Nike enlists BUCK for 50th anniversary augmented reality experience

In celebration of Nike’s 50th anniversary, BUCK has partnered with the company’s Global Brand Experience team to bring its past, present, and future to life through a WebAR experience.

Powered by Zappar’s ZapWorks platform, this provides a portal into the Department of Nike Archives for visitors to Nike stores.

Through the virtual display of culturally significant artifacts from 11 stories, the experience encourages consumers to engage with Nike’s journey thus far.

Using their phone’s QR scanner, users can unlock artifacts.

Each of the 11 stories comprising the experience is self-contained within a single, virtual box that opens up to reveal various artifacts. Visitors can explore these through touch gestures and an app’s UI.

Accented with orange rims, each box was designed to mimic frosted glass, shrouding the artifact within in mystery, and encouraging users to engage with each story.

BUCK optimised 17 3D scanned assets from Nike’s archives in order to make them compatible for a real-time AR experience on a mobile device.

There are two key technologies working together for the experience: WebAR and Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM).

WebAR allows for lightweight AR experiences that don’t require users to download apps.

Everything happens within the web browser on any modern smartphone, creating a low-friction entry point to AR experiences.

SLAM allows objects to be spatially anchored in front of the user, so that people are able to walk around each artifact as though it were truly present.