Great Apes

Hockey Night 2nd Screen is a free sports app designed to transform your basic hockey game PPV into a more social and exciting experience. The app provides a second screen to your actual big screen at home or at the local sports bar and picks up from where the TV broadcast left off, extending the whole experience with new, mobile-centric features.

The app provides the user with info on upcoming games, a game reminder function and other relevant content, but it’s heart and soul really lays in the live game and everything that a gripping, intense hockey game can provide in the right-now, in real-time when it’s really happening.

The real-time experience

After checking in, the user is part of that game among with all other users that have checked in. The checkin incorporates GPS data to determine user location and Facebook is used to authenticate users and integrate our core functions to a custom Facebook application. During checkin users can enable Facebook posting which will post the checkin – and all relevant game data – onto the user’s Facebook wall.

GPS data is utilized for in-app statistics and especially for targeting users’ cheers to their respective cities and their cheer score counts. This data enables users to cheer for their home town and creates a fun, competitive angle.

In the app’s core is definately the Cheer feature. It is triggered by simply shaking your phone: our app tracks and measures accelerometer data in real-time and after a certain threshold is exceeded, a Cheer has begun. At this point the user is seeing a pair of OpenGL 3D cheering gloves that are flailing wildly in unison with the user’s shaking motion.

In addition, our Great Apes laboratory has succeeded in creating an algoritm that is able to pinpoint all downward strokes of the phone. This data is then used to trigger a virtual air horn sound, creating the sensation of your downward strokes actually generating that sound. Each invidual Cheer score can also be posted to Facebook: what better to brag to your friends than let them know you just scored a thousand Cheers.

Cranking up the Fun Factor

Our algoritm also determines shaking events where certain G-force thresholds are exceeded: when this happens – basically when a user has shaken their phone like crazy – we trigger a bonus sound. This sound is chosen randomly from a library of Antero Mertaranta quotes, shouted by the man himself. During this sequence, each shake gesture will rewind the sound playhead a few hundred milliseconds, effectively creating what we like to call the Great Apes Stutter Effect. The end result is a fun way of performing a kind of mixture of stuttering and turntable scratching. SU-SU-SU-SU-SUOMIIII!!!!!

What it really comes down to

We think Hockey Night 2nd Screen is exactly what us hockey-crazed finns need: a fun app that allows for wild self-expression through shaking your phone as well social TV -like feature to keep up with what people are doing and saying – all the while watching that game on a big screen at the venue of your choice!

For more info: contact Sami Kanninen, Head of WebTV, sami.kanninen@mtv3.fi