Text Messages Drive Experiential Wish Fountain At San Diego Office Building
April 28, 2023 by Dave Haynes
In the days before fine pitch LED video walls, property developers often put fountains into the ground floor lobbies of office towers as an amenity and attraction. Here’s a very different kind of fountain – made with machined wood and LED lighting – to deliver an experience at a San Diego office building.
Developed by the Boston-based creative technology shop SOSO Limited, Wish Fountain is described as “an interactive experience that transforms visitors’ wishes into a colorful, water-like light show across a ripple-shaped wooden bench and wall-mounted screens.”
The digital fountain works with the idea of the ripples seen when a coin hits the surface of a wishing well.
Visitors share their wishes via text message to a posted phone number, as an image or text, in response to a prompt displayed on the screens. Each wish is a secret between the initiator and the fountain, resulting in a unique and captivating animation of colors across the bench and screens.
The cloud server powering Wish Fountain utilizes a natural language processor to decipher the mood of each visitor’s text. Then, the installation changes its colors and display inspired by the wish, resulting in reflective and distinctive displays of each visitor’s thoughts and feelings.
To keep the prompts timely, the building owner has access to a cloud-based CMS, allowing them to update the wish prompts to reflect current events, holidays, or important local themes.
Regent Properties and SOSO are committed to adaptive reuse, and Wish Fountain is the perfect answer to adaptively breathe new life into a familiar space. By creating a unique experience for each user, digital installations such as Wish Fountain have an evergreen quality by consistently providing dynamic value to their spaces that static installations can’t.
As you can see in the video below the fountain is paired and sync’d with a tiled, seven panel LCD video wall that encourages visitors to pull out their phones and make a wish.
Clever stuff!
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