Three Byte Intermedia Controls a Roomful of Apple iPads at Infiniti Leadership Summit

Working with luxury car manufacturer Infiniti, brand-leadership expert AMCI sought out Three Byte Intermedia, a custom software studio specializing in innovative AV solutions, to develop a unique personal presentation and interaction platform based on Apple iPads. The challenge: The iPads would be given to 100 people at a time from Infiniti franchise dealerships across the US who were attending the Infiniti Leadership Summit.

Designed to focus renewed enthusiasm on Infiniti's brand presence, the Summit rallied dealers to an enhanced customer experience promise. AMCI wanted to use iPads throughout the presentations to demonstrate the streamlined, technology-enabled experience the company expects dealers to present and emulate.

Three Byte designed a hardware and software system to coordinate and control a room full of iPads as users completed interactive exercises and submitted the results. In one activity, facilitators asked attendees to sort a series of words into different categories based on how well they thought the word represented the brand. When the exercise was completed, the collective results were automatically aggregated and shown on the main presentation screen for everyone to review. This gave the facilitators instant feedback and enabled them to comment on the actual responses from the room.

"Each iPad had a custom-built Infiniti-themed app that we wrote and installed before the event," says Olaaf Rossi, a principal with Three Byte. "Utilizing registration information from AMCI's online participant registration website, users were greeted with a highly personalized experience that included their name, dealership and email address. This same personalization allowed users to receive an email after the event with a complete record of the brainstorming and action-planning ideas they entered during the interactive iPad exercises. Furthermore, as permitted by the users, Infiniti can access this information to follow up and support dealers with their proposed action plans."

Three Byte's centralized control system consisted of a local Microsoft SQL/IIS server, a dedicated gigabit network, and Ruckus wireless access points provided by Scharff Weisberg in each of the meeting rooms where the iPads were used.

The backend system was organized around a piece of software written by Three Byte that allowed central control and status monitoring of all the iPads, the users and the submitted results. The operator had complete control over what was shown on the iPads at any given time. At the end of the event, the operator could reset all of the iPads with a single button push so they were ready for a new group of dealers the following day.

"It looked pretty awesome when our iPad app was triggered, and you could see all of the iPads change their screens at once without any interaction by the person holding the iPad," Rossi reports. "Supporting a presentation with a new method of interacting with the participants gave the designers the ability to 'push' content they wanted, when they wanted, in a very compelling way." ,p> Three Byte Intermedia specializes in the design and implementation of innovative AV solutions for challenging projects of all sizes. It offers custom software development, show control systems design and development, architectural design support, AV systems design and integration, and systems engineering.