Atlanta Hawks Use Tech-Rich Experience To Showcase Stadium Renovations
A rendering of the renovations to Phillips Arena. The Atlanta Hawks recently revealed “The Preview”, a tech-centric tour of the stadium for potential suite and seat buyers.
Branding and design agency Hornall Anderson and the Atlanta Hawks have teamed up to create “The Preview”, an interactive and tech-rich sales experience that shows off renovations to Philips Arena.
The experience takes visitors through five rooms, each adorned with visually-pleasing experiences, and closes with “The Pit”, which features a 3D projection mapping of the stadium shot down from the ceiling on to the bowl below. The visuals are interactive, giving buyers a chance to see all the amenities the stadium has to offer.
“Everyone builds models, you know, with the white buildings and little people,” said Thad Sheely, the COO of the Hawks. “They are cool but everyone has been building models since building began.
“The team at Hornall Anderson said to me: ‘you guys are all about tech, all about immersion. Lets project onto this form the arena bowl in 3D and you can show seating locations and events.’ [With this model] we can look underneath the seats to see the club down below. You can’t do stuff like that in a traditional model.”
“The Pit” starts out as an eerie glowing red but comes to life when a visitor walks through the area. Even though the Seattle-based design agency specializes in creating these sales experiences, this was the first time they replaced a model with a 3D projection.
“This was our first time creating something like ‘The Pit,’” said Brandon Waterman, the creative lead on this project. “A few weird things start happening when you project on a 3D surface. Normal projections are 2D trying to be 3D, for us we had to make things feel flat first and then we could build off of that.”
The result is an interactive and immersive display that provides more functionality than a traditional model. Still, the installation of “The Pit” was tricky because of a uniquely Atlanta problem: “The Preview” sits directly under CNN’s International News Desk. This meant a lot of time had to be dedicated to acoustic engineering to make sure broadcasts aren’t interrupted.
“During construction they would call on a regular basis to shut things down,” Waterman said. “When we were done we brought in the Turner team and had them turn on all the mics in the studio. Then we went down and made more noise than we ever will again in the center and it was quieter than it needed to be. So we can run tours anytime we want, but during construction it was a real pain in the ass.”
For Hornall Anderson, the goal is to capture Atlanta authentically by going beyond sports and tapping into the entertainment culture in the city. According to Sheely, the venue is third in total attendance for concerts nationwide.
“We always said we want to be basketball first and music always,” he said. “The lights never go out in Atlanta. We will host 40+ basketball games and the same, if not more, concerts.”
“It is more than a basketball arena, it is an entertainment arena,” Waterman added. “We wanted to portray both sides equally. To do that, we used a lot of technology that we normally wouldn’t. That allowed us to tell a story and to match the level of technology that will be in the stadium itself.”
A bird’s-eye rendering of the renovated stadium.
Hornall Anderson also created the sales center in the Chase Center, the Golden State Warrior’s new arena. But even though the Bay Area is a national tech hub, the Atlanta center is more tech-focused. A large part of the reason for that is that Chase is a new arena while Atlanta’s arena had to be renovated.
“We were overcoming the barrier of renovation instead of building,” Waterman said. “The audience has been there for 20 years so that immersion worked in a way that analog could not do. We wanted to let people know this is not the arena they knew before. To do that, we had to enter more of a possibility, imagination realm. The tech helped us do that.”
The result is “The Preview” which Sheely – with his background in real estate – likened to an open house.
“We are showcasing what this is going to be and are really proud of it. We want to share this venue with you and make it an experience.”
