We were asked by Honor Mobile to help them launch the 20 Pro. Instead of the usual press briefing followed by a bit of playing around with a handset they wanted to more pro-actively use the phone’s features to *do* something…so we suggested they should be only way to solve 20 x clues of a bespoke escape room.
Normally phones are completely banned for the duration of an escape game, so it was an interesting challenge to reverse this and build an experience around one – particularly one this shiny and with four different camera lenses to play with.
Initial planning sessions led to two other decisions that helped give the game direction:
- It was going to be set in a hotel room, meaning we wouldn’t need to build a full set and could use the hotel as a creative theme (plus providing a boardroom for the tech demos and hospitality)
- Participants were not going to be allowed to touch anything
From here we built the overall creative wrapper, the Experimental Detective Agency – a technological crime unit seeking to prove its value above traditional law enforcement.
http://www.giphy.com/gifs/ZdxffaSamF1kuxm3K5
The premise was that the EDA were going to get offered a first pass at the next serious crime to happen within the immediate vicinity…which then happens conveniently as the group of journalists finish their handset briefing / induction into the unit. Aliana Speer, a private detective had been murdered and her hotel room contains the evidence that she had been gathering against four villains who quickly become the prime suspects.
Key items of evidence included:
– Photographs of the suspects that Aliana had been developing in her bathroom turned dark room (utilising the low-light camera)
– Transcripts of conversations monitored by Aliana in different languages (via the AR translate function)
– Items of fruit that may have contained the fruit fibres found with the poison in the victim’s stomach (using the AR object recognition function & calculating the precise amount of fibre in each)
– A close-up photo of the imprint of a blunt object to the victim’s head (to be matched to one of several heavy objects in the room, using the maco camera to identify the right pattern)
– An electric fan (that had to be filmed using the slowmo function to reveal a hidden message, directing them to…)
– A bicycle tied to a signpost six floors down (which needed to be viewed through the 3x telephoto lens)
– Scraps of paper with numbers written on them (to be pieced together to form a phone number, that it turned out belonged to the hotel’s head of security… who you could then phone and speak to for some contextual information from the CCTV)
After forty minutes of puzzle solving the detective from Scotland Yard would then arrive and ask them to make a case against their chosen suspect(s), supporting it with evidence captured on their phones.
This allowed everyone to feel clever enough to pinpoint at least one of the correct murderers, some to show off by laying out every but of evidence and what it pointed to and then a softer win / lose scenario than a typical escape game with the detective deciding whether or not to give more cases to the EDA to work on.
We were slightly worried that our media audience were going to be coming into the experience cold (having been primed for a more standard product launch), but the surprise experience seemed to go down very well. This was helped along by the feel and functionality of the venue – the M by Montcalm, which is a beautifully sleek building inside and out – along with some zealous over-ordering from their catering team. And most importantly some brilliant creatives, actors and crew…