Inside the Now Building — Observatory's Multi-Year Immersive Partnership with Glamour Women of the Year
- Observatory
- Nov 1, 2022
- 2 min read
Outernet London is one of the most extraordinary visual spaces in Europe. The Now Building has some 23,000 square feet of 16K LED screens — walls, ceiling, and surfaces working together to create a genuinely immersive environment unlike anything else in the UK. When Glamour UK / Condé Nast brought Observatory in to create the visual content for the Women of the Year Awards at Outernet, they were asking us to work at the largest and most technically complex scale we'd encountered in a brand context.
Over multiple years, Observatory created a comprehensive suite of immersive visual content for the event — spanning three distinct Outernet spaces, a narrative 3D animation experience across the main Now Building atrium, Instagram AR filters, and an animated 3D toolkit supplied to other production teams working on the event.
Three Spaces, One World
The Outernet complex offered Observatory three distinct creative environments to work with: the Now Arcade, the Now Trending gallery space, and the primary Now Building atrium — a four-storey wraparound LED environment that stops pedestrians in their tracks on Charing Cross Road every day.
Each space was given its own visual identity while remaining part of a coherent overall world. The Now Building experience was structured as a 10–15 minute narrative arc — moving through emotional phases from Intrigue through Build Up to a Utopian Crescendo, before drawing the audience forward through an imagined doorway. Two contrasting room identities ran through the experience: utopian soft landscapes evoking growth and renewal; and nebulaic cloudscapes and power sources, suggesting something more elemental and charged.
A 3D Toolkit and an AR Experience
One of the most distinctive deliverables of the project was a shared 3D toolkit — iridescent ribbon sculptures and pearl geometries supplied as Quicktime files to other production teams working on the event, ensuring visual coherence across every touchpoint of the Women of the Year experience. The same visual language appeared in the AR experience, with Instagram filters built in Meta Spark Studio offering a Flower Bloom direction and a glitch-floral silhouette mode.
For the 2023 edition, Observatory also produced animated 3D QR codes rendered in the same iridescent style — integrating the functional with the aesthetic in a way that felt entirely at home in Outernet's technology-forward environment.
Outernet: One of the UK's Top Five Visitor Attractions
Outernet's owners note that the site is already a top five visitor attraction in the UK, with its free-to-enter immersive environment drawing audiences from tourists, commuters and creative industry visitors alike. Creating content for a space of that public footprint and cultural significance was a genuine responsibility — and one Observatory embraced fully across the life of our Women of the Year partnership with Glamour UK.
Sources: Observatory project documentation 2022–2023; Outernet London.
