How do you relaunch a paradigm-shifting but nebulous product? That was the task recently handed to Seattle-based boutique agency Wexley School for Girls by Microsoft to relaunch Live, its one-stop online communication and file-sharing hub. The answer: help a worthy charity, create a dazzling, generative art project using cutting-edge tech and throw in a bit of old-fashioned showmanship.

For those scratching their heads, Microsoft Live is, as explained by Wexley's creative director Cal McAllister: "a suite of applications designed to make communicating with people easier. So it includes Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail (which is an upgraded Hotmail platform), Messenger, etc. All of them, different opportunities to make the world a smaller place." The agency landed on the idea of an experiential installation to showcase the revolutionary product's attributes, and after turning to Digital Kitchen in New York, came up with the idea of an interactive art event that would project uploaded smiling faces live onto a 60ft sphere on New York's South Street Seaport.

"We started working off the concept that a smile is the true universal language across all cultures," says McAllister. "So we wanted to find an organization that could help share smiles all over the world." They landed on Operation Smile, a group of doctors and volunteers who perform cleft lip and palate surgeries on children in the third world who otherwise can't afford medical attention. "It was a natural fit; we were not only sharing smiles, but literally creating them," says McAllister. Interactive company Firstborn was brought on board to create the Processing Java language to churn out live, interactive animation. Fed by photo kiosks around the sphere and remotely from LA and computers worldwide, 5,000 smiling faces were uploaded in 48 hours. These were then projected live from four projectors onto the sphere, created by Siam Productions, and the thousands of connected photo particles synched with a musical track to create an ever-changing interactive installation that would periodically build one 'hero' image out of all the others.

Microsoft were so impressed that they kept the event open for another night, and plans are to take the sphere to other cities, all for a good cause. "More than a quarter of a million smiles were shared and Microsoft gave Operation Smile half a million dollars," concludes McAllister.

Wexley School for Girls http://www.wexley.com
Digital Kitchen, New York http://www.d-kitchen.com
Firstborn http://www.firstbornmultimedia.com