Nike
I Love The Smell of Hayward Field in the Morning, It Smells Like Victory!
Nike continued their digital sport launch with a trio of pavilions marking the Olympic Track and Field Trials at Hayward Field at The University of Oregon in Eugene. Hayward Field, the veritable womb of Nike, needed an oversized brand statement, and they got one in Camp Victory from Skylab's Jeff Kovel. Nike turned to Tangram to pull together the myriad of digital content creators, AV technicians, and specialty fabricators to produce an experience that was out-of-this-world-class.
For Nike, it’s not just "all about the shoes" anymore, and it’s not just about logging your last run. It’s about making everything count, building apparel into sports sensors and creating a cloud-based infrastructure that keeps it all social. It’s digitizing performance, offering us a taste of the techno-athletic, not-so-distant future.
The 100-meter Speed Tunnel featured a 70 foot long, 10-foot-tall LED wall that depicted the fastest runs from the Olympic trials in real time--a giant, 1:1 representation of just how fast the world’s fastest really are. In the Nike Plus Live pavilion, head-to-head treadmills allowed runners to face off in the virtual world, creating a gorgeous leaderboard (complete with portraits) by time. Nike+ heat maps built from local runs combined to depict a giant topographical map of the local Oregon terrain, explorable in 3-D. The Shoe Lab had a larger-than-life Lunarlon foam wall showcasing the lightest shoes ever made and the strength depicted by the Flyknit fabrication was shown by a wall holding 500 spools of thread.
The surreal scene had an absurd, larger-than-life-scale, housed in translucent tensile structures, that seemed clad with alien skin. A 10-day sci-fi epic that would make J.J. Abrams air sick, LEDs were too bright, casual sprinting was taken too seriously, and that was the whole point.
