Paper Planes

Format: Live event, Interactive web app

Client: Google I/O

Agency: Droga5, New York

“Paper Planes” is built on the Android platform, so people across the world can use their phones to catch and throw paper planes with a second screen and connect with others like never before. For Google I/O’s 2016 keynote, we teamed up with Active Theory and used webGL to let 7,000 attendees and thousands of live-streaming users fold, stamp and throw planes from their phones into a virtual world on the 50-foot mainstage screen. The platform uses a phone’s accelerometer, gyroscope and GPS to feed data into websockets, funnel servers, Google’s Cloud Platform and App Engine. Users catch planes by waving their phone like a net, to see where it traveled and stamp their own location. “Paper Planes” has since been launched as an Android Experiment because of its innovative use of the platform. Over a million planes have been thrown, there’s over 8 million stamps and 158 countries have participated.

View the project live: Experiments with Google