Case study / Retail R&D

Touch-screen retail R&D, NFC, and 3D engine work for global Olympic and football campaigns

Engagement: 2011-2014Sector: Global athletic apparelReach: Europe, China, USA

Across three years embedded with a London creative-tech agency, our founder shipped retail-tech R&D for one of the world's largest athletic apparel brands. The flagship was a touch-screen Virtual Footwear Wall used in flagship stores during major Olympic and football campaigns across Europe, China, and the USA. The work spanned the multi-touch UI, 3D engine performance, NFC tag integration, and a content management system that pushed multilingual, multi-currency campaign content to the wall in retail.

The brief

The brand needed an in-store digital experience that could anchor flagship retail spaces during global sport campaigns. A large touch-screen wall, footwear browsing in 3D, real-time content swap-out as campaigns moved from city to city, the flexibility to support multiple regions and languages. Built once, deployed across a global retail estate, refreshed for every Olympic, World Cup, or Euro fixture window.

Multi-touch UI and 3D engine

The footwear wall was a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application running on large-format multi-touch displays. The 3D engine that rendered the footwear models needed to be smooth at retail scale — no jitter when half-a-dozen shoppers were poking at it simultaneously. Refactoring led to dramatic improvements in touch responsiveness and rendering throughput.

NFC and RFID tag integration

Article scanning support added so a physical shoe placed near the wall would surface its digital counterpart. NFC and RFID tag readers communicating with the wall over a TCP/IP server, mapping physical product SKUs to in-app 3D models and content.

Content management system extension

A custom CMS extended the wall's flexibility, with multi-language and multi-currency support so the same wall could ship for Berlin and Beijing without separate builds. The CMS pushed campaign content, product launches, and regional pricing to walls in retail without store teams needing to touch code.

WCF services for live data feeds

WCF services maintained for live data feeds from third-party sources (social, review aggregators) feeding into campaign overlays. Real-time content from the brand's social channels and product reviews sat alongside the curated catalogue on the wall.

Olympic and football campaign rollouts

Successfully delivered the release of multiple Olympic and football campaigns across the brand's flagship retail spaces in Europe, China, and the USA. The wall was a permanent installation; the campaigns were the thing that swapped, often with tight retail-launch windows.

What we learned, applied across our other work

Performance work in retail-grade UIs is non-negotiable. A touch-screen experience that lags at 30fps in a retail flagship is a brand liability, not just an engineering one.

Multi-region from day one is cheaper than multi-region later. Designing the CMS for multi-language and multi-currency before the first international rollout was an upfront cost that paid back across every campaign cycle thereafter.

Hardware integration deserves first-class testing. NFC, RFID, multi-touch, and 3D rendering all introduce hardware-dependent failure modes. Building the testing framework alongside the integration work meant retail-floor failures were caught in dev, not in stores.

Tech stack

UI

WPFMVVMPrismMulti-touch (TUIO)C++

3D & graphics

Custom rendering pipelinePerformance & memory profiling

Hardware

NFC / RFID tag readersTCP/IP socket programming

Data & services

WCF servicesEntity FrameworkFluent NHibernateCastle Windsor

Quality

TDDNUnitCustom hardware-aware test frameworkWhite

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