THE CHALLENGE

How can we incorporate immersive technologies into brand activations that would improve brand awareness ?

Immersive technologies are making a run for money in the marketing sphere and many companies are adapting to these technologies in order to increase their brand awareness. Constellation brands wanted to stay ahead of the game by inspiring their employees about these technologies and spark imagination for creating innovative PR campaigns of various brands in their portfolio. Highwest Whiskey wanted such an experience to accelerate their sales in tasting rooms and so this challenge was posed.

SOLUTION

An interactive storytelling mobile AR experience

Augmented reality has proven to engage consumers with a brand in a way that’s differentiated and memorable -- from immersive animation to interactive storytelling, while also taping into viral social media behaviors. Hence, we developed an Augmented reality based mobile application that allows users to scan a coaster and relish the story of High West Whiskey through an audio visual interactive experience.

Here is a sneak peek

RESEARCH AND INSPIRATION

People who experience AR intended to share it to 5 other people

Studies show that AR has a potential to attract new customers and increase brand loyalty among Millenials. Companies like Jack Daniels, 19 Crimes and Victoria has seen significant increase in sales (25% - 40%) with the use of Augmented reality in their marketing and sales strategy.

IDEATION AND SKETCHES

PROTOTYPES

I created prototypes on Adobe XD, and mobile app builds using Unity 3D to test the user flow of the application and the rendering capabilities of existing AR enabled phones.
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TESTING

Finding right balance between quality graphics, user experience and optimized AR experience

Stress testing and user testing the application yielded interesting design problems to solve. This resulted in an approach mainly catered towards maintaining a balance between graphics quality, intuitive interactions and optimized AR experience to engage more users.

ITERATIONS AND DEVELOPMENT

Used LODs and hybrid image tracking to achieve stable AR across multiple devices

Based on user testing and functional testing of some of the high fidelity prototypes, the major challenge was to make the AR experience more stable and intuitive across many devices. In order to do so, we incorporated texture atlases, hybrid image tracking and plane tracking functionality using AR Foundation, LODs for different mobile configurations, fun user interactions, optimized shaders, timeline animations and post processing effects.

1. Hybrid Image Tracking

2. Shader graphs

3. Timeline animations

4. Path creation

5. User interactions

6. Post processing