Vodafone’s 10,000 square feet Experience Center in their Milan headquarters was designed by Sensing Places for customer groups to be taken on a guided journey via a staff member.

Each of the three main rooms contained multiple computers, monitors, and cameras as well as old lighting and blinds infrastructure. Vodafone wanted their staff to have easy control over the hardware, and content while maintaining the existing control system for the lighting and blinds – even though no software was commercially available to do this.

Sensing Places developed customized software and a user interface (UI) that allowed tour leaders to control all hardware and lighting from a tablet.

To control the existing lighting and blinds we identified the middleware control hardware (control router), then set up an ambient server to relay commands to the middleware. We then developed a control application on a tablet with a custom user interface (UI) that used buttons and sliders to control each device. The custom UI and control system integrated with the custom built digital asset management system that managed and displayed content across displays.

This solution provided Vodafone staff with a centralized way to switch input between monitors, control the brightness of the monitors, control the lights collectively room by room, open and close the curtains, and simultaneously turn on/off all computers, cameras, monitors, and lights.