Columbia Sports - Rapid Rafter Experience
Release Date: 2013
The Brief
Columbia Sportswear was working with Loerchner.com Inc and Spoiled Fabulous to develop a dynamic campaign to increase awareness of their new Omni-Freeze zero fabric. They asked us to create a digital experience that would give users hands on experience with the new fabric.
The Solution
As part of a multi-dimensional digital campaign, we created a gamified experience to illustrate the cooling quality of the omni-freeze fabric. Users would wear a sleeve of the fabric on their arm, and control a rafter shooting down a river. By waving their arms left or right the rafter would navigate around obstacles and collect points. Upon completion their points were recorded and users could upload their score to social media in real time on site, to receive a unique coupon code for a discount on Columbia goods.
A leader-board was also present on the Facebook page for the experiential campaign, which updated in real time to show top score winners from the multiple events across Canada.
What We Did
We used Microsoft Kinect Cameras, for real-time gesture tracking. The users would use their arm held above their head to steer a boat left and right on a river. The gameplay experience was programmed in Unity3D, with the Kinect API driving the controls. Users gameplay scores were then fed to a local server which assigned each score a unique retrieval code. User's experience data was then passed to a series of ipads, where CSR representatives would help them retrieve their score, and register/post to social media. Most of the results were posted in real-time, but the local server also had a fallback for areas where no internet/cellular signal was present (as this was a touring event series) which would record results/registrations locally, and upload the results at the end of the night via chron
Gameplay Footage
The Conclusion:
The Rapid Rafter Experience was an effective way to give users an experiential introduction to Columbia's Omni-Freeze fabric, and had a lot of interesting twists and turns on the technical configuration side. Using Unity 3D to drive the visual was a great way to present a rich experience, while also giving us a great way to connect with the Kinect API for motion controls. The registration experience was driven by a web application running on the local server, which then had outbound connections with the Facebook and Twitter API for social media integration. Our custom developed facebook app then served up all of the results data in real time to the campaign page.
This was our first experience delivering an experiential campaign developed in the Unity3D platform, and it has since become a staple in our development arsenal.
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