Capabilities

Projects

Process

About

We are a trusted technology partner for startups, agencies and corporate clients. We build prototype-, MVP- and product-grade solutions in the area of web, mobile, Mixed Reality, Machine Learning and Blockchain.

Le Polish Bureau

We help startups, brands, and agencies by efficiently delivering software solutions that stand out both <u>creatively</u> and <u>technically</u>.

We build prototype-, MVP- and product-grade solutions in the area of web, mobile, Mixed Reality, Machine Learning, and Blockchain.

We offer a complete package including strategy, creative, design, implementation, deployment, quality assurance, and maintenance, but we are also happy to consult in parts of the process.

Featured Projects

2020 was a turbulent time for many businesses, challenging their organization’s security, flexibility, and reliability. 

This digital-first experience demonstrates how IBM can help businesses harness the full power of their IT infrastructure, so they can increase resiliency in a time of global disruption and prepare them for whatever comes next.

The client was looking to develop something that felt unique and distinct from all their other digital activations, from a look, feel and narrative perspective. The challenge was to push the look and feel as much as possible while still remaining within IBM’s well-defined and closely adhered-to design language. The end product pushes the brand into new territory while still remaining on-brand and in line with the larger family of digital activations.

Though the products and solutions are very tech-heavy, complex and technical (infrastructure solutions/servers/IT architecture), we wanted to appeal to the more human side of the products and brand, and connect with users on an emotional level. Which was the driving force behind the name and approach of ‘Backbone & Brains.’ 

The gem structure itself has a very organic, warm, ‘of the earth’ tactile quality while also feeling innovative and futuristic. The language and storytelling were also built to be conversational, casual, and free of buzzwords. The music and sound design also drive this sense of humanity. The editorial section provides more detailed, technical specs and education to complement the more abstract, high-level main experience. All pieces and parts work together to create a welcoming environment that builds intrigue rather than going for the hard sell. 

**Use of light/shadow/illumination**: The central avatar of the experience – “the gem” – is designed to represent two distinct but integrated elements (backbone/infrastructure and brains/expertise) that come together to support our audience’s business. There are some details and nuances that were employed in the experience to demonstrate the integration of these two parts. One standout feature/element is the use of illumination to represent the ‘brains’ at the core of the gem, which is a nod to the talented IBM consultants and experts who bring these products and capabilities to their audience. As the user interacts, they’ll see glimmers of light shining from the core and reflecting across the gem’s surfaces, showcasing this constant support of people–always there to help guide customers and answer any questions they have about these infrastructure solutions.


**Background textures and easter eggs**: Within the main experience, users can choose to explore all 3 products/solutions or just focus on specific ones. If they decide to explore all three, there is a detail right before they transition to the editorial section that reveals subtle textures of the product they selected up front within the background – a nod to the exterior details of each server and storage product. This is only visible to users who explore all three products within the main experience, as a way to transition them from the abstract 3D portion to the more concrete 2D ‘deep dive’ (featuring the actual products behind all these capabilities), so it is a bit of an easter egg moment.

To turn this ambitious vision and design into reality, we developed a responsive HTML5 experience hosted on auto-scaling IBM Cloud Foundry. The three-dimensional part featuring `the gem` was powered by WebGL and the Three.js framework, while the `deep dive` editorial content as well as general user interface were written in React and styled-components. The structure of the website, all copy, images and several configuration options are controlled by an underlying CMS developed with Strapi.

The web experience pushes the boundaries of what’s possible on the web in multiple ways. In order to push performance to the maximum, we used Next.js with incremental static regeneration (ISR). It made the initial page render of our CMS-driven website pretty much instantaneous while allowing for quick content edits and improved SEO.

The majority of the 3D visuals were generated programmatically. The `gem`, being the main character in the story and a basis for all three mini-games, used a single base 3D model exported as .glb from 3ds Max. All its shape variations were generated programmatically - we converted the model into a single BufferGeometry at runtime with fragments managed by GLSL shaders to animate its smaller pieces.

To achieve smooth 60 FPS rendering of all the effects and animations across a wide range of devices, we combined a large number of GLSL shaders into a single rendering pipeline, using a single canvas. We developed a post-processing pipeline consisting of 3 scenes and 5 EffectComposers. The first Scene and EffectComposer were responsible for the generative background with GLSL shaders for occlusion, saturation, brightness control, and lighting effects. The second Scene and EffectComposer handled strobe lights with GLSL shaders of glow and luminosity. Next scenes and composers handled tasks like blending other scenes, the `gem’s` volumetric lighting effects, mini-games rendering, animated gradients with noise and screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAA) to give extra sharpness to the final render.

Despite its highly creative and interactive style, the IBM: Backbone & Brains website's content is largely editable and configurable through a CMS.

Our team has implemented a bespoke solution based on [Strapi](http://strapi.io/) and has customized it to the project's needs.
Not only the copy, instructional prompts, and case studies were editable, but also technical aspects of the experience like supported device parameters, minimum frame rate, or browser versions required.

With the experience premiering at [IBM Think](https://www.ibm.com/events/think/), we needed to ensure that the hosting infrastructure can endure extreme traffic spikes. With that in mind, we have set up an autoscaling server on IBM Cloud Foundry. But we haven't stopped at the platform. We have also implemented Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) with [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/) that allowed us to combine the benefits of server-side rendering for optimized SEO and quick loading times with the flexibility of live website control through the CMS.

At Le Polish Bureau we implement the *Infrastructure as Code* paradigm. Instead of manual server setup, we use [Terraform](https://www.terraform.io/) to spin it up from code and configuration committed to a git repository. Thanks to such an approach, not only we reduce the risk of human error, but we also improve security.

For example, the database password is generated randomly by Terraform and is set as a secret in Bitbucket Repository Variables, also by Terraform. This means that none of our developers ever see the password that allows for database access, while our Continuous Deployment pipeline is able to read it.

Furthermore, because all the infrastructure code and configuration is committed to git, the infrastructure as code approach allows us to revert breaking changes simply by rolling back to an earlier git commit.

Launched at IBM Think 2021 along with several other digital activations, the story and design/look and feel helped the activation stand out while remaining aligned to the larger IBM narrative around hybrid cloud.

**Results**:
- 84% engagement rate at Think 2021, exceeding IBM benchmark by 25%
- 84% completion rate at Think 2021, exceeding IBM benchmark by 34%
- This activation also had the longest average time spent, which was more than 3 minutes on the day of the live broadcast, over 2x the cumulative average of all activations.

Experience IBM: Backbone & Brains yourself:
[ibm.com/resources/activations/backbone-brains](https://www.ibm.com/resources/activations/backbone-brains)

IBM: Backbone & Brains

An interactive, audio-visual digital experience showcasing the beauty of a business operating at its peak, with the help of IBM IT Infrastructure solutions.

IBM: Backbone & Brains | Le Polish Bureau

Our team partnered with IBM and GPJ to design and develop an interactive, audio-visual digital experience showcasing the beauty of a business operating at its peak, with the help of IBM IT Infrastructure solutions.

Commercial project

Our team partnered with Liquid City and Niantic to develop an Augmented Reality app for Niantic's Lightship Summit conference in San Francisco.

The app's goal was to serve as an inspirational demonstration of what real-world metaverse could look like, while providing tangible, useful, and fun functionality for the conference users to play with.

The event venue was over 100 meters long. It was split into several indoors section and a large terrace - all to be covered with augmentations.

We built the application in Unity and we used Niantic's ARDK to deliver next-gen AR functionality.

We wanted users to have the most seamless experience. One where they can walk across the entire venue without having to re-align the AR layer.

To achieve this, we took photogrammetry scans of multiple Points of Interest (POIs) spread uniformly across the entire site.

Next, using Niantic ARDK's Virtual Positioning System (VPS), the phone would recognise where the user is within the venue, and would align the augmentations layer accordingly.

After the initial point of reference was established, users could walk and look wherever they wanted, while the system was continuously looking for other POIs in the background, re-aligning the AR layer witout the user even noticing it.

We used various optimisation techniques to ensure that the breadth of content and its physical scale don't overload the phones. This included a custom occlusion system, clever sound batching, and proximity-based interactions.

Thanks to the centimetre-precision tracking, we were able to provide useful spatial information to the user - from insights about what buildings they're looking at, to what beverages they can find on catering tables.

Because of the dynamic nature of a live event, we developed a CMS solution that allowed our team to reposition any 3D object on the fly, without rebuilding the app.

Another way in which the AR truly helped users navigate the event was a spatial timetable. Simply looking up, the users could see what keynotes are coming up, and by following the coloured lines they could find a way to the correct stage.

In order to unleash even more potential of Augmented Reality, our team developed a system for real-time collaborative stickers.

Users could choose one of three predefined shapes - a circle, an arrow, and a heart, and stick them anywhere on top of a real-world or AR surface. Once someone added a sticker, it became visible to all other users of the app, creating a truly shared experience.

Some of the use cases included providing feedback for what users loved most in the AR world (the heart sticker), or e.g. playing hide and seek by sticking arrows that point to a specific location.

To further enrich the feeling of a shared experience, we implemented a mechanism that synchronised the movement of a large "eel" across all user devices.

The eel was designed to fly across the entire venue. Thanks to the synchronisation, users who spotted the eel could literally point to it in real life and other people could simply move their phones to the same spot to join the shared eel-spotting.

Together with Liquid City and Niantic, our team has pushed Augmented Reality to its limits, learning a lot on the way. Reach out to us if you are interested in developing a large-scale Augmented Reality experience of the future:

[office@lepolishbureau.com](mailto:office@lepolishbureau.com)

Niantic Lightship Summit

A massive-scale Augmented Reality experience powering Niantic's Lightship Summit 2022 event.

Niantic Lightship Summit '22 | Le Polish Bureau

We partnered with Liquid City and Niantic to deliver a next-generation Augmented Reality experience for the Lightship Summit event in San Francisco.

Liquid City

Niantic

Superunion approached us with a collaboration to create a new and completely redesigned global company website - superunion.com.

The project was launched in July 2022 across several markets: United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and China.

Superunion wanted to combine cutting-edge creativity with ease of use. This ambition is best demonstrated on the landing page which is visually divided into two parts - one being dedicated to organised information consumption, and the other one, a.k.a. "the dark side", to organic exploration.

The website remains clean, quick, and easy to navigate, while rewarding the user with omnipresent micro-interactions and UI animations.

The entire website is made of modules - each developed in isolation using [Storybook](https://storybook.js.org/). The entire project consists of over 100 of those individually tested, responsive units.

A global agency website requires ultimate customisability and control. We implemented a bespoke CMS solution based on Strapi that allows our client to not only modify the content of existing pages, but also create completely new ones, as well as localise the content into multiple languages.

Our technical team has designed the architecture of the website with SEO in mind. Using Next.js with Server-Side Rendering (SSR), incremental static regeneration, and best HTML practices allowed us to achieve an unprecedented SEO score of 100%.

Our DevOps team has provided a state of the art auto-scaling hosting solution based on Google Cloud Platform that is capable of sustaining any traffic. Clever technical architecture where the data from the CMS is fetched at a constant-interval server-side and rendered into a static version of the website decouples traffic from CMS and database load, resulting in drastic hosting cost reduction.

Experience the website yourself at [superunion.com](https://superunion.com).

Superunion.com

New global site for Superunion developed in React, Next.js, and hosted on Google Cloud.

Superunion | Le Polish Bureau

We worked closely with Superunion to turn their design into a working version of their new global site.

Advertising

The Sound Of Light is an exploration of what’s possible when nature, technology and artistic expression come together to create something truly special. Inspired by Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s AI capabilities we have successfully found a way to transform Northern Lights footage into music, using AI.

How does a telecommunications mogul promote itself beyond traditional media? For the launch of the Huawei Mate 20 Pro phone—a AI-centric device—it had to do exactly that. It had to be tech-forward and future thinking. And let the world know exactly what the company was all about.

Using artificial intelligence, we managed to translate the Northern Lights into music. With the help of a professional Aurora chaser, we trained the AI to classify auroras and built an app that analyzes each one, generating corresponding music phases. We worked with a best-in-class composer and a live orchestra to create the soundtrack.

No Computer Vision algorithm knows how to recognise types of auroras. Even people do this subconsciously. But there are different looking auroras. Some mysterious, some magical, some look calm, some look dynamic.

So we started by crowdsourcing people's perception of auroras, asking them to group similarly looking photos of northern lights. We deployed the tool on [Amazon Mechanical Turk](https://www.mturk.com/).

Via data crowdsourcing we obtained over 10,000 data samples within just 24h!

This has allowed us to develop a Machine Learning clustering algorithm using [Google Tensorflow](https://www.tensorflow.org/) that would automatically group tens of thousands of image presenting the norhern lights into buckets of the same "type".

We have then worked with our Creative Director and our music team to assign matching musical motifs to each of the identified types of auroras.

Next, we have split the final video edit into key frames and, for each of the frames, we have used our trained clustering model to give us 4 most likely aurora types that the given frame represents, along with the similarity score. This also means 4 musical motifs (as each of the aurora types has a musical motif assigned).

But we didn't just stop at playing pre-selected motifs. As we have four and a similarity score for each one, we used the concept of latent spaces and [Google Magenta](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/) tool to generate completely new audio that is an interpolation based on the similarity to all 4 audio samples.

To go even further, we have analysed temporal values of the aurora film edit and used them as signals to modulate the audio. For example, we have used optical flow to track how the aurora actually moves, which was affecting additional sound effects.

The AI-powered tools, suggestions, generated audio and algorithms were delivered to the composer, who turned it into a proper musical masterpiece.

This is a story of a collaboration between human and machine. Neither is to replace one another. Synergy is the key to success.

Huawei: Sound of Light

Huawei: Sound of Light | Le Polish Bureau

In a coordinated process of data acquisition, augmentation, data crowdsourcing, AI training and testing, we developed a set of tools that were aiding a compositor make an aurora audible.

Ogilvy Germany

Huawei

Music

On July 16th, 1969, millions of people gathered around their televisions to watch Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin take flight from Kennedy Space Center aboard Apollo 11. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic moon launch, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation wanted to introduce today’s generation to President Kennedy’s vision for the space program and this pivotal moment in history. So, in partnership with Digitas, we created JFK Moonshot, an Augmented Reality app that enables people to experience the events surrounding the Apollo 11 mission in an immersive way.

JFK Moonshot is an Augmented Reality journey to the Moon and back, created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. - Jakub Jakubowski, Game Director, UNIT9

We built an interactive documentary app that let users learn about the Moon launch and re-live the Apollo 11 mission in Augmented Reality. Using the latest Augmented Reality technology on an enormous scale, we created a simulation of a life-size Saturn V, a replica of the rocket that launched Apollo 11 into space.

JFK Moonshot hit the app store on June 12th and was officially launched at a symposium at the JFK Space Summit a few weeks later. On July 16th, exactly 50 years to the day of the moon launch, users could experience a virtual Moon launch in the app and follow the spacecraft’s five-day journey from the Earth to the Moon from anywhere in the world.

We used latest [AR Kit](https://developer.apple.com/augmented-reality/) and [AR Core](https://developers.google.com/ar) tracking capabilities, both markerless and marker-based, to deliver highest quality Augmented Reality experience. 

Whether they remember watching the Moon launch or were learning about it for the first time, we made a historic event accessible to people of all ages. The app honored President Kennedy’s forward-thinking vision and rounded out a year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Moonshot.

In the end, we introduced a new generation to an important moment in history using the latest and greatest technology—which was once just as unthinkable as putting a man on the Moon was 50 years ago.

Download links: [iOS](https://apps.apple.com/app/id1460242290#?platform=ipad) / [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jfk.moonshot)

JFK: Moonshot

JFK: Moonshot | Le Polish Bureau

We developed an AR application that allowed people to re-experience the moon landing live, all around the world. A combination of quality asset integration, game development, real-time multiplayer and educational app.

Digitas Boston

Bentley wanted to celebrate its 100th birthday by reflecting on a century of luxury excellence and looking ahead to the future.

So we partnered with UNIT9 and helped them create an interactive, mobile-first, interactive 3D website that showcased the car in it's purest visual form.

We smoothly combined the exterior with interior visualisation, allowing the user to instantly switch between their desired points of view.

The website was developer as mobile-first, ensuring that not only the car looks stunning and the animations are smooth on handheld devices, but also that the entire UX makes sense for smaller screens.

We have built the website in React and used [THREE.js](https://threejs.org/) as the 3D engine.

60 FPS, insane interactivity and fast loading combined with the looks of the Bentley concept car resulted in an unforgettable digital experience.

Bentley Centenary

Bentley Centenary | Le Polish Bureau

We collaborated with UNIT9 to create a website that represented a Bentley concept car as it is - beautifully stunning and smooth. And we did it across mobile, tablet and desktop.

Bentley

Automotive

Mobile gamers are constantly searching for the next big addictive game that they can carry in their pocket—and of course, the ideal mobile device on which to play their favorites. To prove that OnePlus, with its 8GB of RAM, is the perfect platform for the job, we collaborated with UNIT9 and helped develop Crackables: a limited-time, AI bot-hosted game. It had to be as savvy as the most hardcore mobile gamer while demonstrating the power of the OnePlus.

Crackables is a unique combination of a compelling, story-driven cipher puzzle game, creative use of vintage technology and modern design.

Crackables is a can’t-put-it-down series of crypto puzzles, both digital and physical. Players had to complete each challenge in order to move to the next puzzle—and only the fastest 1,000 people who made it through the first three challenges qualified for the next round.

We developed it in React and used a lot of [PixiJS](https://www.pixijs.com/) and [THREE.js](https://threejs.org/) to power all the interactivity and 2D/3D gaming.

The entire web-based puzzle mind-bender was powered by an AI chatbot. Developed on top of Google's [Dialogflow](https://dialogflow.com/), it was constantly aware of the user's progress and it was always there to offer help. The user could use natural language input to ask the bot for hints or attempt to provide solutions.

Crackables is a can’t-put-it-down series of crypto puzzles, both digital and physical. Players had to complete each challenge in order to move to the next puzzle—and only the fastest 1,000 people who made it through the first three challenges qualified for the next round. It’s those 1,000 super-players who were sent a real-world package containing a mysterious device. Using a touch-tone protocol, they had to crack various audiocodes in order to be one of the top six winners of the grand prize: the ultimate gaming PC setup.

Gamers everywhere flocked to be one of the big winners. OnePlus proved that its mobile platform is not for the average player, and that it can support even the most intricate, advanced games out there. 

OnePlus: Crackables

OnePlus: Crackables | Le Polish Bureau

OnePlus

It is our unique recipe in which we are a partner who can lead whilst adapting to your specific needs. A process that we have refined through working on creative projects with incredibly tight turnarounds and rapidly changing scopes, all with our characteristic agility, precision and reliability.

Le Polish Bureau is a <a href="https://unit9.com" target="_blank">UNIT9</a> Company with its headquarters in Lodz, Poland.

We are a strong team of 30+ engineers and creatives with access to the rest of the Group's talent pool if needed.

Capabilities

Process

We follow a strict production process that results in quality, efficiency and transparency at every step.

About