If only we’d thought of a virtual Easter Egg Hunt
Posted by Richard Pentin on April 11, 2009
To coincide with Easter, the London agency W + K have launched an intriguing online Easter Egg Hunt which incorporates Microsoft’s latest photosynth technology.
What is Photosynth exactly?
Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs:
- the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a collection of flat photographs
- the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.
It examines images for similarities and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, the photos are then mapped together to create a 3D canvas where you can navigate around to view each independent photo.
Virtual Easter Egg Hunt
What W + K have ingeniously done is take numerous photographs of their office space to create a virtual environment and invited people to navigate around the room to find 6 hidden Easter Eggs. The eggs are numbered and reveal a telephone number when put into the correct sequence. The first to phone the number will receive a pair of customised Nike Dunks. So if you need a new pair of trainers, have a go here!
It’s an original way of utilising this new technology and demonstrates how it can be applied in an interactive way to engage consumers, whether that’s on a promotional campaign level or perhaps for 360 degree product demonstrations.
But before we get too carried away…
Unfortunately there are certain limitations with photosynth to iron out before it can fully enter the mainstream.
- Software installation: You have to download the software in order to run the programme which, whilst easy to do, adds another barrier to consumer participation
- Computer power: You need a fairly hefty computer to run this software
- Mac compatibility: Works well on PCs but only Intel Macs are compatible.
Even so, hats off to W + K for pushing the boundaries and being one of the first to demonstrate its potential as a creative marketing tool.
