The ad was awarded a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions competition.
Shadow Wifi clearly targets an audience who’s actively in danger: people on the beach. Skin cancer is the fastest growing form of cancer in the world. And instead of flatly informing them we gave them a good reason to seek some shadow: free wifi. To get connected they had to register on a webpage with all the prevention information needed, allowing us to prolong the relationship and keep them updated on the dangers of skin cancer.
We created SHADOW WIFI, a new free WIFI network that remains active as long as people remain in the shadow. The SHADOW WIFI Towers were set on the most popular beach in Lima, Peru. To get connected you have to register on a webpage with all the prevention information needed.
The technology
For this project we had to combine a lot of different technologies. We developed software to track the position of the sun, designed hardware to follow the movement of the sun troughout the day and designed a very narrow-beam WiFi antenna to deliver WiFi only to a designated area, the shadow zone.
For this project we had to combine a lot of different technologies. We developed software to track the position of the sun, designed hardware to follow the movement of the sun troughout the day and designed a very narrow-beam WiFi antenna to deliver WiFi only to a designated area, the shadow zone.
Challenges
In stead of tracking the shadow we decided to track the sun and point our WiFi antenna exactly to the opposite direction. We used a camera as a sensor and replaced the standard camera-glass with a welding-glass. This way we only had a bright spot indicating the sun and everything else showed black.
Our custom developed software scans the sensor images for this bright spot and calculates it’s position in the frame. We then calculate the movement we have to make with the sensor to get this “sun-spot” right in the middle of the image.
Because the wireless antenna is mounted exactly in the opposite direction as the sensor, it’s always pointing to the shadow area.
We used a Raspberry pi to run the software and control an arduino-shield that was connected to the rotation-device.
By using this setup we are able to have an out-of-the-box solution that can be setup anywhere in the world without any ICT-knowledge. The entire system calibrates itself, searches for the sun and starts to follow it troughout the day, providing WiFi in the opposite direction, the shadow.
The antenna itself is also custom designed to be a very directional antenna, opposite to the “normal” antennas which are mostly omni-directional.
The WiFi signal coming out of the antenna is very narrow, allowing wifi signals to be very precise.
Number of users
At the beach in Lima, Peru we were able to provide WiFi for up to a hundred simultaneous users. Upgrading the access point that powers the antenna would allow us to up this number to 250+ simultaneous users. When a user connects and logs on to the Shadow WiFi network, providing his/hers emailaddress, we get analytics on how much time they spent on the network, so we know how much time they spent in the shadow.
