Football in Augmented Reality

Football in China is huge, growing at a phenomenal rate, with 140 stadiums currently in development, and already home to the world’s largest football school. Over the next decade, the Chinese Government will erect 50,000 more schools. They hope that by 2020 more than 50,000,000 Chinese citizens will play football regularly, with 30,000,000 of those set to be children. Future Lions is part of this focus.

The problem is not in getting the nation interested in football, they have the passion without a doubt. Where the problem does lie, though, is in conveying the cultural roots and heritage of the sport over a vast country in a relatively short timescale.

China is embracing this concept and as part of this initiative is developing methods of cultural exchange including the installation of football museums in a number of major cities.

The Future Lions Concept

The first Museum which opened in Shantou in Jan 2017 features 50 large-scale framed prints of sports legends and key moments from across the years. They include Bobby Moore being held aloft in the England’s 1966 World cup win, George Best; the world’s first football superstar arriving at Manchester training grounds and Vinnie Jones in the infamous grab of Paul Gascoigne.

AR Media’s solution was to design and produce an app to further augment the prints by utilising image recognition.

Simply pointing a device at an image within the exhibition, visitors can now access a fully translated audible backstory on each image with specific attention being paid to the cultural significance of the sporting moment.

In addition to the information being delivered to the visitor, we are also able to track and harvest a variety of analytics relating to the engagement and usage of the app.

Future Lions Measurements

This allows us to measure the overall experience of an estimated one million visitors in the first year, including the volume of traffic, location of use as well as the duration of use and the dwell time within certain assets.

Use of this data will allow the enhancement of the experience moving forward but will also allow us to refine and better understand the campaign as a whole.