Critically-acclaimed Pinot Noir specialist, Siduri, is serving up a holographic augmented reality experience which brings to life the winery’s ethos — that serious wine and serious fun aren’t mutually exclusive.
To mark the debut of its new show, Cursed, Netflix is using WebAR to give users the ability to virtually conjure roots and lightning, receive the sword of power and find their path of magic in a series of augmented reality challenges.
To mark the debut of its new show, Cursed, Netflix is using WebAR to give users the ability to virtually conjure roots and lightning, receive the sword of power and find their path of magic in a series of augmented reality challenges.
Today we are excited to announce the release of our Video Recording feature which can be added to any 8th Wall project to let your users capture and share their experience.
When you add Video Recording to your project, your users will be able to capture moments within the WebAR experience and have the option to download their media and/or share it with their friends using the most popular messaging and social media applications. This opens up viral marketing opportunities for your experience by equipping your users with the tools they need to share their experience with their network and inspire further use.
8th Wall Video Recording happens in-browser and on-device, supporting iOS, Android, and Desktop computers. Designed with privacy in mind, capturing video on-device not only makes recording of web content extremely fast but it also ensures that only the user has access to the media they have created.
Augmented reality offers a brand new way for people to engage with digital content. This type of engagement is dramatically different from the views and clicks we are used to today; but this should come as no surprise seeing AR represents a massive leap in dimension — moving the digital experience from 2D to 3D. Whereas in a 2D digital world we may parse information from an image or video as a quite passive and unremarkable interaction, in a 3D world we are asked to be an active participant, fully present to live out an experience that is meaningful and can be quite extraordinary.
Augmented reality is a brand new medium, an experience medium. And a new medium demands new ways to think about it including how to measure its effectiveness in delivering a message.
But what are the metrics we should use to measure an AR experience?
As life is a sequence of experiences, it stands to reason that a good place to glean insights into how to to measure an AR experience is to look at what metrics we value when we evaluate our real life ones.
Let’s imagine I just got back from a trip to Toronto and am now on the phone with a friend. Some of the most common questions I would get would be:
These same questions apply to an AR experience.
Augmented reality requires users to be present in the experience. AR asks users to stop what they are doing in the real world, and fully enter an experience in a new augmented one. In this way, they are required to dedicate time to fully focus on the AR experience and be completely immersed in that moment. This results in high-quality dwell time in AR. Of course, your user will remain engaged within your augmented reality experience as long as you are keeping their attention, so getting your user into the meat of your experience as fast as possible and keeping them engaged by giving them meaningful things to do will be essential.
As AR is in 3D, users automatically become active participants in the experience. In AR, users must move about and interact with the space you’ve created to do anything from trying on virtual accessories to building new worlds. Just like in real reality, augmented reality makes engagement a mandatory requirement. As such, it will be critical for you to design your experience to ensure that your user engages in a manner that aligns well with your goals. AR user flows may not be linear, however, as your user has more agency than 2D digital experiences and so listening for places your user may be stuck and finding ways to encourage them to interact with your critical user paths and CTAs will be essential.
Our memories are shaped by our experiences. With AR users fully present and interacting within an augmented world, their recall of the experience should be just as vivid. This makes it even more critical to pay attention to every detail designed in your AR experience to ensure that the memories that could be created are ones you wish to have represent your brand and product goals. As most memories today are shared on social media, listening for mentions of your experience on these networks in addition to polling users post-experience are great ways to measure this metric.
In addition to being able to recount what they saw and what they did, like all great experiences, a large part of your user’s memory will be around how they felt while inside your augmented reality. Therefore it is also critical to design an experience which not only evokes an emotional state while engaging in your augmented reality, but also leaves them with this lingering sentiment when they return to our real reality. To capture this, consider implementing an easy rating system which pops up at natural times within the experience or follow-up with a survey when the user is back in the real world.
Of course, measurement of an AR experience should center around the goals set at the beginning of the project. Once your goals are set and the experience is live, it is time to measure.
Building with the 8th Wall WebAR development platform makes it easy and effective for you to measure your AR experiences. Our modular framework was designed to integrate with external libraries such as your preferred analytics solution.
To help you get started with measuring your experiences, we have recently updated our documentation with a new section on “Advanced Analytics,” beginning with outlining how to integrate Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager in your WebAR projects.
If you are already an 8th Wall developer you can learn how to add Advanced Analytics to your project by heading on over to our docs. To get started developing with 8th Wall, sign up for a 14-day free trial here.
🙌 A big thank you to our developer community for consistently providing us with helpful insights and critiques on our software. We’re continuing to develop and iterate based on the valuable feedback that you provide us.
Around the world, as shelter-in-place protocols begin to ease and people slowly step out of their homes, we’re urged to maintain a safe distance of 6ft (or at least 1.5 meters) from one another. Grocery stores are using tape to mark the ground at 6ft intervals between patrons, and public parks are painting “social distancing circles” onto their lawns.
With AWE 2020 Online right around the corner, we’d like to recognize our talented partners’ WebAR projects that have been nominated for various Auggie Awards. Vote for your favorites to help them take home an Auggie! Here are the 10 nominations…
Best Campaign Nominee
To promote Fox’s LEGO Masters TV show, Fox teamed up with Trigger — The Mixed Reality Agency to develop a WebAR experience that allows people to build their own 3D LEGO creations alongside the show’s master builders. Users could share their AR builds on social media for a chance to win tickets to LEGOLAND, a LEGO Masters Build Box, or a feature on official LEGO Masters social channels.
Best Campaign Nominee
Indie rock band Real Estate became the world’s first musicians to launch a WebAR concert. Dubbed “Quarantour,” the virtual performance was created to bring the live music experience directly to fans amongst worldwide shelter-in-place protocols due to COVID-19.
To celebrate the release of our new MRCS Hologram project template (which makes it way easier to create WebAR holograms), we’ve dedicated this Week in WebAR exclusively to some of the exciting hologram projects our partners have whipped up.
Independence Day in Israel is observed on April 28th and 29th this year, and in order to personally “visit” each and every home in Israel (while practicing good social distancing), President Reuven Rivlin has transformed himself into a WebAR hologram.
This is the first time in history that a country leader has been telecasted in full augmented reality to visit constituents in the privacy of their home and speak to them using volumetric virtual video. The project is a collaboration between The Office of the President, video capture system TetaVi, volumetric video streaming service Omnivor, creative director Nim Shapira, and WebAR technology by 8th Wall.
During the activation, President Rivlin delivers a speech about the 72nd anniversary of Independence Day in Hebrew. Rivlin concludes with: “You know what? Let’s take a selfie. But I didn’t bring my camera…Come on, let’s take a picture together and don’t forget to smile!” presenting a perfectly-timed photo op for participants. Users are encouraged to share on social media with the hashtag: #PresidentRivlinandI.
