The Challenge
Durex wanted a guerrilla-style brand activation in Milan that would stop foot traffic, create shareable moments, and reinforce their brand positioning around connection and intimacy. The catch: the installation had to work outdoors with zero infrastructure — no power outlets, no network connections, no permanent mounting. It needed to be set up in minutes, run autonomously for hours, and pack down just as fast.
What We Built
A fully self-contained interactive system built in collaboration with VirtualBlast, consisting of a custom battery-powered totem and a wireless LED wall. The totem houses an iPad running a Unity application with real-time computer vision — face tracking and depth estimation models processed entirely on the iPad's GPU. When the system detects exactly two people standing together in front of the totem, it triggers an interactive branded experience that streams wirelessly to the LED wall via Teradek video transmission.
The interaction flow is simple and immediate: passersby approach the totem, the system recognizes a couple, the LED wall comes alive with a brief, playful Durex-branded experience, and brand ambassadors on site reward participants with giveaways. The whole sequence lasts under a minute and is designed to create organic social sharing.
Technical Approach
The computer vision pipeline uses our Body Control framework for couple detection with face tracking and depth estimation — all processing runs locally on the iPad GPU with no cloud dependency. The custom totem was designed in our workshop, engineered for weather-resistance and battery power for full-day operation.
Impact
The installation ran across multiple activations in Milan, consistently drawing crowds and generating organic social media content. The combination of computer vision interactivity with the surprise factor of a self-powered street installation created exactly the kind of disruptive, shareable moment that guerrilla marketing aims for — technology invisible to the audience, branded experience impossible to ignore.
