Mastercard’s Priceless.com provides Mastercard cardholders exclusive access to unforgettable experiences and valuable benefits. The program encourages cardholders to “Start Something Priceless” by participating in unique, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. To allow their cardholders to enjoy arts, culture, and travel from the comfort of their homes, and using the latest technology, Mastercard worked with the Miami Design District and ROSE to create an augmented reality 360-degree immersive tour of the Miami Design District’s most iconic artwork and architecture. The virtual trip also features extraordinary pieces from Craig Robins’ private collection, the entrepreneur, art collector, and CEO/president of Dacra, the real estate development company that owns The Miami Design District.
Using their mobile device, Mastercard cardholders can view seven rotating orbs, each representing and depicting one of the pieces from the Miami Design District’s unmatched art collection via their AR-enabled camera. These orbs act as both the main menu for the experience and an interactive art piece that nods to the Mastercard logo. Once an orb is selected, users are transported to the district itself to experience a 360-interactive view of the selected artwork. The collection includes Interdimensional Portal by Criola, Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome, John Baldessari’s Fun Mural (Part 1), Wall Drawing #1138 by Sol LeWitt, Virgil Abloh’s Dollar a Gallon III, Standing Julian by Urs Fischer, and Jana Euler’s Two Brides.
Users can learn about each piece through audio and written descriptions inside each portal. Users walk around these objects by tapping or walking toward designated hotspots. At the same time, users can tap nested portal doors to move to the next piece of art from within their current portal, allowing for a linear tour of the artists’ work. Users can also select to move using a menu of all the works.
To support 40 high-resolution images in the experience, one for each hotspot, without causing long buffering times between portals or hotspots, we intentionally wrote a custom router that preloaded pages so media would be fully loaded on consecutive pages before they needed to be shown to the user.
For participants, the ability to walk around the 360 spaces provides a greater sense of immersion and mimics how they would have experienced the art in person. The ability to tap hotspots to move makes the experience accessible for those who are less mobile or lack the space to walk.
This campaign, while ongoing, has been considered successful for its deep user engagement. In the first 6 weeks of the campaign, the experience saw an average engagement time of 1 min 38 sec, with spikes as high as 14 min. On average, users explored 6 hotspots, with 3 art pieces explored on average per session, 26% of users returned to the AR experience again.
