How do you showcase a career in the Royal New Zealand Navy to potential recruits, when the majority of the Navy’s work happens at sea?

The answer is: catch the bus – to schools, job fairs and career days.

The Navy has been doing just this with its mobile naval display units for many years, to help recruit young people, but the old bus had come to the end of its life.

However, the good news was that the need to replace it created an opportunity to deliver an interactive and dynamic on-board experience, using the latest technology to capture life in the Navy, as well as to reflect the Navy’s advanced technological capabilities.

The newly customised NZ$800,000 naval display unit is built in a modified Mitsubishi Fuso Fighter bus chassis was nearing its launch date when Intergen was recruited to provide the last link in the technology story on board – design and install a bay of four interactive touch-screens, to showcase naval careers and opportunities.

The turnaround time was vital – just two and half weeks before the bus was leaving the station...

The naval display unit has inspired many young people to follow naval careers, but it had become dated and lacked the interactivity needed to really showcase the opportunities available in the Navy.

Catch this bus…
Intergen has a preferred supplier status with the New Zealand Defence Force and had been previously been engaged to deliver the Navy’s online presence, at www.navyjobs.mil.nz, so knew the territory well. The challenge was the time-frame.

The new naval display unit had to be delivered by March 16, leaving a tight window of just over two weeks to develop and install the Hewlett Packard TouchSmart screens that would contain an interactive menu of experiences about life and opportunities in the Navy.

The look and feel of the content on the touch-screen kiosks was created in collaboration with Saatchi and Saatchi, while the brains making it work came from Intergen’s experience with Windows Presentation Foundation, the big brother of Silverlight technology. This new tool is extremely rich and interactive, and is designed to run on the desktop.

“Windows Presentation Foundation provides developers with a unified programming model for building rich window smart-client user experiences that incorporate all the exciting elements, such as multi-media, graphics, videos and documents, and lets you interact with everything via touch-screen,” says developer James Newton King, describing WPF’s capabilities.

“It’s Microsoft’s next generation technology for building superb interfaces. You name it, it can do it, and developers like us love it.”

Burning the midnight oil
Intergen’s team threw late nights and weekends at the project to get it delivered on time. The result? “It’s awesome,” says Navy Recruitment’s finance and marketing advisor, Anna Biss, borrowing the language of the largely student audience it’s aimed at.

“Intergen created exactly what we asked for in an incredible time-frame. The result is an interactive, hands-on look at what the Navy has to offer.

“People can take quizzes to find what job is the best match for them. They can watch video clips, find out about their eligibility, see the opportunities for travel – we’ve brought the real environment within the Navy right up close.”

There’s also a smart recruitment follow-up mechanism, in the form of a touch-screen ‘contact us’ keyboard. It uses an asymmetric encryption mechanism to meet the Navy’s strict security requirements.

Interactive
Navy Recruiting’s newest asset is an exciting, up-to-date environment, featuring an expandable audio-visual room for up to 20 people and a bay of four interactive screens.

Now the Navy can bring the latest technology to potential recruits – wherever they might be in New Zealand.

ENGINE ROOM:
>> Windows Presentation Foundation





> Intergen
Wayne Forgesson | Director of Marketing
P: 04 472 2021
E: wayne.forgesson@intergen.co.nz
W: www.intergen.co.nz






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