Prudential

Developed by the Mayor of London and his agencies in 2013, Prudential RideLondon is a world-class festival of cycling.  Spanning 3 days, this is an event on a huge scale, culminating with a 100 mile sportive (bike event) on the final day, ridden by more than 20,000 cyclists.

A sportive of such mammoth scale requires a similar level of organisation.  The registration point for participants was the Excel Centre in London's Docklands.  Headline sponsors Prudential approached Xncreations to develop an engaging cycle based user experience for those who visited the expo over the 3 days in advance of the sportive.

Prudential sought to combine static bikes with interactive video to help them engage with the high footfall over the duration of the expo.  Keeping things very relevant to the 100 mile event, they chose to run a “Sprint Challenge”. Xncreations were asked to provide software incoporating a video of the iconic stretch of the Mall which would dynamically adjust the speed of the video, depending on the users power output.   Run as a competition, data accuracy and local storage were extremely important requirements.

The Solution:

Building upon our ANT+ library, developed a lower level desktop application to gather data from the 4 “watt Bikes” being used.  A local web server was setup to aggregate the data, and we utilised a JavaScript video library to dynamically control the speed of the video depending on the power output of the rider.  We worked in conjunction with the video specialists “One Guy” to capture and edit the video footage.  A frame rate of 30 fps @ 1080p was used.

Due to the size of the event, and the number of users expected to engage in the experience, Xncreations were onsite to provide support.  It was exciting to be part of the setup process and witness what goes on behind the scenes to organise and deliver events on such a large scale.

The atmosphere was incredible and we were proud to be there.  With over 5000 people engaging in the challenge the client seemed very happy too!.