NZHQ Olympic Fan Zone

Moved from 2020 to 2021 the Tokyo Olympics went ahead in July 2021. Due to Covid, fans were not able to travel to Japan and be part of the event. Back in New Zealand, there was a real passion to create a space where friends, fans and whanau of athletes could join each other to celebrate the triumphs and successes of the competitors — together.

So the NZOC set up NZHQ at The Cloud, on Auckland’s Queen’s Wharf. An official fan zone where people could watch, connect, and experience a very different Olympic games through technology. A space to share a sense of solidarity (with our New Zealand athletes) via nine massive screens from the best seat in town.

Satellite helped to enhance this set-up for NZOC by designing a mobi-site that users could register on that provided event schedules, an onsite location map, a ‘what’s on’ list, food and drink details, live updates, venue times and a host of other useful general info. This was a quick and easy way for people to find out when their favourite events were on and what time they needed to be in the door to watch them.

As a way to give back to the relatives of our Olympians, and bridge that distance, NZOC created a special VIP family zone. To manage the zone, Satellite set up online pre-event app registration, so that friends and family of the athletes could ensure they secured a spot there ahead of time. This was also a useful data source for NZOC to maintain crowd limits, plan resources accordingly and manage opening and closing times for the venue.

To effectively control crowd capacity at NZOC HQ, Satellite provided the client with RFID wristbands. These were given to people when they arrived and had presented their QR code venue ticket at the door off their mobile device.

This allowed NZOC to focus in on data before, during and after the event — specifically who came, how long they spent in the zone and what type of ‘delegate’ they were relative to their scanning activity. The bands were also used to manage access into the VIP zone.