13 March 2020 Rosemary Kay

Football during Coronavirus – how we’re reaching out to fans…

Whilst football has been on hold, some football clubs haven’t forgotten them. And they are reaching out to us to find solutions, using AR and story and our creative avatars. We’re finding new ways to make football an exciting way to share experiences, even when you have to keep your social distance.

We’re delighted to be working with football clubs, who are keen to find ways to connect with their fans, in these disconnected times.

Before lockdown, we began working with a local club using Augmented Reality story quests, with scenes placed around the city of Manchester, to encourage fans to walk to the stadium. Because whilst this top club was keen that their players are the fittest in the business, they also want their fans to be healthy too. But all that has to be reassessed, during lockdown, so we are now thinking about how fans can be engaged, even if games are being played behind closed doors.

And we decided: if the fans can’t come to the stadium, then somehow we have to take the club to the fans….

What if, we thought, a football mascot could appear in your bedroom, in your garden, on your street….

So we began working on making an Augmented Reality avatar, a 3D, talking, moving mascot. It could appear anywhere you wanted to place it, accessed on your phone.

And that was just the start, as we began to develop an entire storyworld of other mascots, for fans to immerse themselves in.

Some really exciting concepts have come out of our team’s creative sessions, so watch this space, because football is about to become even more exciting in the new normal, where AR can take players to a new league of entertainment….

https://mascots.fandom.com/wiki/Moonchester_and_Moonbeam