MegaFon, the general partner of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, with its Olympic activation needed to reinforce its customers loyalty and mobile internet usage as well as to stimulate mobile internet trial by other network customers in the time of Mobile Number Portability (MNP).

In the early 2013 Olympics seemed "very official and unapproachable" for most Russians. Brand saw a phenomenal business opportunity to encourage everyone to leave their personal mark in the Games history and put its high-speed mobile internet at the core of it, inviting fans to write a new digital chapter of the Olympics.

Megafaces - MegaFon’s Olympic Pavilion became a pinnacle of the five-months Olympic campaign «Create Your Own Olympic History» and gave everyone an opportunity for an epic “I was there” Olympic Moment - for THE best selfie ever!

2,000 sq m Pavilion featured the world’s first large scale LED kinetic façade, becoming a digital Mount Rushmore. Customers around Russia and visitors to the Olympic Park had their faces photographed and transferred to the Pavilion façade. Designed to function like a huge pin screen that could extend out to a depth of up to two metres, the façade of the Pavilion was made up of over 11,000 actuators and was capable of rendering 8 metres tall by 6 metres wide 3D images. Morphing every 50 seconds, three faces were featured at any one time, enlarged by 3,500%. The CPP (creative positioning pipeline) was a 3D processing engine which ran automatically to algorithmically position, scaled and re-light the raw scan data in a virtual photo booth to elicit the greatest recognisability and emotional impact from the real world facade compositions. It's effect was akin to a digital tromp l'oeil effect, the first of its kind.

This technically complex project took only 12 months to move from initial architect’s sketches to the most innovative and engaging brand experience of the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

Acknowledged as the best Olympic pavilion of 2014, MegaFaces was the runaway success of the Games. More than 400 news articles in the Russian media and over 600 articles in international media established the pavilion as one of the iconic symbols of Sochi 2014.

And with over 140,000 participants’ faces shown throughout the Games and more than 100,000 posts and tweets, public engagement in the campaign was even better than expected.

MegaFaces Pavilion was an inspiring example of how the elements of the digital age can find their physical embodiment. In addition, we believe that this technology breakthrough will encourage young architects and artists to investigate the potential for permanent shape-changing buildings in the future. After the Games the Pavilion will be reassembled in a public area in Moscow to serve as a flagship for MegaFon’s innovation and outstanding customer experience.

The Pavilion and its kenetic facade might also become a unique medium for selected contemporary artists and a distinctive art-platform in itself.