Atlanta United VR Golden Spike Experience
An embodied VR fan activation that let supporters perform Atlanta United’s Golden Spike ritual using a custom tracked physical hammer.
A ritual normally reserved for celebrity guests needed to become an embodied fan activation.
Atlanta United’s Golden Spike ceremony is a recognizable piece of the club’s match-day culture. Fanboard commissioned a VR activation that would let supporters perform that ritual themselves at team events around Atlanta, rather than simply watch it from outside the stadium experience.
Technical leadership plus a custom tangible interface.
I served as technical lead and project manager within the production team. I designed and fabricated the tracked foam-core hammer, integrated HTC Vive tracking, helped shape the interaction, and led the technical delivery of the activation.
My role
Technical Lead · Project Manager · Interaction Designer. I managed the technical work and built the physical-digital hammer interface that translated a full-force physical swing into the virtual Golden Spike interaction.
The controller was not a gamepad—it was the ritual object itself.
HTC Vive trackers transformed a lightweight physical hammer into a spatial controller. Fans could grip, raise, and swing the prop with natural motion while the virtual scene placed them on the pitch to hammer the Golden Spike. The design used tangible interaction to make the activation immediately understandable to people encountering VR at a social event.
The activation traveled to 12 Atlanta-area events.
The experience was deployed at 12 team-sponsored bar and social events around Atlanta. Its success criterion was experiential rather than experimental: the hardware needed to survive public use, staff needed to reset it quickly, and first-time VR users needed to understand the interaction with minimal instruction.