Bringing Olympic Visitors Up Close and Virtual

Visitors to the Winter Olympics may walk away talking about more than just the medal winners and who crashed and burned on the slopes, thanks to an ultramodern fiberglass interactive visitor center at Olympic Square that offers a virtual snowball fight and live-action screenings of the Games.

The techie-named Olympic Rendezvous @ Samsung, which opens to the public Friday, was built as a temporary structure on the seven-block downtown area where the opening and closing ceremonies will be held and where visitors can take a respite from the events. It was drawing lookie-loos even before construction was finished. The Samsung pavilion is an official sponsor’s showcase that stands out among the other sponsors’ tents that surround it, for both its large scale and its flashy design.

“Most of what we’ve put up to celebrate the Games is tenting and looks like tenting,” says Mitt Romney, CEO and president of the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee. “Samsung has a design which is futuristic and high tech. When you walk inside, you think you’re going into a very luxurious museum.”

Out front, lighted images span rows of curved, molded panels with such catchy features as a digital snowbank and views of spectators being interviewed by roving camera crews. In lieu of sound, comments from the random crowd snapshots are relayed via scrolling text messages. Once the Games begin, the screens will also relay live images from the competitions.

Samsung is just one of 63 official Olympic sponsors for the Salt Lake Games, and the electronics company built this center not only to highlight its latest wireless communication products but to help market itself as a design-conscious firm. The company used the same approach at the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympic Games, building a visitor center with huge, curved sail-like scrims and drawing in some 1 million people. Samsung is trying for gold a second time.

The design for this year’s structure was created by Imagination, a 24-year-old London-based firm known for its avant-garde architecture, interior design and light shows. Imagination was one of several firms that contributed pavilions to London’s Millennium Dome, and the firm also built the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Ireland, a six-story complex featuring a 100-foot-tall atrium shaped like a giant pint glass. The company’s clients include the Ford Motor Co. and Coca-Cola.

At Olympic Square in Salt Lake City, the two-story, 12,500-square-foot building boasts sophisticated, clean design that could double for an interplanetary space station. Inside, surrounded by tomato-red pod-shaped sound baffles, anyone who cares to can make free three-minute phone calls to anywhere in the world from phones suspended from the ceiling. Visitors can also have their own images projected onto the exterior through picture phones. Other new Samsung products are displayed in floating plastic bubbles. An Internet cafe looks out over the main floor, and flat-screen monitors offer glimpses of the Games.

The highlight is sure to be a virtual snowball fight, set up around a huge round royal-blue-rimmed table--the Olympic Committee’s Romney said he has already been pummeled by speed skater Bonnie Blair. Using hand-held phone devices, players accumulate enough “snow” to toss a snowball at another player across the table; virtual snowballs travel across the table as crisscrossing light beams. A VIP lounge is available upstairs for athletes and interviews, and various performances will take place on an inside stage. Samsung won’t reveal the cost of the building, but the company is spending $50 million on marketing and promotions for the Winter Games.

There’s no doubt that the bottom line here is selling the Samsung brand in an increasingly competitive market. But doing it in an eye-catching, consumer-friendly environment was paramount for the Imagination team. With offices also in New York and soon to open in Los Angeles, the design firm is drawing attention to clients by creating interactive environments instead of relying on traditional brochures, print ads or television commercials.

“We believe that everyone is much more affected by what they experience than what they’re told,” says Mark Hider, CEO of Imagination USA. From the living facade on, we wanted a way to draw people in and to alert people that they’re near something interesting.”

But Hider believes that technological bells and whistles mean little without a human element: “Technology is enabling all of this to happen. But it’s much more human and engaging because it’s technology on a human basis, not in a Big Brother way.”

Adding an interactive element to LED-screen technology was how Hider wanted to use the medium: “Most LED boards are just running the same loops of ads,” he says. “But if you use them to deliver people an experience with a purpose, I think people won’t find them intrusive but will find them stimulating and engaging.”

Imagination’s arrival in L.A.--no formal date has been set--was prompted by the desire to work more closely with existing clients and develop relationships with entertainment companies and information technology corporations, working on everything from events and communication to marketing and conferences.

Los Angeles, Hider believes, “has more than just a sympathy with design. There’s an understanding of new ideas ... and how experiences can help in that regard.”

For Samsung, the goal was to create an environment that is “welcoming, connective, dynamic and fun design for spectators,” says N.Y. Kim, project manager for the center. “Design for Samsung is very, very important in terms of not only our products, but also our showcase.”

To view the Olympic Rendezvous @ Samsung, visit www.Sam sung.com.

Times staff writer Hilary E. MacGregor contributed to this story.