Interactive 5G Smart-Port Sandtable for a Major Telecom Operator

The brief

A major telecom operator — with China Unicom as a named public partner — needed an exhibition centrepiece to explain the 5G smart port: a working, interactive sandtable where visitors could see an automated harbour come to life. The exhibit had to make an abstract industrial network tangible, showing how 5G coordinates cranes, autonomous vehicles and vessels across a live port at a glance.

What we did

We designed and built a physical automated-port model with motorised quay cranes, AGV container trucks and container ships, all choreographed to move as a real smart port would. An interactive control and content system tied the moving model to synchronised screen content, so a visitor's input on the interface set the port in motion — a crane lifting, an AGV routing a container, a ship berthing — each step narrating the role 5G plays.

Model engineers, motion-control technicians and interactive developers worked together so the physical action and the on-screen story stayed frame-accurate, with every crane movement and vehicle route cued precisely to the narration. The sandtable was built to run repeatedly through a full exhibition day without drift, so the hundredth visitor saw the same clean sequence as the first. Lighting and layout drew the eye across the model, and the interface was kept simple enough for any visitor to operate unaided while still communicating a genuinely technical process.

The result

A working smart-port sandtable that turns a complex 5G industrial application into something visitors can trigger and watch unfold in miniature. The exhibit gives the operator a clear, memorable way to demonstrate 5G's role in port automation — cranes, vehicles and ships coordinated in real time on a single interactive stage. For a technology that is otherwise invisible, the sandtable makes the value of 5G connectivity immediate and physical, leaving visitors with a concrete picture of an automated port at work.