Mid America Beverage Expo – Speaking Engagement, Hololens App, & Snapchat AR Lens (2018)

CASE STUDY

CLIENT:
Mid America Beverage Expo

AGENCY:
n/a – direct with client

DELIVERABLES:
• Speaking Engagement & Presentation
• Hololens Augmented Reality Application
• Snapchat AR Lens for the Event
• Stylized Snapcode

TECHNOLOGY:
• Microsoft Hololens
• Windows Holographic OS
• Snapchat Lens Studio
• Snapchat for iOS & Android
• Blender
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• PowerPoint

OBJECTIVE:
The Mid America Beverage Expo, an annual Midwest beverage industry tradeshow, had recently made a return under new management and with new branding. ShowMeVirtual was asked to be a featured speaker and give a talk about virtual and augmented reality, and how it’s being used in the beverage industry. In addition to the presentation, expo attendees should get a chance to try a virtual or augmented reality experience for themselves.

SOLUTION:
ShowMeVirtual’s founder, Ian Renz, gave a multimedia presentation detailing how AR and VR are being used as both a marketing and engagement tool in the beverage industry. The two-day Mid America Beverage Expo brought in attendees from across the entire Midwest including distilleries, wineries, breweries, glassware companies, and other alcohol-related brands. Ian’s presentation helped educate expo attendees on the differences between augmented and virtual reality, examples of successful campaigns already using this technology, and some actionable items for the attending brands and organizations to begin to use AR and VR in their own campaigns. As part of Ian’s presentation, ShowMeVirtual also created an interactive Microsoft Hololens application that told a story about wine, from barrel to bar, incorporating industry facts along the way. The Hololens AR application also let attendees visualize and organize a handful of unique beverage glasses on a holographic barrel bar floating in front of the user, showcasing an example of interactivity and engagement within a branded augmented reality experience.

In addition to the session and Hololens application, ShowMeVirtual also created a Snapchat AR Lens for the event to further help attendees understand the technology, and enable patrons and exhibitors alike to create their own unique piece of content on-the-spot at the expo. To create the Mid America Beverage Expo Snapchat Lens, ShowMeVirtual modeled the MABE logo in 3D in Blender, and textured the logo in Snapchat Lens Studio. We wanted attendees to be able to create a piece of content that would  be unique to their brand, so we programmed in an option to choose from one of eight unique beverage glasses that would best represented each brand (wine glass, brandy glass, champagne flute, etc), and then created a feature that let the user input their own logo into the experience in real-time. The end result was an customizable augmented reality Lens that featured both the attendee’s branding and MABE branding, which allowed tradeshow patrons to simultaneously promote themselves on their own social channels while also driving engagement for the Mid America Beverage Expo.

By using Snapchat as the augmented reality platform, we were able to avoid requiring patrons to download a third-party application to create their customized AR content. Because other social media AR platforms do not yet allow alcoholic beverage promotion in any way, Snapchat proved to be especially advantageous since it also allows you to save content directly to your device, enabling users to post their customized AR Snap to any other social media channel. Based on feedback both during and after the event, attendees and exhibitors loved the ability to create their own content, and our session, Snapchat Lens, and Hololens application stirred up significant interest for major alcohol brands in the Midwest to begin using this technology themselves.