FDJ — Française des Jeux — operates the French national lottery and sports betting across roughly 30,000 physical points of sale.
The brief sat at the intersection of physical retail and digital innovation. FDJ was actively exploring how new technologies — Web3, the metaverse, gesture interaction — could redefine the in-store experience for the next generation of players. The central problem the team was investigating was the inherent limitation of current touchscreen technology in a public retail environment.
The post-COVID context sharpened the brief. Touchscreens require direct contact, which raised hygiene concerns the company couldn’t ignore, and confined interactive surfaces to indoor placements — capping sales reach by design.
The brief was to develop a touch-free interactive screen using Gestoos computer-vision technology — improving usability while unlocking dynamic digital signage formats that didn’t rely on physical contact.
FDJ’s long-term ambition was to integrate Gestoos directly in-store, so customers could interact with screens to place bets through hand gestures alone — opening a new interactive layer over the existing retail footprint without rebuilding the hardware.
Two operational constraints framed every design decision. First, the system had to detect customer age, since French regulation forbids minors from participating in money games. Second, in the short term, the touchless interface had to serve as a flexible canvas for events FDJ organizes — sports competitions, brand activations, public-space installations — where the same gesture system could be re-skinned and re-deployed quickly.
Gestoos’ capability profile aligned cleanly with FDJ’s Expériences Physiques strategy — a positioning unique in a market dominated by software-only and scalable digital solutions, by giving the company a way to digitize in-store activity without abandoning the physical retail surface.
Fig. 01 — FDJ Innovation Lab, Paris HQ — gesture-controlled lottery interface running on Gestoos.
FDJ operates with one of the most disciplined corporate identity systems in French retail — a 2021 brand book defining logotypes, color gradients, typography, the iconic losange shape, marie-louise framing rules, and a specialized pictogram system.
The interface had to live entirely inside that system: La Caslon Graphique EF for editorial type, La Chance for display, the FDJ blue-to-red gradient applied to typography and visual filters, the diamond shape used as a brand anchor across product blocks. Every gesture state, every transition, every screen had to read as FDJ first — not as a Gestoos demo bolted into FDJ’s space.
Working inside this system, three operational constraints shaped the design loop:
Gestoos × FDJ matched the company’s broader strategic positioning — Expériences Physiques — in a way few software vendors could.
Most of FDJ’s digital partners offer software-only, infinitely scalable products. The opportunity here was different: a software layer that activates physical surfaces. By introducing a gesture interaction system on existing in-store screens, FDJ could digitize a behavior that had always been physical — placing a bet — without losing the retail experience that defines the brand.
The same system extends naturally beyond points of sale: live events, sports competitions, brand activations in public spaces. Every screen FDJ deploys becomes a programmable interaction surface.
The work ran across four phases — each one feeding the next with concrete artifacts rather than hand-offs.
I spent the first weeks on-site at FDJ’s Paris Innovation space, observing how visitors approached the existing screens, recording their hesitations, and benchmarking against the gesture libraries already available in Gestoos. The output was a shortlist of nine candidate gestures evaluated against three criteria: ergonomic comfort over a 30-second interaction, recognition reliability across light conditions, and learnability for first-time users with no instruction.
From the shortlist, four gestures survived to production: hover (cursor proxy), point (selection), swipe (lateral navigation), and confirm (commit a bet). Each one was mapped to a specific UI state with three feedback layers — visual halo for hand presence, animated trail for direction, and a confirmation animation that resolves within 400ms to keep the rhythm of a betting decision intact.
The interface was built against Gestoos’ computer-vision SDK running on the kiosk hardware. I worked directly with the engineering team to define the contract between recognition events and UI state — what triggers a state change, what tolerances are acceptable for false positives, and how the system degrades gracefully when ambient light or movement disrupts detection. Age estimation was integrated as a pre-condition gate: no betting flow begins until the model has surfaced a confidence score above the regulatory threshold.
Two rounds of testing ran in the Innovation Lab with visitors from outside FDJ. Round one validated gesture comprehension (the swipe vs. point distinction was reworked here). Round two stress-tested the betting flow end-to-end. The feedback was direct enough to kill two early decisions and confirm the four-gesture vocabulary as the final shipping set.
“Two-meter screens. No touch. One national brand book that doesn’t bend.”
Designing for gesture is closer to choreography than to UI.
The biggest lesson from FDJ was that every interaction unit on a touchless screen has to be reachable as a movement, learnable as a hand pose, and recoverable from error without making the user feel foolish in public. That last constraint — the social cost of failure in a retail environment — ended up driving more design decisions than the brand book did.
The other lesson was about working inside a strict identity system. Rather than fighting the FDJ charte graphique, the design embraced it as a constraint that forced sharper choices. The result is a touchless interface that reads as FDJ at a glance — not as a vendor demo — which is precisely how a national brand should look on a public screen.