Work / Vodafone · MWC 2026

Case study · Mobile World Congress

A stand youcould play with.

For Vodafone's stand at Mobile World Congress 2026, we built the hero interactive — a person-sized, fully playable phone — the set pieces around it, and the show-control brain that made every screen, light and game on the stand move as one.

Client
Vodafone
Agency
fresh
Event
Mobile World Congress 2026, Barcelona
Our role
Interactive build, custom electronics & show integration
Viper in full — a person-sized red Vodafone retro phone with the game on its colour screen, a backlit keypad and an antenna, on the stand at Mobile World Congress 2026.
Viper — a person-sized, fully playable phone. Scan your pass, take the keypad, play.

The brief

MWC is the busiest hall in tech — thousands of stands fighting for the same footfall. fresh's stand for Vodafone needed moments that stopped people walking past: things to play, to touch, to queue for — all tied into a single, synchronised show across a 14.5-metre curved LED wall, a six-metre 30-screen "tornado" attractor and a hall full of screens. Our job, over many months embedded in fresh's team, was to build the bespoke interactive pieces and the technology that made the whole stand behave as one connected experience.

30Screens, one tornado
4iPads, one canvas
3 mCell tower, LED discs
1Giant playable phone

What we built

  • 01

    Viper — the giant phone

    A person-sized, fully playable phone: the fabrication, the integrated LED, and the custom control hardware and software — built hand-in-glove with Vodafone's developers, marrying our controls to their game code.

  • 02

    The 30-screen attractor

    Four retro TV cases we built to house modern LED monitors — folded into a six-metre, thirty-screen tornado of displays driven as one seamless 3D canvas by Creative Technology's Pixera media servers.

  • 03

    The undersea cable

    An oversized model of the subsea cable that carries the world's data, housed in a lit polycarbonate tube — the centrepiece of the Seabed to the Stars console.

  • 04

    Four iPads, one canvas

    Custom iPad apps whose content flowed between screens with millisecond-level latency — four devices on plinths that read as a single, continuous interface.

  • 05

    The TouchDesigner brain

    One source of truth for the whole interactive area — reading every touch, answering every device, animating the floor tape and overhead rings, and cueing Pixera over Art-Net.

  • 06

    The 3 m cell tower

    A three-metre Vodafone cell tower model with discs of LED light, wired into the same system — firing at exactly the right beat of the journey playing out on the iPads.

Seabed to the Stars — one brain, one canvas

The stand's flagship interactive traced the journey your data makes, in four chapters you could hold in your hand: Sea, Rural, Urban and Space. Pick one on the iPads and that corner of the stand became its world — a model waking up, a run of light through the floor, and full-screen video chapters on the 14.5-metre curved LED wall, all at once.

Each chapter had its own hardware. Sea lit the undersea-cable model in its polycarbonate tube and ran light north–south through the pixel tape in the floor. Rural fired the LED discs up the three-metre cell tower and ran the western tape. Urban played video across two LED tower blocks — office buildings made of light — and ran the eastern tape. And Space woke an actual satellite hanging above the stand, ringed by three concentric hoops of LED.

Underneath it all sat a TouchDesigner system we designed to be the single source of truth. Every touch on every iPad fed back to it over OSC, and it answered every device at once: the four custom iPad apps behaved like one screen cut into four, content flowing between them with millisecond-level latency. The same brain animated every run of floor tape, cued every model, and pushed Art-Net to Pixera so the wall's chapters landed in the same breath. A complicated integration on a custom protocol — that felt, to the person at the iPad, completely fluid.

The Seabed to the Stars installation — three concentric light rings over the iPad console and undersea-cable model, the curved LED wall playing 'From the seabed', the cell tower to the left, the LED building towers to the right, and caustic water light rippling across the floor.
Seabed to the Stars — rings, wall, tower, buildings, console: one instrument.

Tap an iPad — every tap plays the next chapter. First up: Sea.

14.5 m curved wall · chapters 30-screen tornado 4 retro TVs inside Pixera CT media servers an actual satellite · space TouchDesigner one source of truth 3 m cell tower · rural LED towers · urban undersea cable · sea OSC · every touch, both ways 4 custom iPad apps · one canvas west tape · rural north–south tape · sea east tape · urban
The real thing ran exactly like this: every touch to TouchDesigner; TouchDesigner to everything — the iPads, the chapter's model, its run of floor tape, and Art-Net to Pixera for the wall — in the same breath.
TouchDesigner OSC Art-Net Custom protocol Pixera (integration) Custom electronics Addressable LED iPadOS Raspberry Pi

Embedded, not bolted on

This wasn't a prop drop-shipped to a loading dock. Over many months we worked as part of the fresh team — tens of calls alongside them and Vodafone, from first concepts through developer liaison to the show floor. The Viper game was Vodafone's own code; we worked hand-in-glove with their developers to wrap it in our hardware, controls and lighting. To the client, one team delivered the stand.

If you're an agency, this is a thing we do: we slot into your team, carry your standards into the room with your client, and build the interactive layer under your banner. You keep the relationship — we make the technology disappear into the work.

One cohesive product, two teams, no seams.

On the stand

A clean wide view of the Vodafone stand at MWC 2026 — a comms-tower prop, iPad interactive plinths and a subsea-cable display under concentric ring lights, with Champions League branding.
FIG. 01Subsea cable to satellite — one connected journey
The racetrack-shaped LED wall reading 'Vodafone Viper — straight from your first phone, can you beat the high score?', with the day's high scores listed beside the game.
FIG. 02Viper's high-score wall — “can you beat the high score?”
The three-metre Vodafone cell tower model — stacked antenna arrays with LED light discs between them, on the Vodafone stand.
FIG. 03The 3 m cell tower — LED discs firing on cue from the iPads
The six-metre tornado attractor — thirty screens spiralling up a red tower beneath ring lights, with the retro TV cases built into its base.
FIG. 04The tornado — 30 screens, our retro TV cases at its base
Wide view of the Vodafone stand before doors — the giant Vodafone sign overhead, the Seabed to the Stars area with its light rings and curved wall on the left, and the tornado attractor on the right.
FIG. 05Doors closed, lights on — Seabed to the Stars left, the tornado right

Credits

Client
Vodafone
Agency
fresh
Media servers & LED
Creative Technology
Game code
Vodafone's development team
Interactive builds, electronics, iPad apps & show integration
HALF GREY BEAR
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