Trash talking and soccer, (or at least sports in general) go hand in hand—the taunts and the jeers, the ragging on the other team, the threats and the promises of victory.
The energy around the FIFA World Cup continues to build. Deeplocal partnering with Wieden+Kennedy Portland found a way to capture that energy, the trash talking, and the physicality of the game with their campaign “Balls to the Yanks, Balls to the Brits produced for EA Sports.”
In less than three weeks, a team of three people created the only known Twitter-powered portable ball printing robot in the world. The robot takes in messages from a variety of sources (iPhone, iPad, web submittal, and Tweets) and then our web-based moderation system filters the messages before they’re printed on the soccer balls.
If you’ve heard about the Nike Chalkbot (and you probably have by now, it’s received enough press), you’ll understand the excitement around Balls to the Yanks, Balls to the Brits. Soccer fans in America and Europe can submit a message, which is printed on the soccer balls with acetone-based ink that dries in seconds. Then the ball is propelled into the crowd using a steel, spring-loaded mechanism.
Cheering crowds were able to get their hands on these trash-talk-coated balls at EA’s one day event in London and Los Angeles. On both sides of the ocean, fans submitted their message via iPad, it was printed on the soccer ball in the opposite city, and hurled into the crowd. The back and forth of trash talk came alive that day. Check it out: EA’s Balls to the Brits, Balls to the Yanks on June 12
The technology behind the campaign is Deeplocal through and through—taking the digital world and propelling it into the physical world. The Nike Chalkbot took messages of hope and inspiration from online venues (Tweets, web submittal, etc.) and painted them directly on the race course of the Tour de France. Then, the Chalkbot snapped a picture of the message and sent it back to the submitter, complete with GPS tracking coordinates, merging the physical back with the digital world.
For “Balls to the Brits, Balls to the Yanks,” we took the print head technology that’s traditionally used for industrial applications and repurposed it. There are 15 digitally-controlled spray nozzles and the same web moderation software, called Handlr, as the Chalkbot. The robot is powered by a Linux Netbook that pulls the submitted messages from all over the world, and they’re printed in real-time. Designed from scratch, the robot is made entirely of steel and can be adjusted to paint on different types of sports balls. And there are two of them that speak to one another.
Much like Chalkbot, the project focused on feedback. Printed balls were photographed in a tongue-in-cheek setting and sent back to users, documenting their printed ball arriving in the opposing team’s homeland. Evan Andy Sanberg got in on the action in LA.
Deeplocal has more tricks like this one up its sleeve—we love projects (often involving robots) that use technology and art to link digital technology to things you can hold in your hands, or bike across on the ground.
Look for our next post on the project we just launched with Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam for Nike in Jo’Burg.
