This year the event is hosted at the Hudson Loft in downtown LA. We utilized all 4 levels of this studio loft and transformed it into an experience for gamers, journalists and execs.
Attendee Journey
Starting on 1st floor, guests walk through security and are immediately greeted by the core visual, The VizID, Xbox brand color lighting, and friendly staff that help them get started on their journey.
Our attendees move up the space through a very large elevator. The venue was once a car dealership, so this elevator was previously used to transport cars! For this event, it's moving our guests. We wanted to highlight this experience, so we wrapped the walls with vizID graphic elements, and the lighting team designed an incredible X-shaped chandelier to really set the vibe on this unique elevator journey.
Most guests are brought up to the top 4th floor first, where they would check in at registration and then their meetings. We also included Bag Check, work and lounge Areas, photo backdrops, and a large Media workroom which served as the main area for our guests to write their stories.
The 4th floor also features most of the meeting rooms which have the demos of the games they came to experience.
Depending on the schedule, guests may also go down to the 2nd floor, which feature creator pods for creators to film content in a quiet space, as well as more private meeting rooms for games and exclusive hands on new hardware.
The 3rd floor was our production home base. We also had an area that acted as the executive lounge and that's where they could also watch the live stream of the Xbox Games Showcase broadcast.
Design Challenges
The biggest challenge with an event like this is how to utilize all the space and make it feel like an Xbox event, and also blend that design with the original features and architecture of the venue.
In terms of event branding, this project started with 1 visual asset: The vizID.
The challenge was how the team could use this one asset and expand it to the entire space. This was by far the biggest challenge, but our approach ended up being quite simple. Instead of just using the full lockup of the VizID and treating it like a single asset "poster," we broke it down into layers to make multiple assets and different looks.
Those elements being the text lockup, colors, and the Smokey background. The background was key in the designs. Utilizing different crops and scales of the background, we were able to make different looks for different areas.
This created a nice cohesive look, using the same element, but not making it seem overly repetitive.
Our second challenge ended up being a technological one concerning how we would render and represent our designs to the client.
SketchUp is an incredibly powerful tool for modeling, but we did run into some limitations. One of them being the native views out of sketchup didn’t give us the fidelity and accuracy we needed to feel like we understood how the designs felt like on top of the venue in a photorealistic fashion.
Enter Unreal Engine 5, and our resident expert Alberto Zamora. Our lead designer supported Alberto to create a digital twin of the entire venue in Unreal Engine 5. Utilizing a combination of some photography from the site visit, measurements from our fabrication team, DFG, and the pre-existing Matterport scan done by the venue, we made an initial model of the Hudson Loft in Sketchup. This model was sent over to Alberto, where he rebuilt the model's geometry, and added textures and lighting to create a digital twin of the venue featuring our design interventions in a photorealistic manner. Utilizing Unreal Engine gave us the ability to present our designs in the most realistic way possible. We were also able to present our ideas without ever having to hit render. All of our concept images shared with the client were screenshots straight out of Unreal Engine, saving us a massive amount of time. Being able to just view our graphics on more realistic colors and textures of the venue straight from the Unreal Engine editor without having to wait for render times was such a game changer. For a deeper dive into the process, check out the conversation featuring our lead designer and Alberto (link).
The greatest aspect of projects like this is how much collaboration goes into it on our internal TPN side and also with our client and vendors. Huge shoutout to all of our partners and vendors that commit to the quality of their work and ensure such memorable premium experiences.
