Elevating Interactivity

The Hard Rock Café in Las Vegas is huge – 42,000 square feet with over 900 seats. It’s totally over the top and fits right in with all that Vegas offers.  The thing most interesting about this flagship Café is its use of interactive touch-based activities to entertain their patrons. Hard Rock decided to leverage three different form factors in allowing their guest to explore memorabilia and select music for listening.

The most impressive piece in the restaurant is the 18-foot “Rock Wall”, which is a 6-person multitouch experience that allows visitors to browse the growing database of Hard Rock memorabilia. The experience is designed to have touch “stalls” where 1 to 6 users can stand and select an image to be zoomed into and pull up supporting descriptions.  Access to this content already existed previously via this website.  The wall experience (like the others, below) leverage Microsoft’s Silverlight technology to empower a Deep Zoom feature so you can get super up close to personal to Eric Clapton’s guitar. On the wall this is especially impressive because of its size.

Though hard to see in this picture (photos of the venue are of poor quality due to the low lighting) the image quality onscreen is impressive thanks to high quality imagery and a high resolution. We are big fans of large touch walls (see Cannes Lions Touch Wall) but this one seems a bit lacking in purpose, given that the memorabilia application is something that exists already and seems fairly basic for such a large form factor. But large touch walls like this have a big “wow” factor, they can mostly compensate for average content. The Rock Wall is definitely the biggest interactive screen I know of that simply accesses a database of static content.

Several Microsoft Surface units are also deployed throughout the environment as lounge tables and bar height stations. These include access to the same memorabilia database as well as some casual games. I like how they are integrated into the fixtures and provide patrons with fun content to entertain themselves while hanging out.

The third touch form factor within the restaurant is booth interactives – 19-inch touch screens at visitor’s tables. The booth systems feature a digital video jukebox of music, allowing the visitor to see what songs have played recently, as well as the ability to vote for the next song to be played.

This video shows off all three of the interactive form factors.