Bottles and Cans, oh my!
2020 was a very strange year. With most people self-isolating at home, we saw an explosion of opportunities for AR/VR/Video Conferencing. Lots of venues and events that would normally take place were closed, and for companies like BrewDog, who get a large portion of their revenues from sponsoring events in the EU, there was a need to find creative ways to reach new customers. Fordings INNOVATE reached out to me for some fresh ideas on what could be done.
AR Marketing
The labels for BrewDog were a perfect marker for AR placement. Scan a bottle or can with your mobile device's camera and launch an interactive web app. The web app can detect if the beer bottle or can has been opened which differentiates between viewing a trailer or the full experience.
Sell me a joke
For every experience played the talent receives ¢ (think Spotify). Using geo-targeting from each can, we can begin to predict which jokes work better in which areas and adjust the videos that get played. Giving jokes the best chance to sell in the most likely areas. We can also provide BrewDog something they don't normally get: granular geo-enhanced analytics. We can begin to detect the true life-span of their products, how many people look at them, where do they go.
Capture and release
Using depth cameras to capture the talent, we can provide a "hologram" experience with our AR. The demo I made was shot with the Kinect 2 camera and converted using custom software (I wasn't going to learn .NET for this). Being in self-isolation I filmed myself in my dining room for a quick and dirty POC. As luck would have it, I have a stand-up comedian's body shape. The rest of the POC was done in Modo so if we needed to go to prototype the assets would be prepped for Unity 3D and a demo could be quickly knocked out with a plugin like VuForia.