Work

AT&T Live Arena: NCAA March Madness LED Wall

An interactive LED wall for the AT&T Live Arena fan experience at NCAA March Madness: live leaderboards, countdowns, score changes and timed messages built as Rive components behind the hoop.

Client: AT&TThrough: WunderBeast

Wunder Beast / AT&T / 2026

Live data, made visible.

An interactive LED wall for the AT&T Live Arena fan experience at NCAA March Madness.

My role: Motion design, Rive animation and interactive development

Delivered: Five Rive components for the wall behind the hoop (round play timer, score and timer HUD, team standings board, scrolling ticker and a 3-2-1-GO countdown), each with a standalone HTML demo, a structure diagram and developer documentation

Tools: Rive (state machines, ViewModels, Luau scripting), Adobe Illustrator

The brief

The AT&T Live Arena was a fan activation space at the NCAA March Madness tournament. A large LED wall behind the hoop ran live content while fans played. Working with Wunder Beast, I designed and built the display system: the graphics had to respond to the game in real time and stay readable across the whole wall.

The build

I split the wall into separate Rive components that the event software drives through ViewModel properties. The play component cycles four timed challenge slides, with durations, text and basketball icons set by the host, ends on a final message such as "WINNING SHOT", and fires lifecycle events (segment start and end, final countdown, last five seconds, ready, reset) so the game logic can stay in sync. The HUD takes staged score digits and a small Luau script moves them onto the display with the score-change animation. The standings board shows up to ten rows with select and highlight states, the ticker scrolls player names and the AT&T logo at a set speed, and the countdown steps through 3, 2, 1, GO.

The constraint

Everything ran at full resolution on a large-format LED wall, for hours, with state changes coming from live play. The glows depend on Rive's vector feathering, which needs the WebGL2 runtime, so every component, demo and handoff document was built and tested against WebGL2. The components kept changing during March as the event took shape; the play component alone went through twelve saved versions before the final file.

The delivered experience

The event footage and photography show the wall in use behind the hoop during play: scores, countdowns and prompts. Each component was handed off as a .riv file with a self-contained HTML demo exposing its controls, plus documentation of its inputs and events. My original Contra case has the wider account.

Client feedback

"Ilya was a fantastic partner on our NCAA Final Four activation. His Rive work looked and performed great across a large-format LED environment, and he brought strong technical skill, flexibility, and care to the project." Brandon DeLauney, Wunder Beast

Left: four of the Rive components on one wall-sized stage (score/timer overlay across the full width, 3-2-1 countdown, round callouts ending on Winning Shot, team standings). Right: the event film.

Recorded from the scoreboard component: the board and rows play in, a row is selected and marked, then it plays out. Rows hold neutral demo data.

Recorded from att_play_component_v2.1.riv: the round timer plays in, runs the Layups and 3 Pointer stages and lands on the Winning Shot message, at its place on the wall.