Mar 1, 2016 - Jul 1, 2016
In my way to rethink advertising campaigns, BembAR is conceived as a proof of concept of a game in Augmented Reality (AR) that is oriented to ad campaigns. Once installed in a smartphone, the user launches the app and scans the corresponding brand logo and starts to play the game. Ideally, the score achieved in the game would be displayed in a ranking and would serve as a way to gain promotion codes or prizes. Having this way of interaction would lead to ideas of constructing advertising with gamification elements.
BembAR was built using Unity as the game development engine to create the game logic and attach the texture and materials. The immersive experience in Augmented Reality was built using Vuforia SDK. Although I am familiar with the process of creating AR apps, the difficulty resided in the image to track in order to display the game. For example, when the mechanism to display AR content is Image-Based Tracking, the image has to have enough pixel details to make it trackable. Images that consist of only lines, solid colors, and poor details are not considered trackable. Therefore, they are not good, and it would be hard to track the image in real scenarios. This problem arises as it is expected that logos don't have much detail in their designs. To tackle this, we found a logo with good enough details, so we ended up with a decent trackable image where the application could recognize and show the game. However, if it were not possible to find a picture with a high level of detail, we would apply some filters to the image to gain a high level of detail, like the noise effect.
BembAR is a prototype of an AR game-like app that lets users interact with the brand logo in Augmented Reality with gamification elements. This application aims to show new media to present the product or to engage with the brand. In addition, it adds elements of gamification to demonstrate an interactive ad campaign to increase engagement.