Lewisville is experiencing a boom. Population is growing exponentially and more real estate development projects are popping up every day. The City needed to respond to this growth by engaging locals, visitors, and potential residents with Old Town, its historic downtown center and upcoming real estate projects. Here’s how Tonic3 helped Lewisville showcase the city’s past, present, and future through an innovative Augmented Reality interactive experience.

Business Problem

The City of Lewisville is a dynamic suburban community in Denton County, Texas, with a population of over 100,000 inhabitants. In recent years, the city took part in an accelerated development process, leading to a boost in the real estate sector. The city wanted to embrace the momentum and triggered a branding campaign to increase interest and engagement of citizens with city life, raising awareness to bring attention to development investments. 

Our challenge was to come up with an original marketing proposal and deliver an experience platform using Augmented Reality (AR) for people to be captivated by the city, no matter if they were walking down the street of Lewisville or at home. 

iOS & Android Mobile AR City Platform

What We Did

We built a top-notch iOS and Android mobile app specially customized for the city. The AR platform allows people to engage in a wide range of immersive experiences - at home or in Tour Guide mode - to visualize points of interest in the historic downtown to provide information and to showcase real estate developments yet to come. 

Through contactless tours, interactive public art exhibitions, and virtual event hosting, the Augmented Reality solution developed by Tonic3 provided the City of Lewisville of new and exciting user experience for local brands and businesses to connect with potential customers, as well as an educational tool for both city lovers and tourists to get to know more about the Old Town’s history and attractions. 

Targeted to different audiences, the mobile app provides three different options in its Tour Guide mode. The first serves as an interactive AR camera guide system that leads the end-user to a destination. 

It also comes with the ability to take a photo when you have the experience in view. This mode works by detecting plane surfaces and then displaying the corresponding experience, such as a 3D billboard at the preset location. In comparison, the second option is fueled by a single 3D rendered object (e.g. the exterior of a building or a 3D sculpture model) which allows the possibility of placement and also rotation.

It comprises custom digital breadcrumbs for each destination and audios for each tour point, as well as environmental ambient audio. 

The third alternative includes scene customization (with animation or badges, for example) and custom interactions placed on objects. The At Home mode - segmented in the same three audiences - additionally enables users to place an object at home or at any other location. There are more customization options such as audio, photo, and scene customization, depending upon the client's needs. 

Tonic3 and Old Town Lewisville Teams - UX Workshop

Crafting our AR development

To develop this flexible and innovative AR platform within 5 months, we gathered a team of UX designers, UX strategists, and Unity developers and conducted an in-depth process that included the following steps:

1. We determined the right approach for the experience between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The later implies virtual environments with digital constructs while the former involves information overlaid on the real world. In this case, we chose AR as it suited the purpose perfectly.  
2. We assessed what kind of technological capabilities were needed for the concretion of the project.  
3. We considered the technological needs as well as the requirements of the experience itself. 
4. We crafted concept designs to test the direction in 2D and 3D models. 
5. We built a prototype to validate the conceptual approach. 
6. We took into account all the findings and moved into the development of the product. 
7. We developed the iOS and Android mobile application with AR technology. 
8. We tested the experience extensively on a variety of the latest ARkit / Arcore capable iOS and Android GPS enabled devices.

During this process we used advanced knowledge and practices of UI design, Augmented Reality technology, Adobe XD, AR foundation, Unity prototyping, VR prototyping, and UX research, to devise a first-class AR experience product.  

Outcome

Tonic3 delivered an innovative AR platform that markets and creates unique experiences, either at home or at a particular geo-based location.

This project is a great example of our success with investment analysis of real estate developments, customer engagement in shops, showcasing historic points of interest, contactless tours around the city, public cultural interactive activities and even remote events and tours via the “At Home” modality. As a result, users can experience what the Old Town of Lewisville has to offer, from its streets or at a distance.

Is your business ready for Augmented Reality?

AR and VR Aren't Rocket Science Anymore. Advances in the field have made Immersive Tech affordable and available to more people. If you'd like to learn what products and brand experiences can be built through AR development, and what it takes to carry out an efficient development process, check out our AR services.

Not sure how AR/VR can impact your business? You know you need something but not quite sure what it is? Reach out to us and schedule a conversation - we’ll help you think through your goals.