Google & NBA partnered with jam3/mediamonks to bring this vision to life for fans in the metaverse. As the lead artistic director for this project, my main responsibility was to design the avatars. I created six unique, interchangeable outfits that enhance each avatar's individuality. This allowed us to offer diverse and dynamic representations that bring each character to life with its own distinct style.
Pixel Arena is the NBA's interactive Google universe — a metaverse court where fans build a custom avatar, drop into the game, and live inside the experience. My role was director and character designer across the world's signature beats.
The locker room is where players assemble their avatar — a hub for the modular wardrobe that drives the whole system. Tops, bottoms, kits and props slot together cleanly so every fan walks onto the court looking like themselves.
Six avatars, each with a swappable outfit. Designed as a modular system — silhouettes, colour palettes, and prop kits that mix and match without ever clashing. Every avatar feels like a singular character; collectively they read as one team.
Alongside the player avatars, we built a bespoke NPC character for Google — the in-world face of the Pixel phone partnership. A couple of design iterations from the exploration phase.
These two avatars rendered in a GLTF web player — the same compressed polygon and texture format that ships into the game. What you're seeing is exactly how each character behaves in-engine, after every optimisation pass.
Google · NBA
Jam3 · Monks
Adam Romano
Arice
Kousha Motamedi
Cyrill Durigon