Client: EE / BAFTA
Agency: Poke London
Production Company: UNIT9
Maya Jama stepped onto the red carpet at the 2020 EE BAFTAs, and on screen, her gown began to move: digital fabric swirling around her, shifting from powder blue to teal. To show what its 5G network could do, EE wanted a red carpet moment that brought fashion and technology together live. We worked with designer Richard Malone on the world’s first 5G-powered AR dress, a hand-sewn gown that came to life on camera as Maya moved, broadcast to 1.2 million viewers.
It started with a scanning session with Maya, giving us a 3D model of her body for the digital fabric to wrap around. Hidden inside six layers of fabric in the real gown were 12 body-length wires and 18 sensor bulbs, picked up along the carpet by stYpe’s RedSpy and Follower tracking systems, the same kind of tech used in film and broadcast. That tracking data was fed into Unity to render the digital fabric in real time, then streamed over EE’s 5G network with almost no delay, so the animation followed every move as it happened.
As producer, I ran the project day to day, bringing together five very different teams: creative, technical, hardware, choreography, and fashion design. A big part of that was working closely with Richard to make sure the sensors worked within the physical dress. With live TV and no second takes, the weeks before the event were all about testing, and we put every part of the system through round after round of QA. On the night, I was on the carpet with our developers and third-party hardware team, keeping a cool head right up to the moment we went live and making sure the real-time animation held up from Maya’s first move to her last.