Wimbledon's Virtual Hill | Solarflare Studio

// services

Interactive Installation

Experiential Design

Motion Design

Live interactive digital version of Henman Hill at the 2021 Wimbledon Championships, built with Wasserman for AMEX. Fans joined a social metaverse experience during live matches while attendance was restricted.

Henman Hill without the queue

Henman Hill is one of the most recognisable spaces in British sport: a patch of grass where thousands of people watch tennis on a big screen and make it feel like an event in its own right. In 2021, with attendance restricted and millions of fans unable to be there, Wimbledon and AMEX wanted to bring the Hill to them.We built a live, interactive digital version of the experience with Wasserman, a social metaverse format that let fans join from anywhere in the world and feel genuinely part of the Championships rather than passive online viewers. The brief was to capture what makes the Hill worth being on: the shared watching, the collective reaction, the sense that you are in the same place as other people who care about the same thing.

Live, interactive, and social by design

The platform was built around liveness. Fans joined during matches, reacted in real time, and occupied a shared virtual space with other attendees. The social mechanics were designed to generate the kind of spontaneous collective behaviour that happens on the real Hill: celebrations, groans, shared anticipation.AMEX's role in the experience was integrated rather than badged on. The brand's presence made sense within the environment because it reflected their existing Wimbledon partnership, and the virtual format gave them access to a fan audience that the restricted-attendance Championships could not deliver in person. Technical reliability during live match moments was the most demanding requirement.

Scale and reach beyond the physical event

A live sports experience in a social metaverse format reaches audiences that the physical venue structurally cannot. Wimbledon's Hill holds a few thousand people. The virtual version had no capacity ceiling, and no geographic constraint.For AMEX, that reach is the commercial argument. Their Wimbledon partnership is about associating the brand with a specific quality of live sports experience. Extending that experience to a global digital audience during a year when attendance was limited gave the partnership a reach it would not otherwise have had. The format also generated genuine fan content that amplified its reach further on social, which is the right behaviour from a well-designed social metaverse activation.

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