It has become fairly common among companies and brands to attempt to engage with audiences by using VR and AR. Sports teams have been no different, with AR experiences being offered to fans across the world.
Though it is primarily US sports teams producing these experiences, isn’t just American companies that have been involved in their creation. UK-based VR and AR content company Zappar has been working with two National Football League (NFL) teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the Minnesota Vikings.
The partnership with the 49ers allows fans to view AR experiences by using souvenir cups. With one of these cups, fans just need to open up the team’s official app to see some of the team’s most famous moments. With the Vikings, Zappar created an AR message which could be unlocked using the gameday magazine.
Sport Techie spoke to Max Dawes, Partnerships & Marketing Director at Zappar, where he said: “With the Vikings it was their awesome Executive Director of Digital Media & Innovation, Scott Kegley who reached out to us. The 49ers we met via Adept who are a really innovative sports focused fan engagement platform and who we now have a great partnership with. They have driven app downloads and truckloads of engagement. They have begun to build up a new media channel for these teams and they have added value to physical products.”
Asked how Zappar differs from its competitors in the AR sector, Dawes said: “Our mission as a business has always been to democratise AR and provide the least friction between a brand and their end user to deliver valuable and value-added experiences to drive affirmative actions. Typical AR and VR experiences in sport tend to be for much smaller audiences, VIPs, or experiential marketing stunts which reach a few thousand people. In addition they tend to rely on very expensive hardware which is mostly unattainable for most fans. We have built our platform to work for the least powerful devices up as opposed to the most expensive devices down.”
Source: VR Focus