03.02.16 InterConnect 2016

There are no small shows — only small actors. But we’re not actors. And this wasn’t a small show.

We were thrilled to be part of Drury Design Dynamics‘ team on IBM InterConnect 2016, held February 21 – 25 at the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. UVLD has been part of this team for over a decade, and we’ve seen this show blossom from a small users’ symposium to the premier cloud and mobile conference it is today.

The show, uniquely, occupied both major arenas in town as well as many meeting rooms all over town. The A-List of speakers included the leadership team at IBM as well as some fantastic tech luminaries. Elton John was our headliner, but there were real stars onstage has well. We had Joshua Carr control a droid with his mind. Really. He explains it all on YouTube! We had the founder of Runkeeper, Simon Wheatcroft, talk about the challenges of building an app and being an ultrarunner. Oh, we should mention that Simon is blind. We also had a live orchestra, a band or two, the ubiqutious DJ, and interviews in the house. It was frenetic. Frenetically awesome.

no 16x9 imag for us!

no 16×9 imag for us!

The media team had a lot of their plate: both major venues were challenged by a design that didn’t rely on the conceit of picture in picture. This was truly special. Other than guest speakers and demos, every content graphic fell transparently on our widescreen background. Indeed, even IMAG windows were placed in a unique shape so they fell organically onto the visuals around them. By using the routing available to us in Pandora we were able to do all this with just three inputs from video, rather than having to composite masks from external sources.

Dave Rees. Programmer. mustache wax level: expert .

Dave Rees. Programmer. mustache wax level: expert .

John Ingram lead the design effort at the MGM Grand Arena, with Greg Cohen managing the lighting at the Mandalay Bay. Matt Webb and David Rees programmed. Seth Rapaport handled the ballrooms at MGM, and as we never saw him we know that it went outstandingly well. Chris Nye was the electrician with John, with Pete Campbell keeping Greg honest as his electrician. Lighting gear was provided by 4 Wall Entertainment.

On the media side, UVLD’s Visual Media Developer Cameron Yeary headed up his team of Florian Mosleh, Kevin Morris, Sam Kriemelmeyer and Chad Yeary.

On the Drury side, it was all-stars. Chris Drury was onsite as overall creative director with Dan Kaiser hanging out wherever Chris wasn’t. Philip Manin was executive producer.

We have some photos here of course, and they’re all over the interwebs as well. We love working, but we especially like a couple of arenas, a few thousand people and a great team of people as our clients. We loved this show.