Case study

Dublin Doodle

Clients
Tourism Ireland
Hugo&Cat
Type
Social media campaign
Facebook App
Interactive installation
Sector
Tourism
Culture
Events
Date

For St Patrick’s Day in 2013 I and my team at Hugo&Cat were tasked by Tourism Ireland with creating an online experience to promote Ireland around the world and drive new Likes to the Ireland.com Facebook pages.

What we built was called the Dublin Doodle, and it was developed as a Facebook App (effectively an interactive mini website embedded within the normal facebook.com website) that allowed people to draw a picture in light onto a virtual facade of Trinity College in Dublin.

They could then share their creation with their friends as well as browse, play back, like, and comment on other people’s entries using the app.

The best of these doodles were then projected onto the face of the real college to kick off the official St Patrick’s Day festival in Dublin.

At the core of this project was the drawing tool we developed using JavaScript and Canvas to allow people to scribble away on a picture of Trinity College. To make it realistic we blended each stroke algorithmically into the night-time photograph to give the doodler a real appreciation of what it would look like once projected onto the college facade.

Simultaneously, each stroke was faithfully recorded — both the properties of the pen used, and the coordinates along its length — so that the whole drawing process could be played back as an animation when viewing other entrants to the competition.

Meanwhile we created a separate script which operated offline to recreate each winning doodle in a super high definition animation to be plugged into the outdoor projectors on the day. You can see more of the amazing creations below;