With over 36,000 attendees, Google Cloud’s flagship event was a bold showcase of how AI is shaping the future. I partnered with production and tech teams to bring key installations to life through immersive, high-impact design.
Highlights included the AI Basketball Coach, where Gemini and Imagen offered real-time feedback on players’ form; the Vertex AI Model Garden, a vibrant space celebrating startups building with AI; and the Hardware-Verse, a hands-on zone for exploring Google’s latest in cloud and AI infrastructure.
Role: Experiential Design Direction
Agency: George P. Johnson Experience Marketing
AI Basketball Coach
Showcasing the speed and intelligence of Google’s AI tools, the AI Basketball Coach uses Gemini and Vertex AI to analyze attendees’ shooting form in real time. Each participant receives instant, personalized feedback from an on-screen coach—powered by Imagen-generated video—along with a shareable video recap of their session, making it easy to relive and post the experience across social channels.
How It Works
Pixel cameras mounted above the court captured each shot and movement in real time. Video was streamed to Vertex AI, where computer vision models analyzed biomechanics like form, release, and arc. Gemini 2.5 Pro generated instant feedback, both on-screen and via narration, offering personalized coaching after every shot. The full pipeline ran on Google Cloud, with low latency and live, on-site inference throughout the event.
Design Evolution
The activation went through many iterations, originally conceived as a Stephen Curry–branded experience, with his AI persona delivering virtual coaching. Early designs leaned into his voice and identity. As the concept evolved, we shifted toward a more product-led story, spotlighting Gemini and Vertex AI. While the celebrity tie-in was phased out, many of the original design principles carried through to the final experience.
Model Garden
Showcasing more than 200 AI and ML models from Google, partners, and the open-source community, the Vertex AI Model Garden offers an engaging, botanical-garden-inspired space to explore innovative, cost-effective solutions for real-world projects. Visitors can follow curated paths through models spanning vision, text, code, speech, and video—each paired with use cases, benchmarks, and deployment options—while connecting with the startups and teams turning these technologies into groundbreaking applications.
Hardware-Verse
Showcasing Google’s latest advances in AI-optimized cloud infrastructure and high-performance hardware, the Hardware-Verse invited attendees to explore cutting-edge technology through distinctive, hands-on demo stations. Featuring Google’s custom silicon—including the next-generation Ironwood TPU, Axion CPU, and Willow Quantum processor—this immersive activation highlighted decades of R&D through interactive demos illustrating how this infrastructure powers real-world applications in manufacturing operations, retail analytics, emergency response, and financial services.
