Unboxing a brand new product is one of the most exciting experiences for customers – so much that product unboxing videos are among the most popular on YouTube. Producers know how to make this experience memorable by designing attractive packaging materials that enhance the look and feel of the product itself. But now things have gone one step further: adidas Originals had Rose Digital, a minority-owned technology consulting firm, and Annex88, a digital led company, create the first web-based augmented reality unboxing experience for their upcoming product.
Deerupt: Discovering a New Footwear Silhouette Through Augmented Reality
Pre-launching a product is always a challenging project. The product itself cannot be featured and it is difficult to create excitement around something people cannot see or touch. But Rose Digital and Annex88 have found the solution to this conundrum by using augmented reality and the power of influencers to create hype around an innovative adidas Originals product.
The pre-launch campaign for Deerupt started on March 9, when various influencers across the globe, including Kendall Jenner, received a custom-made shoe box designed by artist Daniel Arsham, a collaborator with the Adidas Originals brand. The box did not contain a pair of shoes, but a QR code marker which launched the augmented reality experience.
The Powerful Duo: Technology and Creativity
Deerupt augmented reality unboxing is an interactive experience developed with the most advanced AR tools: JSARToolkit and ThreeJS. These AR development platforms allow building high resolution and realistic AR visualization which can be accessed through any recent web browser.
The Deerupt unboxing is different from any previous AR experiences (such as Nike’s SNKRS or Onitsuka Tiger) mainly because it leverages open source computer vision libraries to deploy AR via the web, as opposed to using native app techniques which are limited because they require an app download, and snap lenses can often be limited to certain audiences. This approach not only widens the audience, but also shows that significant advances in the resource usage of computer vision and 3D visualization were leveraged.
The Founder and President of Rose Digital, Evan Rose, explained the importance of this step forward:
“The problem is, no headset on the market has true global reach. Even the arrival of ARKit and ARCore still puts an app download barrier between users and AR. What we created with Annex88 and adidas Originals breaks that barrier and puts AR into the hands of any person with a smartphone that has a modern web browser”, he stated in the official company blog post.
A Concept Inspired by the Upcoming Product Design
The look of the augmented reality unboxing experience was designed to give users a first feel of the product itself. The grid design, simple but disruptive, is a metaphor for the paradigm shift which the Deerupt model will create in the world of sports shoes.
The web based AR experience represents the way adidas Originals created its new product: no longer to meet the user halfway, but to completely adapt to their needs and requirements, to reach them in the environment where they feel most comfortable.
Speaking of the innovative augmented reality unboxing project, the Director of Global PR and Social Media at adidas Originals, Silvia Calligher said: “Up until now something like this could have only been done through a larger platform or app. We challenged ourselves to break this barrier and prove this could be done anywhere. Similar to how Deerupt conforms to its wearer, the experience conforms to the user.”
The adidas Originals Deerupt model is available in stores beginning March 22.
You can experience the augmented reality unboxing at virtualdeerupt.com.
