piñata, an Arduino powered bat streamed over a live event.

A Labs and TMW Unlimited collaboration, the tech team supported Labs on producing the platform for a truly unique experience.

Activision (client) were releasing the latest version of their ever popular "Skylanders" franchise and introducing a new character named "Painyatta". Labs decided to play on the name of the new character by having a tweet powered Piñata, and would promote the game through a live event.

For the live event, a custom "Painyatta" piñata was created and for every accepted tweet using the #HitPainyatta hashtag, the piñata would receive a hit by an Arduino powered bat. The prospective tweeters could watch the event via a livestream and any prizes knocked out of the piñata by their tweet would be sent to them.

Whilst Roo Williams (TMW Labs) and Tim at ELK planned and executed the physical build it was the responsibility of myself and our tech team to provide the Twitter integration supported by a bespoke CMS for moderation.

The tweets were collected by our service using the Twitter API and then listed on an internal CMS for live moderation. This would avoid any un-suitable tweets.

Node.js was used to build the moderation platform and also control the tweet collection. The moderator would select suitable tweets and push them to a approved queue, which then broadcasted each to a large ticker visible by everyone displaying the user's name and their Twitter message.

The whole event was broadcasted live by a 3rd party and generated a huge amount of social trending with celebrities even getting involved. The client was extremely happy with the result and on going social media generated by the competition.

Images by Andrew Williams