SONY XPERIA™
Face Off
Like many new smartphones, the Sony Xperia™ T came with built-in NFC, allowing picture and music transfer from devices through what Sony called ‘One-touch sharing’ – as simple as bringing two phones together.
Sony and its agency, Iris, wanted to showcase this feature to its core audience of ‘edge youth’. The problem was how to let people without a Sony Xperia experience One-touch sharing.
The answer was an interactive experience I helped develop and realise with an amazingly talented team at B-Reel, allowing people both online and at a live event to share their Facebook profile pictures between smartphones in the most exciting and entertaining way possible – a real world, multiplayer game.
Intro video
How it worked
The game pitted up to 8 users against each other, driving purpose-built remote controlled roadsters with Xperia™ T handsets embedded in the car’s ‘shell’ (the bit that sits on top of the chassis).
Using Facebook Connect to personalise your car with your profile picture, the aim was to share your picture with as many static Xperia handsets as you could, in two minutes. The more you shared, the more you scored, and you could win instant spot prizes featuring a range of Sony products if you were lucky enough.
The team I lead worked closely with Iris to develop the arena, and built the online microsite and all the technical development to ensure the phones on the cars and phones on the track connected with each other. This logic was handled by an Arduino Mega, used to hack the original controllers, allowing us to let users drive the cars from either the web or a native Android app for users on-site.
All the action was streamed live online by an overhead camera, and there are two other live streams of the arena and venue feeding video in realtime.
This campaign was ultimately a live online event, a physical experience, a game, a product demo and more. It was unique to Sony Xperia and perfectly aligned to its core values of imagination, magic and wonder.