Inspiration
We have all stood in line at a store waiting for the next available attendant. It's frustrating, it's boring. We plan to change that with the introduction of Brick Breaker by Metro, an AR experience designed to make the wait in your local Metro store fun and rewarding.
What it does
Brick Breaker is an augmented reality game run through any modern smartphone. With a simple scan of a poster, any customer can play for fun or for rewards. Each time a customer scans into the game they accrue loyalty points which eventually lead to prizes and discounts. Additionally, by beating other high scores players can earn cash rewards towards their bills and even become the Store Champion. Store Champions will have their name displayed on the top of the high scores for each location.
Feasibility
One of our top priorities was creating a product that is feasible to roll out to customers today. With this in mind, we choose our software stack carefully to ensure the app would run on any modern smartphone. Brick Breaker is incredibly cheap and easy to implement across Metro stores. All the game takes to implement is integration into the Metro app of the already completed game and for posters to be printed.
Business Value
In the world of contractless service providers, one bad interaction can lose a customer. Due to the nature of monthly payments, a customer can cancel at a month's notice and move on to another service. Recognizing this issue, we decided we would create a way to maintain customer happiness during times of increased wait lines at stores. With the addition of a game to play, which provides a distraction as well as possibilities for prizes, customers will be much less likely to be unhappy with their wait at a store.
In addition to stores, the campaign can be extended to ads placed where people will be waiting for long periods of time such as bus stops and lines at amusement parks. In these types of locations, potential customers will be sitting around looking for something to do and will likely interact with the game and ad increasing awareness and customer satisfaction.
How we built it
Cross-Platform Mobile Application The mobile app was built using the Unity game engine with the help of the vuforia framework. We choose Vuforia because it has the ability to run on top of ARKit and ARCore supporting both iOS/Android.
Heroku Hosted Node.js Server The high score and loyalty tracking features of the website are stored in a MongoDB Atlas database run using a Node.js server on Heroku. To bring all of these different frameworks together we use RESTful API calls to and from the phone application and the webserver. These calls pull the high scores each time a user opens the game and posts a new score any time a user finishes a game. The frameworks work very well together allowing for a quick and seamless flow of data behind the scenes.
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