195km - which corresponds to an average speed of 19.99km/h. But how fast is that really?
As a sponsor of a marathon, Generali wanted to generate attention on site and approached us with the idea of a digital-analogue installation. A treadmill was set up in a container on site, on which visitors could test what it means to run at this speed. Over a virtual distance of 400m, visitors could compete against the fastest marathon runners and realise that even over this short distance (approx. 1% of the total distance) it is quite difficult to keep up with their pace.
Technical implementation
The digital-analogue activation game is controlled by a treadmill - we had to move half an office room to create enough space for our test environment and fiddled around for some time until we could reliably read out the speed and connect it to the front end.
The architecture is based on a Raspberry Pi connected to the treadmill, which transmits the speed data to a server in real time. The frontend with carefully drawn pixel graphics in 2.5D then brings this speed onto the screen in a playful way.
Would you manage to compete against Tadesse Abraham?
