Samsung: 360-degree Infinity Screen image viewer

In order to better compete with Apple’s iPhone, Samsung has had to continually innovate and offer increasingly attractive features to prospective mobile phone customers. Accordingly, and integral to the release of the Samsung Galaxy S8 phone, Samsung created the Infinity Screen—an expansive display that stretches from edge-to-edge. While much of Samsung’s marketing is executed online, the company still does considerable business via brick-and-mortar retail, where customers can immerse in the brand and sample products.

In collaboration with design firm karlssonwilker, RubensteinTech helped Samsung to consider how to best expose in-store customers to the Infinity Screen feature.

The team approached the project head-on, brainstorming different ideas for how customers could and should interact with the Galaxy S8. Our role not only involved investigating, testing, and troubleshooting potential technological obstacles but providing creative insights for how to showcase the feature at retail and pitching Samsung on possible solutions.

We developed a custom Android mobile app to feature 360-degree views of images on the Galaxy S8’s Infinity Screen. With design and production direction from our partners at karlssonwilker, we installed multiple phones within freestanding kiosks. On each phone, Samsung displayed a full-screen photo, and encouraged customers to approach the kiosk and explore each image from 360 degrees.

In order to prevent customers from navigating to other phone features, we developed a unique security system, powered by RFID cards, to give Samsung employees sole administrative rights. Using first an RFID Install card, the app can be downloaded, installed, and accessed on specified devices. Via a bespoke interface, administrators can toggle through images and select the desired one(s) for display. Then, using a similar security method, administrators can lock the selected image to the display(s), preventing users from navigating away from the image viewer on the in-store devices.

Initially, the concept was intended as a prototype to be tested in stores in New York, Kansas City, and Austin; however, based on early success, Samsung decided to showcase the kiosk and 360-degree Infinity Screen image viewer at the Festival de Cannes, in Cannes, France.