IBM's Return Serve was a virtual reality kiosk application for the 2014 Australian Open Tennis Championships. Powered by IBM's data, processed live from Tennis Australia, participants were challenged to return the last serve played on Rod Laver Arena. Live. To do so, they were required to wear the Oculus Rift headset to immerse themselves in a digital replica of Rod Laver Arena, then take ahold of a Razer Hydra motion sensor controller to swing their virtual tennis racket.
The primary objective of the campaign was to showcase IBM's data analytical capabilities during the event, and expose its application of personalised data analysis to augment the human experience.
Several booths were constructed to house the application across both Melbourne and Sydney. Their locations were:
Sydney
Melbourne
Alongside the virtual reality application, a complete web experience was also developed to create a similar user journey online.
More info on IBM's website here.
Tech: Unity 4, C#, JSON, Razer Hydra, Oculus Rift (DK1).
