Samsung S5 Pulse Challenge — Philosophy, Technology, Bibliothecary, Design

DESCRIPTION

After the successful 'All Eyes on the S4' campaign for the 2013 launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4, Swisscom again wanted a massive viral campaign for the launch of the Galaxy S5, making use of the latest features found on the device. The focus for the campaign was the device's newly introduced heart-rate monitor. The campaign revolved around a competition whereby contestants would be put to the task with various challenges specifically conceived to elevate their heart rate. If they managed to keep their heart rate below 100 bpm throughout the entire experience, they would instantly win a Samsung Galaxy S5. 9 Challenges were thrown at the contestants while they were seated in a customised motorised chair within a specially setup venue purpose built for the event. The contestants' heart rates were monitored throughout the experience and the entire event was live-streamed onto the website and distributed banners from 3 of the GoPros built into the chair as well as on-location cameras.

TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION

The motorised chair was a customised beauty chair with the ability to control the horizontal position as well as the rotation of the contestants. Integrated into the chair were 3 GoPro cameras DMX controlled LED lighting, one facing the contestant, one of the view of the contestant, and one of their hand on the S5's pulse monitor.

On location, the contestant's heart rate was continually sent to a central locaton via Bluetooth. From here, it was distributed to a server online as well as an old CRT monitor plugged into a Raspberry PI running Processing to display contestants' heart rates to them. The feeds from the GoPros and on location camera were encoded with Teradek Vidiu live-stream encoders and sent to a Wowza streaming server via the 100/100Mb dedicated line.

A campaign website was built to display three feeds from the location as well as provide a platform for social media communication. The feeds and heart rate were also sent to distributed media banners.

The backbone of the system was setup using Amazon Web Services. EC2 instances were premade, ready to be spawned on demand. A data schematic of the system can be made available on request.

Over the course of the 8-hour day, 69 Terabytes of data were sent out to the banners and website. The majority of the day had around 5000 banners connected to the streams at any one point and up to 20 Amazon server instances were running at the same time, delivering around 14Gbps of data.

All feeds and heart rate data was accessible from a control room. Software on the Raspberry PI was remotely updateable. We had additional hardware for the GoPros and encoders and an extra live feed. The feeds were remotely switchable should any have failed.