ASB Classic 2023, Grand Slam

With the return of the ASB Classic in 2023, ASB approached Satellite in November to come up with a fun unique experience that could be implemented with a relatively short turnaround time and be ready for the crowds to participate with, at the ASB Tennis Centre in Stanley Street, Auckland in January 2023.

Satellite presented several concepts to ASB, one of which became the 2023 ASB Grand Slam.

Visitors to the ASB Classic were given the opportunity to hit as many balls at a wall of targets in 60 secs as they could and if they hit the targets, they would score points. The smaller the target, the more points they would earn.

The Construction

Using a wall constructed of several sheets of plywood attached to trusses, Satellite cut holes out in various sizes, and added a network of ball “capture and return” containers and pipes to the back.

When someone hit a ball through one of the target holes, it would not only record the score for that hole, it would return the balls to a collection point ready for the next player's turn.

The Scoring Technology

Satellite made use of “computer vision” to capture movement inside the target holes. When a ball was successfully hit into a target hole, the movement would be sensed and record it as a successful shot. Each target had an Android smartphone attached to the top of the catchment container. Installed on the phone was an Android app that used the phone’s camera to look for movement. When movement was detected, the app sent the correct points for that target to the cloud where the player's score was being tallied.

Using our event management experience we knew the brand ambassadors who were running the game would need a way to manage the game play settings, so we built an Android app to control the game settings. They could reset to a new game, add the players name (for the leaderboard), set the length of the game and manually control scores if they needed to with all the details stored in the cloud.

Another Android app was used on a large wall-mounted flat screen to show the leaderboard.