2019 was the year of AR. Probably 2020 will be the year of the AR too and every year for the next decade or so. But since having worked in the AR space for a few years now, we felt that we really need to push the envelop when it comes to AR product experiences. We do get to work on a lot of fun projects in collaboration with our partner agencies or directly with brands but we had a few ideas we wanted to explore for product AR experiences.
So we ideated quite a bit on what consumers would like to experience when exploring products digitally now that gradually the rectangular bounding box of the screen is falling apart & spatial design is replacing it. We zeroed in on 2 approaches for this- one would be a visually immersive experience & other would be a functionally engaging one, and built and published 2 AR experiences to explore & test these out.
But we selected 2 very culturally relevant products that consumers can instantly relate to and engages them at the first sight, even in this relatively new medium.
For the visually immersive experience there could be no other product more relevantly fit than the Nike Air Mag. It serves as the crux of the hype beast niche of the present day while also being a retro culture monument and we figured this will give AR the attention it needs from the audience who are passionate about lifestyle and fashion brands.
Before we can move into the UX and think about how users will interact with the whole experience, we need a 3D model of the product that we are showcasing, in this case the Airmag. And this is probably the most time-consuming and artistically challenging part of building an AR experience.
The 3D model must perfectly represent the actual product with all of its details with precision while also considering the correct scale, the materials like wood,metal, plastic that the product is made of and represent it in 3D as close to real-life as possible. And all of this takes some time, depending on the structural complexity of each object. No way to rush it.
Lens Studio is probably our favourite AR authoring platform right now and maybe we are biased since we are a Lens Creative Partner for Snapchat (that’s a shameless plug right there). But even so, it’s increadeby robust, while still being accessible to designers and creatives with little or no dev skills. Most interactions can be setup using pre-built tools in Lens Studio.
The build for this experience was relatively simple with just some animated textures and slow-mo animations. We kept it clean so that the audiences get to appreciate the beauty of the sneaker.
The final build of the experience was published as a Community Lens on Snapchat. Reason we specifically chose Snapchat as the platform to build this AR experience was because Lens Studio lets you quickly bash together assets & content to test ideas out, without needing to get deep into the tech stack to get something off the ground. Also Snapchat’s demographic of audiences being very open to try out new things, regardless of how unfamiliar something might seem. All in all, we saw this whole exercise as a way to test out how audiences would like to experience lifestyle products beyond the limits of a rectangular screen.
