Pink Gin Augmented Reality
This project was sadly never completed. It was built to promote a popular brand of Pink Gin, building off the fantastic label design produced by Elmwood. The label depicted a magical landscape that begged to be explored further and my aim was to do this through Augmented Reality (AR). The app allowed users to explore a 3D version of the label through their phone or tablet. The hilltop landscape had its own schedule, people went about their days, animals scurried about and the sun rose and set over the course of about three minutes.
The user could interact with almost everything in some way, simply by tapping on what they saw. Some objects contained hidden cocktail recipes, snippets of history about the distillery, Spotify playlists and even coupon codes.
I built the experience loosely around the concept of a shoe-box diorama brought to life and encouraged the user to get as close as possible when exploring the hilltop village. Sound cues were used to lead the user to areas they might not have noticed and it was intended to be difficult for a user to find everything in their first visit. Some animals only appeared at night, others would come and go several times throughout the day. Other objects formed small puzzles that needed to be completed to unlock recipes, but this was never spelled out to the user overtly. Exploration was key to the experience and hints were only provided sparingly.
Translating a two dimensional, illustrative style to 3d can be difficult and some experimentation was needed to get the balance right. The end result was faithful to the designer’s intent and allowed for great flexibility. Some hurdles, such as lighting, required some creative thinking to overcome but I was very happy with the end result, as well as some of the experimental effects that were not yet added to the working version of the project.
The animations were a mixture of bought assets, in-house produced motion capture and hand animated movements.
While I was sad that this project couldn’t be finished, it taught me a great many things about project management and pre-production especially. Had it been completed, I’m confident that it would have been the most ambitious example of a promotional Augmented Reality app yet released.
