The Colonel (KFC) enlists Leica and IKONOS imagery to help with innovative marketing

Picture this... an 87,000 suare foot logo visible from space! That's what KFC constructed recently for a promotion thanks to the help from Leica Geospatial. A Colonel Sanders logo was built in the Area 51 desert near Rachel, Nevada and its huge! The company also used the image to bait consumers into a contest where they were asked to search the image for a hidden message from the Colonel - see http://www.kfc.com/facefromspace/default.asp - here's some backroung info from Leica about the construction effort. Over three months, a project team including designers, architects, engineers, and even astrophysicists spent 3,000 hours creating the face. During the six days of onsite construction, the tiles were covered from prying eyes, human and otherwise. The grid is made of 65,000 1’x1’ interlocking tiles that were painted red (6,000), white (14,000), eggshell (12,000), beige (5,000) and black (28,000). Once the grid was unveiled, the IKONOS commercial satellite, circling 423 miles above earth, was used to capture the image for processing. Leica Geosystems in Switzerland used its Leica Virtual Explorer 3D visualization product to incorporate the captured IKONOS imagery into a virtual earth, a clear and spatially accurate digital reality. Terabytes of spatial information are seamlessly merged into a highly informative digital earth and distributed to thousands of users worldwide without preprocessing. For the KFC project, the virtual earth was used to create a sequence of images to let viewers at Internet sites “zoom” from space to the KFC face.