Hard Rock International

Hard Rock International Creates Unique Rock ’n’ Roll Experience Online

Begun as an authentic American diner in London in 1971, Hard Rock International today owns restaurants, hotels, casinos, and live venues throughout the world, as well as an unparalleled collection of rock ’n’ roll memorabilia. Hard Rock wanted to reinforce its authentic brand and role as custodian to rock ’n’ roll history by sharing its collection of memorabilia with fans. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Vertigo and design and advertising agency Duncan/Channon, Hard Rock used Microsoft Silverlight™ 2 to create a unique Web site that serves as a shrine to all things rock. Visitors use intuitive zoom technology to navigate the collection, investigate the stories behind each piece and share their discoveries with friends. Using Microsoft products and technologies, Vertigo built a content management system and infrastructure for the site in just 30 days.

Situation

In rock ’n’ roll religion, Hard Rock is a place of worship. Since its inception as an American diner in London in 1971, Hard Rock International has displayed relics of rock ’n’ roll lore and music culture for the veneration of millions of fans. The company’s more than 146 restaurants and venues, located around the world, feature genuine rock artifacts—everything from the red Fender Lead II guitar that Eric Clapton hung above his reserved table in the original Hard Rock to the handwritten lyrics of a song that Axl Rose penned for Guns N’ Roses’ breakthrough album Appetite for Destruction.

Hard Rock’s Memorabilia site reinforces that our brand stands for that personal, authentic connection fans have with rock ’n’ roll music and its heroes. Sean Dee, Chief Marketing Officer, Hard Rock International

To emphasize the authenticity of the company’s brand and to differentiate it from mass-market theme restaurants and hotel chains, Hard Rock hired design and advertising agency Duncan/Channon. Part of the new brand campaign involved a Web site featuring Hard Rock’s memorabilia collection, the largest and most valuable music memorabilia collection in the world.

“At more than 70,000 pieces, our collection has been described as the Smithsonian of rock ’n’ roll,” says Sean Dee, Chief Marketing Officer at Hard Rock International. “But of course, this memorabilia is extremely valuable and must be handled with extreme care, so we wanted to find a more practical way to bring the collection to a broader audience around the world.”

Duncan/Channon worked with the online services group and a cross-functional team of experts at Hard Rock to build a memorabilia Web site that would let fans view artifacts and read the story behind each one. The initial plans involved an HTML-based Web site with basic search capabilities and some Flash components. Each archive item would have its own page, and visitors would be able to zoom in on each item.

Figure 1. The Hard Rock Memorabilia Web site.

Solution

While the team worked on the creative aspects of the new site, Duncan/Channon’s development collaborator and Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Vertigo suggested a new approach using Microsoft Silverlight™ 2, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation Web experiences. “As soon as we received the beta code for Silverlight 2 and explored the Deep Zoom capabilities, we understood that this technology would radically change what was possible for the memorabilia site,” says Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo.

To convince colleagues at Hard Rock and Duncan/Channon, Stanfield created a presentation of 1,500 family photos using Silverlight 2 and Deep Zoom, a capability that allows users to explore collections of super-high-resolution images. The demonstration assuaged any initial skepticism about Silverlight 2.

“Once we saw Deep Zoom in action, there was no longer a debate about which technology we would use,” explains Michael Lemme, Creative Director at Duncan/Channon. “Deep Zoom doesn’t just approximate the real-life experience people have at Hard Rock, it goes even further so that fans can get closer and interact with pieces in ways they couldn’t in person.”

From Deep Zoom to Deep Purple
As shown in Figure 1, the Hard Rock Memorabilia site (http://memorabilia.hardrock.com) presents visitors with a mosaic image of all the pieces in the collection—altogether an amazing 2 billion pixels in size at launch, and growing all the time.

Visitors to the site can zoom in and out by using the scroll wheel on the mouse, pan the image by clicking and dragging, or quickly target a specific item by clicking it. When the visitor selects an item, historical details appear in a transparent frame, along with audio and video; links to external Web sites; and an option to share information about that item through e-mail or on a blog. To the left of the images, visitors can select filtered views of the online collection according to featured artists, type of artifact, decade, musical genre, and location, as shown in Figure 2. Once a visitor selects a view, the site rearranges the images in a quick animated sequence.

“The combination of Deep Zoom and filtered views could accommodate the entire collection of 70,000 pieces. This is a new paradigm for exploring large sets of visual data—it is far more appealing than the traditional approach of thumbnails and page-based navigation,” says Lemme.

Microsoft technologies ensure the system would not only perform as quickly as possible, but scale as the memorabilia collection grows to encompass all 70,000 pieces. Scott Stanfield, CEO, Vertigo

Hard Rock wants to encourage greater interaction among its customers through the site. While researching the project, Duncan/Channon found that many fans

Figure 2. The memorabilia site offers sophisticated navigation.

already post their own images and videos of Hard Rock memorabilia on photo-sharing and video-sharing sites. “A search for ‘hard rock’ on Flickr returns 80,000 results, and many of those photos are accompanied by extensive comment threads. People are already out there talking about Hard Rock memorabilia and having discussions about the story behind particular pieces and what it meant for their favorite artists,” says Dee. “One of our primary goals with this site is to foster that type of discussion.”

In coming months, Hard Rock plans to add comment features so that fans can discuss particular items through regular text comments or by posting their own related image. Hard Rock is also working on widgets that people can embed in their blogs or Web sites. These widgets will feature selected items or custom collections.

Developer Jam Session
Vertigo used Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Suite and an early beta version of Silverlight 2 to build Hard Rock’s Memorabilia site in just 30 days. Developers worked in familiar C# code and used some JavaScript for the scroll wheel controls.

“The Hard Rock Memorabilia site was the first Web site to employ Deep Zoom technology, and we collaborated closely with the Silverlight team at Microsoft on the beta technology. Today, developers that create applications for Silverlight 2 will have a wealth of resources at their disposal, including a software development kit and tools like Deep Zoom Composer,” says Mike Hanley, Engineering Director at Vertigo.

To make it easier to edit and expand the online collection and enable filtered views of the collection, Vertigo made the memorabilia site data driven, or automatically composed from separate content elements instead of pieced together with custom code. Vertigo built a tool called Vertigo BigPicture™ that organizes content and collections of images. The system includes a content management system based on Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 and a file system for managing the 77,000 image files that comprised the initial launch of the Hard Rock Memorabilia site.

Fast Facts
Days to complete	30 days
Image tiles	77,000 tiles
Image size	2 billion pixels
Project team	1 project manager, 1 designer, 6 developers
Development software	Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Suite
Programming languages	C#, JavaScript
Programming model and technologies	Microsoft Silverlight 2, Deep Zoom, Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, Microsoft ASP.NET

The memorabilia site launched with 257 items, but the company plans to eventually include thousands of pieces. To ensure optimum performance of the Web application, Vertigo employed 64-bit code on Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 and Windows Server® 2003 R2 with Internet Information Services 6.0.

“While Deep Zoom in Microsoft Silverlight 2 is simple enough for enthusiasts to build applications with, we needed to make sure the Hard Rock application would scale in terms of performance and manageability as new items are added in the future,” says Hanley.

Benefits

The Hard Rock Memorabilia site helps Hard Rock International promote its unique collection of rock ’n’ roll icons and differentiate itself from mass-market venues. “Hard Rock’s Memorabilia site reinforces that our brand stands for that personal, authentic connection fans have with rock ’n’ roll music and its heroes,” says Dee.

Raw, Emotive Experience
Microsoft Silverlight 2 and the Deep Zoom technology helped Hard Rock, Duncan/Channon, and Vertigo capture the tangible spirit of rock ’n’ roll through an online experience. “Rock ’n’ roll is about authenticity, doing something different, and expressing yourself without inhibition. Deep Zoom brings those qualities to the memorabilia site and lets people interact with these objects in a way that is both unique and natural,” says Lemme. “Deep Zoom adds another dimension beyond horizontal and vertical scrolling; now, viewers can seamlessly zoom in—extremely close—to an object or group of objects.”

While most Hard Rock memorabilia is encased in glass and displayed in locations around the world, the memorabilia site lets fans interact with rare pieces and inspect details, such as handwritten lyrics and letters, as shown in Figure 3.

“Microsoft Silverlight 2 revolutionizes what is possible for a site like this. It is a huge advance in terms of what we can create for our clients and their customers,” says Stanfield. “Visitors to the Hard Rock Memorabilia site can easily inspect the grain of leather on a jacket or the individual wire wraps on the E string of a guitar. You can look inside Buddy Holly’s glasses and read the inscription of the

manufacturer.”

Deep Zoom doesn’t just approximate the real-life experience people have at Hard Rock, it goes even further so that fans can get closer and interact with pieces in ways they couldn’t in person. Michael Lemme, Creative Director, Duncan/Channon

Familiar, Cross-Platform Development
Working with technology still in development, the Vertigo team built the Hard Rock Memorabilia site in just 30 days, thanks to the familiar development languages and mechanisms supported in Silverlight 2. In addition, the development team did not worry about which browser visitors used because Silverlight 2 supports all major browsers, as well as the Apple Macintosh platform.

Vertigo also took advantage of Microsoft server products and technologies to handle the tremendous technical challenges for the site. “At the launch, the site comprised 55 gigabits of RAW-format images, streaming videos, and 3.5 gigabits of other content—all available in a browser that runs at 30 frames per second as the viewer pans around an image with 2 billion pixels,” says Stanfield. “That’s a lot of requests back to the server. Microsoft technologies ensure the system would not only perform as quickly as possible, but scale as the memorabilia collection grows to encompass all 70,000 pieces.”

Stronger Brand Affinity

Figure 3. The memorabilia site lets fans inspect fine details.

The Hard Rock Memorabilia site raises the profile of Hard Rock International as the custodian of rock history—and fosters the discussion and sharing of that history online. In just a few weeks after the public launch, traffic to the site has quickly risen due to word-of-mouth recommendations and favorable reviews in blogs. Upcoming commenting features and widgets that people can embed elsewhere online will continue to excite and engage the community of fans.

The site’s intuitive navigation and historical details, provided by the resident Hard Rock experts, draw visitors in and foster a close connection with the Hard Rock brand. “We expect people to spend significant amounts of time on the site, poring over memorabilia and reading the stories that connect a particular piece with the music or an artist that they grew up with and love,” says Dee.

Microsoft Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, Visual Basic®, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight also supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on Mac OS or Windows.

For more information about Silverlight, please go to:
www.microsoft.com/silverlight

 

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For more information about Hard Rock International, call (407) 445-7625 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.hardrock.com/ The Hard Rock Memorabilia site is http://memorabilia.hardrock.com  

 

For more information about Vertigo products and services, call (510) 307-8223 or visit the Web site at: http://www.vertigo.com/

 

For more information about Duncan/Channon, call (415) 306-9200 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.duncanchannon.com/

 

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.