I was recently hired to work on an interactive show stand for Virgin Media. Virgin’s brief was that they wanted people to signup and do a 5 question quiz on an iPad. The answers to the quiz would then determine what kind of ‘TV animal’ they are in accordance with their recent marketing campaigns. And finally they sit down on a couch and their photograph is taken with their ‘TV animal’ superimposed with them. The photograph is then stored online and a link to it is emailed to the user for them to have a look at it and circulate via social networking.
My brief was to work on two aspects of the build. Firstly to develop a web application for the user signup, quiz, ascertain which kind of ‘TV animal’ they are and display the photographs. Secondly to write an API so that the Unity application doing the photography could find out the name and ‘TV animal’ of the next person in the queue, take the photograph, submit it back to the web application and send out the email. To implement this project, I :
- was provided with PSD design files and some images from which I sliced all the graphics
- coded HTML / CSS templates using Bootstrap
- designed and built a MySQL database to store all the data
- coded the web application using Codeigniter MVC PHP framework and converted the HTML / CSS templates into views templates
- developed an API to provide the Unity application with access to the data in the database, store the photograph and send out the email
- configured an Amazon Web Services linux instance to host the software live
I needed to make a few changes to the API which the Unity developer subsequently requested and the designers also made a few changes which I implemented. The whole system then smoothly ran live at a few shows.
I really enjoyed developing on this web application and API, it was great fun.