The Vault of the Secret Formula creates a participatory space that shares the history of the Coca-Cola brand and celebrates its most famous secret without giving it away. The installations use technology to make visitors a part of the exhibit, their presence a catalyst that unlocks possibilities in virtual environments. Every component of the exhibition builds upon the previous one, increasing anticipation as people move through each step and learn more about the secret formula. The experience follows a clear narrative: visitors begin their journey by entering a high security zone full of incredible technology– the nerve center where the company's most valuable invention is kept. The theme of secrecy and mystery ever-present, they travel through Coca-Cola’s history and end up at the vault where the formula is held.

Our engineers, designers, and content strategists collaborated intensely on this project, completing it in just 10 months. The team made extensive use of openFrameworks, the computer vision library OpenCV, the Unity3D gaming engine, and an in-house depth-sensing framework developed in c# and the .NET framework.

Our innovative deployment of multiple Kinects in fixed physical installations to sense people in space allowed crowds to participate in experiences where their individual movements and collective activity unlocked new features of the game. Our engineers and innovation team weathered challenges such as capturing "clean" data, visualizing this data in real time (point clouds), manipulating this data (changing guest avatars dynamically), and using collision detection and gaming engine technology to place guest avatars in a world where they could interact with objects and affect scenes. At the time of this project's development, Microsoft did not officially support using Kinect in scenarios other than the Xbox. We worked with Coca-Cola and Microsoft to receive an exemption based on the novel uses we envisioned for the device.

We have worked with the client to enhance aspects of the exhibit with new features and functionality to extend the consumer experience. For example, we upgraded the Face Capturing system to capture more people more quickly to ensure everyone saw individual captures of themselves up on the security screens.

Our innovative use of multiple Kinect devices on this project has opened up a new set of opportunities for creating interactive and reactive immersive physical spaces. It has given us the ability to sense a person’s position in space and respond accordingly, altering the aspects of environments that affect the senses. It functions as a bridge to understanding consumer needs and meeting them by making dynamic the qualities of spaces that affect people emotionally.