Designed by:

Matthew Walsh

The brief was to create an interactive window display for the North Face shop in Newcastle. The idea I came up with was to project imagery of outdoors activities on to a series of pyramids representing mountains for the extreme side of the brand. The interaction part was involving an Xbox Kinect, where you raise your hands and the area your hand finishes it selects the video that will play on the pyramids themselves. The North Face is a wet known brand and the majority of the public know who they are and what they sell, with this in mind I thought it was appropriate to sell those famous brand values rather than the items themselves. Anyone who knows The North Face know their products are some of the best in the world and would buy them regardless, so selling the brand values and the lifestyle they want you to lead creates a much more powerful and imposing message.

The pyramid shapes in the display are there to portray the extreme side of The North Face. They are an extreme lifestyle kind of company, so they need extreme looking displays. Their previous displays are flat and uninteresting with very static looking objects, when the North Face is anything but static.

To interact with the display, all you need to do is walk past, using the Xbox Kinect and Modul8, the display tracks your body movements and reacts accordingly, walking from left to right makes the display glow in a vibrant red, very much like the branding colours of The North Face. This proved to be very effective way of getting the audience to stop. Once you are stood in front of the window, with the aid of a few waves in the air, you are able to manipulate what activity is displayed on the pyramids.

There are 5 different areas for your hands to change to videos, they are in the shape of an arc above your head, This helps with giving the sense of physical movement, it isn’t a normal movement to wave your hands above your head, maybe in a situation where you are trying to get attention or need some help, which is a great possibility when your in the extreme environment The North Face wants you to go.

Overall this project has done exactly what the brief asked it to do, When in the user testing phase there were many comments on how unique and individual the display was, They loved how the unevenness of the surface gave that extra dimension to the extreme nature of the sports being displayed.