The Portuguese app marketplace Aptoide approached CODON to look for a campaign that would help them promote their marketplace during Telecom 2016. What we came up with was a campaign that engaged the audience in an exciting way, starting from when they entered the exhibition area and ending at Aptoide’s booth.

The idea revolved around the design and develop of a location-based AR game. By engaging with the game, users could find multiple Aptoide logos placed in different locations in the exhibition area with the last logo placed in Aptoide’s booth.

By seeing each of the logos through the phone’s camera, the user interacted with the logo using AR objects and receive points. The scoring system was based on the duration it took the user to reach each of the locations. In the end when the user arrived at the booth, the score was transferred via a custom NFC system and was fed to a realtime data viz installation. At the end of each day, a winner was announced based on the scores and was awarded with a gift.

The realtime data visualization section consisted of a multi-display installation that exhibited a virtual network made of interconnected nodes with each node representing a user who had experienced the campaign. When a user submitted his/her score to the system, a new node would appear in the network. With its size related to the amount of the user’s score, the node would connect to its neighbour nodes with a part of the user’s phone number hanging above it.

To make the user experience consistent and attractive from the start until the end, we also came up with an idea for the final gift that the winner would receive. Aptoide had considered to have a mobile phone as the prize so we proposed to have a custom-designed limited-edition object accompany the phone. A mobile stand was designed to fit the specific phone model and was furnished with Aptoide’s logo. During each day the stand was fabricated using an on-site 3D printer and was presented to the winner.

The work utilized a multitude of concepts and technologies to achieve its goal. For each section the necessary software was developed natively using C++ to achieve the most efficient and optimal performance possible.