This NFL season has seen its fair share of pro teams embracing augmented reality face painting to provide fans a tech-friendly way to express their passion, but the trend actually started three seasons ago on the collegiate level.
Now, Nissan, which in 2015 launched its Die Hard Fan App complete with the AR face painting feature featuring designs for 100 colleges and universities nationwide, is expanding the capability of the social media-friendly element to use Facebook’s Camera Effects.
LSU Tigers and Nissan are bringing AR Facepainting to Facebook.MORE: https://www.sporttechie.com/nissan-die-hard-ar-face-painting-expands-to-facebook-camera-effects/
Posted by SportTechie on Friday, November 3, 2017
The move is likely to help Nissan reach even greater numbers of college football fans; the original partnership deal in 2015 is, the company claimed at the time, the “widest-reaching sponsorship in the history of collegiate sports.”
“Nissan’s Die Hard Fan App has been a rousing success in the past two seasons, and this year, we wanted to take it a step further—and what better way to do that than via a groundbreaking collaboration with social media giant Facebook?” Jeremy Tucker, Nissan North America’s vice president of media marketing and communications, said in a statement.
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Nissan’s augmented reality face painting app works with Facebook’s Camera Effects — effectively a design — by letting fans view and apply the app’s numerous face paint designs through Facebook rather than having to go through the Die Hard Fan app every time. Nissan partnered with Facebook and digital design firm Critical Mass to make the Facebook option possible, according to the announcement. Presumably, fans who use Facebook to apply the AR face paint will be able to more quickly upload the pictures to the social media platform that reaches two billion people.
According to Nissan’s announcement, since the AR face paint launched in 2015, 42 million designs have been applied, 3.6 million pictures and videos have been taken, and 1.5 million of those pictures and videos have been shared on social media. The free DieHard Fan app has been downloaded 630,000 times.
“As one of the first brands to leverage Facebook’s new Camera Effects, Nissan will now be able to reach and engage with college football fans faster and easier than ever before. This is yet another creative way to get fans excited and involved with Nissan and our College 100 Sponsorship,” Tucker said in statement.
Facebook enabling augmented reality face paint was also recently used by FIFA during the Confederations Cup.
To complement the anticipated hype around the expanded capabilities of AR face paint, Nissan also introduced a Facebook messenger bot for college football trivia and a contest for fans to virtually design a Nissan Titan — with the opportunity to win the truck model in their favorite team’s colors.