INTERACTIVE ACTIVATION
Stella Bikes
Solhiem cup 2026, Amsterdam
Services // INTERACTIVE
Challenge
Stella wanted more than a booth at the tournament. They wanted people to feel what a Stella bike is for, fietsplezier, the pure enjoyment of cycling. That’s not something you explain in a sentence. It has to be ridden.
So we put a real Stella bike inside a game. Magnets on the rear spokes read speed.
A sensor on the handlebars reads steering. The brakes are wired in too. Every pedal stroke, turn and stop feeds straight into an immersive 3D game, no buttons, no controller. The bike is the controller.
The experience
Riders move through three minutes of the Netherlands, built from the ground up: Amsterdam canal houses, open polder, a town square, a park, dunes and beach, a fisherman’s village, picking up rewards along the way. Three large screens throw the ride across live game cameras, so it plays as a spectacle for the crowd around the bike, not just the person riding it.
The installation was built to travel and run unattended. It’s now rolling out to Stella’s headquarters and a selection of shops across the Netherlands, with remote access for troubleshooting, calibration and updates from anywhere, no technician required on-site. A live leaderboard turns every ride into a competition: the daily high score wins a helmet, the week’s high score wins a bike.
The tech disappears. Riders aren’t thinking about sensors, they’re pedaling through a landscape they recognise, chasing a leaderboard spot. Fietsplezier, made playable at scale.
Team
Client
Stella Bikes
Creative technologist
Bas van Diejen
Game development and 3D content
Mike van der Noordt
Production
Ina van den Berg (Life on Jupiter)
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