On Running Global brands
Turning a three-minute treadmill sprint into a live show
Creative partners
On Running is the Swiss running company whose Lightspray upper is sprayed on rather than stitched.
On Running took Lightspray on a world tour: an On Labs pop-up where runners raced a three-minute treadmill sprint, their pace driving the visuals on a 4m screen and their distance climbing a live leaderboard. With design studio HATO, who set the brand and art direction, we prototyped the interactive experience and built everything behind the screen: the speed measurement, the real-time visuals, runner registration and the leaderboard, starting with the Paris launch.
Reading the belt
When the expected API turned out not to exist, we engineered the measurement ourselves.
The concept assumed the venue treadmills would hand over speed data through an API. On the machines On Running needed to use, that feed did not exist. The installation had no way to read how fast anyone was running, which was the whole point.
A reflective sensor on the belt faltered at elite pace, which is where it mattered. We fitted magnets to the belt and read them with a Hall-effect sensor instead. So we were building hardware as well as software.
Pace on screen
We prototyped HATO’s art direction into a live scene that moves with every stride.
HATO set the look. Our job was to make it move. Working with their team, we prototyped how the visuals should behave, then built them as a WebGL shader, with the runner’s speed and the time remaining shaping what the crowd saw. The hard part was the range. A walk had to look alive and a sprint had to look fast, without the screen going wild, and getting that right took many rounds of simulation and testing on site.
Every frame depended on a chain staying up for the whole event: registration at the door, a database in the cloud, a controller on the treadmill reading the sensor, and the shader on the screen.
Built to travel
A handover pack, remote support and a live sign-up tool let On Running’s teams run it after Paris.
After Paris, the installation had to work in cities we would not be standing in, and each city ran differently. Paris ran to a schedule: runners registered in advance and had a QR code sent to their phone, scanned at the treadmill to start their three minutes. Boston was open to anyone passing, so we built a back-of-house interface for staff to sign people up on the day. We wrote set-up instructions and a handover pack, gave On Running a backend they could manage themselves, and supported each event remotely.
The first unit shipped to Boston, where On Running’s team ran it on their own and signed up a long queue of runners. A second followed to Tokyo. Mainhausen had a different treadmill and a bigger screen. We raised the sensor block and it ran.
Impact
On Running now has a race it can take anywhere, on hardware it owns.
In Zurich, one runner covered 1,044m in three minutes, with the crowd watching the visuals respond.
The brief asked for software. On Running ended up with measurement hardware it owns and a visual layer built on it, which its teams have since run at events in Boston, Tokyo and Mainhausen.