"Take on the Machine" Q&A

With the success of their "Take on the Machine" campaign for Scion, SF agency ATTIK (and their production partner North Kingdom) have raised the digital bar when it comes to Augmented Reality games. Fresh off their FWA Site of the Day award, we got a chance to ask a few questions of Jacob Ford, ATTIK's Interactive Creative Director, and Pär Hultgren, Project Manager for North Kingdom.

Jacob, can you give us a quick overview on this campaign, and discuss how the Augmented Reality game fits in?

This campaign was conceived by ATTIK's Simon Needham, Ron Lim, Greg Coffin and Mike Brenner, who looked very closely at the concept of "taking on the machine." Considering everything that might mean to members of our young, predominantly male target audience, we see the Scion tC giving drivers the ability to take on the machine, and we wanted to immerse people in the world we've created, where everything is kind of bearing down on you and threatening to swallow you up... and allow them to avoid those obstacles, and make it through to the other side. With the campaign idea fully developed, I got involved in discussing different venues; among those, we wanted a piece of the campaign that would be more tangible.

When the idea for an Augmented Reality Game came up, we felt it was a very cool idea, but we wanted to create something more cinematic than any AR game we've ever seen, and to address that goal of making the campaign more tangible, we wanted to allow players to steer the car. We pitched it in, and our clients really liked it. We then reached out to North Kingdom due to the fact that they have tons of experience, as well as the ability to take the game to the next level. We feel they did an amazing job on it, delivering the cinematic approach we hoped for as well as the interactivity.

Using an AR marker from our Spectacular print ad, or a marker you print out at home or get from a dealer, you can use it as the steering wheel for the tC in this game. Almost like the Wii, it brings you more into the game; we've seen people demoing this, where they lean and react. That's exactly what we wanted to offer in this experience.

Playability, visual quality, and story were the priorities for us.

We feel this is a really great project, and it represents the direction ATTIK is now moving in, where broad cooperation across disciplines is a primary focus. As a creative group, the way ATTIK thinks is, first, come up with the best idea, and then figure out how that's applied in any given medium. It's all about working with our partners to find the best use of technology to involve the audience and connect with them.

Pär what did North Kingdom do on this project?

We designed a game plan, made a race track, built a 3D city, and gave the AR site its own look within the frames of the main site. Finally we programmed, tested, tweaked and optimized the game to what is is today.

What was the biggest challenge your team faced on this project, and how was that addressed?

To, within the existing frames of Flash, give the game a decent speed and frame rate. The biggest challenges were in prioritizing design versus speed, and giving the game attributes that make it addictive.

What else do you feel it's important for people to know about this project?

It was actually quite an easy but time-consuming journey in terms of adopting the style and feeling ATTIK had created. ATTIK did a great job there, so it was always clear for us what to do, which gave us the opportunity to fully focus on the game.

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Credits:
Client: Scion
Creative Agency: ATTIK
Executive Creative Director: Simon Needham
Creative Director: Ron Lim
Senior Writer: Mike Brenner
Senior Art Director: Greg Coffin
Interactive Creative Director: Jacob Ford
Interactive Art Director: Jeff Fang
Interactive Producer: Maribel Arellano
Game Design: North Kingdom
3D Graphics: Filterfilm
Music: Face the Music
Sound Design: Audio Alliance
Backend Programming: Dataduktus