Michigan State University (MSU) has a storied basketball franchise, launching the careers of countless NBA stars throughout the years. The university recently created an interactive player wall of fame to highlight notable Spartan alumni from the Tom Izzo era. As the longest-tenured basketball coach in the Big Ten Conference, Izzo’s two-and-a-half decades leading the MSU Spartans has produced a lengthy list of basketball stars now profiled on the university’s basketball wall of fame, located in the Frances Cleaves Family Center.
Designing the player wall came with some challenges—most notably, it would have been impossible to honor 25 years of MSU’s star players on a single wall. To address this spatial challenge, Red Dot Digital Media, Carousel Digital Signage, and BrightSign collaborated to create an interactive experience that makes it easy for visitors to scroll through and learn about MSU’s basketball alumni.
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“MSU’s basketball program now has a player wall of fame that the university will never outgrow,” said Darryl Kuder, CEO of Red Dot Digital Media. “Touch-interactive displays are perfect in this case because MSU can add new players for decades and never need to expand beyond these two displays in the Frances Cleaves Family Center.”
The player wall of fame takes advantage of two wall-mounted 75-inch Newline interactive touch displays. Content created on Carousel Digital Signage’s CMS platform is fed by a pair of BrightSign XT1144 media players to enable the interactive experience. Viewers navigate a vertically scrolling list of graduation years on the left of each display. Each year displays names and images of players matching that particular graduation year. Once a player is selected by tapping his corresponding image, detailed information is revealed about the player’s accomplishments on and off the court.
“Sophisticated content requires the very best hardware to ensure failsafe performance—that’s precisely what BrightSign delivers,” said Eric Henry, president of Carousel Digital Signage. “BrightSign’s players offer unmatched reliability, and ensure that content on the MSU player wall of fame displays perfectly, with zero downtime.”
Creating a digital platform for the player wall of fame is particularly useful in that subsequent graduating classes can be added with ease. University personnel have access to a shared Google Sheet for easy addition of future players. Adding new players is as simple as populating text and images to the Google Sheet connected to Carousel’s CMS platform.
