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MINI Cooper is a world-renowned automotive brand that is known for its iconic design and epic marketing campaigns. Wanting to take their marketing strategy to the next level, MINI reached out to Ram, McCann, and Facebook to create their first digital AR marketing campaigns to catch a broader and younger audience.
01 Room for Everyone
02 Space for Everything
Griffin Palmer
Intern (Me)
Interaction design
3D Modeling
Research
Hannah Erikson
Intern (Legend)
Animation
3D Modeling
Research
Meta/SparkAR
AR program
Partner
Owner Research
We interviewed local owners of Mini Coopers to understand why they chose to purchase the car and how they use it despite its mini reputation.
10+ Interviews
5 Home Visits
1 Test Drive
Our real life hero user.
and MINI shipped us a car!
Ideation
We played around in SparkAR to get familiar with the program and then began creating demos to pitch our initial concepts to MINI.
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Here are my favorites they didn't choose...
Location Changing Portal Effect
Storyboards of MINI's chosen directions:
Packing Experience
Users are able to pack the vehicle virtually by tapping on a series of objects in the surrounding environment.
Allows users to adjust the human factors of the avatar and see an accurate fit of themselves in the vehicle.
User Height Experience
SparkAR is not meant to hold heavy 3D models. Meaning all of MINI's assets had to be individually edited to reduce their total polygons before we could begin packaging the final products. (This took many hours off my life)
Both experiences were patch coded in SparkAR and streamlined as more file size issues effected the usability.
Prototyping the tap-to-pack feature for user testing.
The avatars were designed on "Ready Player Me" before they were rigged and animated in Maya by our team.
Testing the animated figure in SparkAR
Both experiences successfully launched on Facebook and Instagram after some final rounds of testing at our home office (my bedroom).
Read more:
Whats Next?
After the launch of the duel experiences, MINI has continued to explore AR, creating two more projects to date based on our research and cookie data. The advertisements themselves were trend-setting as more car companies began developing AR experiences for customers on social media.
