The Brief: To engage new audiences and grow the game of tennis globally, the USTA needs the US Open to provide a rich viewer experience both on-site and on-line for millions of fans around the world.
This was the year of Watson. IBM’s artificial intelligence system of tools. How can we showcase the data of tennis and explain artificial intelligence to the masses?
Our Response:
Let’s have tennis fans talk to Watson and he’ll create a portrait of them using Tennis ball emoji.
Building off our success with the Watson Cognitive Photobooth, We decided to apply Watson to Tennis data. What traits made up a world champion? We gave Watson as many available data points as possible on past U.S. Open participants in order to glean what traits each had and how closely you match to a tennis star.
The design of the booth was a remix of the Cognitive Photobooth, re-imagined as a standup booth so that we can fit more users through the space. The fabricators did a great job of transforming the design with improvements for ventilation to withstand the brutal NYC summer heat. Our creative technology group added LED lights to the booth to give the operators a visual cue to what was going on inside the booth. Blue for engaged, white for photo taking, and green for empty.
Users would then enter the booth and Watson would ask them 5 open-ended questions in order to use the tone analyzer to determine traits. After you finished, the back-end crunched the data and gave your percentages in each category. Watson then matched you to a tennis pro that your data closest matched up to. It was always a great reaction when fans were matched with their favorite player or a player from their home country showcasing the power of A.I. Fans received a printed poster of their portrait and also a shareable photo directly to their device.
For people not on-site at the U.S. Open we created a microsite that users could access on IBM.com to talk to Watson from the comfort of their home.
My role as Executive Producer was to determine feasibility and scope, web application development, fabrication of Watson Booths, on-site event management, and logistics.
ClientIBMServicesA.I. / Social PhotoboothProd CoInternal / Bednark