Arcade to attend SXSW with UK Trade Mission

We are very excited to announce that Arcade will be returning to SXSW in 2023. Having debuted at the event in 2022 with our GPT3-driven interactive episodic series, Alone Together, we are heading back this year as part of the prestigious UK Trade Mission with the Department for Business and Trade.

As well as demo-ing some of our latest work, we will be part of the roundtable discussion, “How Creative Tech Deepens Place-Based Experience” on March 12 at UK House, the home for the best of British at SXSW.

Find out more about the Trade Mission and see what’s on at UK House hier.

You will also find the team at Niantic‘s SXSW HQ showcasing, amongst other things, our Lightship-driven game, Bazaar, designed to create new reasons for communities to engage with local bricks-and-mortar retail.

Bazaar was developed in partnership with Niantic, in response to their ‘Revitalising the High Street’ challenge as part of Digital Catapult’s recent Futurescope programme.

You can read more about Bazaar hier, but if you’re headed to Austin and want to see it in action (or possibly even collect some drops and claim a prize or two) then let us know!

The team will be in town from March 10-14, and hope to see as many of you there as we can at UK House, Niantic or just out and about at SXSW.

Livvy Hinkin and Jon Meggitt presenting Bazaar at Digital Catapult

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Bazaar demonstrator launched at Digital Catapult

The Arcade team was out in force at Digital Catapult last week, showcasing Bazaar at the culmination of Niantic’s wonderful Futurescope programme to over a hundred representatives from across the UK tech and innovation sectors.

Having been selected to partner with Niantic on the ‘Revitalising the High Street’ challenge, we had spent the past few months furiously innovating, putting the new Lightship ARDK to work in the creation of a new type of experience designed to give shoppers a new reason to return to local bricks-and-mortar retail environments.

The result was a prototype that we were very proud to show off to the assembled audience. The film below was played on stage, in which Arcade Co-Founders Jon Meggitt and Alex Book introduced the Bazaar concept and explained its potential impact.

Jon was joined on stage by Client Services Director Livvy Hinkin, who introduced Bazaar’s imagined storyworld in which there is more to High Streets than meets the eye.

In our game, they are special, important places, connected by an ancient magical network. But the magic has started to seep out into the world, and it is up to us to find and return the ‘drops’ to the shops that need their power. Find enough, and reunite them with the shops they came from, and the owners will show their gratitude in the form of free goods, discounts and other rewards.

Livvy Hinkin and Jon Meggitt take the stage at Digital Catapult

POSITIVE EARLY SIGNS

As part of the demonstrator we ran a test week, in which we set up controlled Bazaar testbeds across three high streets, including the recruitment of ten testers and three real world ‘drop shops’ in each location, tasked with putting Bazaar through its paces.

Livvy also took the audiences through the headlines from our research. The feedback was very encouraging, with hundreds of drops collected including the limited edition ‘timed’ drops that had testers racing to get there first. Interest in the full version, should it be developed and launched, was universal. But the most important metric was undoubtedly the impact it could have on people’s propensity to increase engagement with their local high streets, with 91% of testers reporting that they would be more likely to visit as a result of Bazaar.

You can read more about Bazaar in Digital Catapult’s comprehensive post hier.

A FABULOUS EXPERIENCE

But whatever the future holds for Bazaar, our involvement in the Niantic Futurescope programme was one of the most valuable and rewarding experiences we have had to date.

The chance to partner with Niantic, the shining light at the forefront of the ‘real world metaverse’ (to use the phrase they coined), was everything we hoped it would be and we cannot thank them enough for their support, encouragement and enthusiasm at every step of the journey.

One of our biggest learnings is that Niantic, through the Lightship platform, is set to drive the mass scale integration of AR into our everyday lives. We at Arcade are committed to being a part of that journey, and we cannot wait to where it takes us.

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BAZAAR, GET IN TOUCH

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