Havas Mango: Summer Metaverse Internship
A Fintech experience
Project Overview
Havas MANGO was a newly established branch of Havas Health & YOU, created to focus specifically on health and wellness branding.
As a Metaverse Intern, I explored how emerging virtual technologies could deliver creative solutions for pharmaceutical and wellness clients while providing strategic insights to internal teams.
I joined this internship to further explore my interest in the growing role of the metaverse within the healthcare and marketing industries.
From June to August, I worked on Project “Eclipse” and, separately, developed an AR pitch mockup that was selected to be presented to the team’s client, Nuun.
ROLE
Metaverse Designer
AR Designer
PERIOD
8 weeks
JUN-AUG 2022
TASTE THE NUUNIVERSE
Advocating for Nestle's sports drink brand, Nuun.
Each of the interns was to each pitch an idea in 5 days that uses the power of Augmented Reality (AR), emphasizing the strengths of the technology and its effectiveness to the target users who are young student athletes.
TOPIC RESEARCH
Selling Points
Nuun is the first sports drink that contains only 1gram of sugar
A very high number of young athletes drink sugary sports drinks
Teens drink sports drinks without knowing the health consequences
Teens drink sports drinks without knowing the health consequences
Target User Data
Recent data in suggests that 72% of teens are active on Instagram, posting pictures and videos on their feed and stories. There are 1.393 billion active users on Instagram in 2022.Instagram is known for its user-friendly interface and high accessibility for media content creation than its competitive apps like TikTok.
VISUALIZATION
Ideation
After a live brainstorming-session, we voted for seven to eight ideas that we thought was strong and effective. My AR Nuun filter was selected as one of the highly-voted ideas so it progressed onto the next step which was prototype visualization. I used Adobe Illustrator to visualize the interface with the AR Nuun bottle and presented it to the team.
Visualization Image
Persuasive Design Methods
- Using obfuscation to draw attention to our wanted target users.
- The AR filter is fun and casual; It motivates a user to play around for a bit. This can suggest a natural interest about the brand to the user.
Features
- Users should be able to explore different looks of the Nuun bottle by swiping to different options within the filter - the looks change in color and text.
- Users can take pictures/videos with the filter and share it with their friends and followers - allows high accessibility and exposure for brand awareness.
The team decided to bring this idea to the final pitch deck. After some refinement of the original idea, we re-named the idea to 'Taste the Nuuniverse' with a meaning to give a taste of Nuun to the users and a taste of the metaverse for our client.
One of the major decisions was despite having 5 days until the pitch presentation, I decided to include a full experience of the prototype to show to the client by creating a real, AR mockup. I used Meta's Spark AR since the software is user-friendly and accessible for easy-publicizing if the idea gets selected by the client.
INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPING
Maya / Meta AR Spark Studio
I modeled the bottle and UV-mapped the downloaded images of Nuun's wrapping papers to create a realistic look of the actual tablet bottle. Then I brought over the model to Spark AR to continue creating the filter.
During the development phase, I worked with the Creative Director and the Design Director on the slogans that appear on top of each Nuun bottle flavor as 3D texts and the graphical user interface for interaction.
Here is the collaborative look of the filter shown below.
Trial v1
Trial v2 - Undulation effect
Trial v12...Design iteration
FINAL
Pitch Day with Nestle
Although I could not get any screenshots of the pitch presentation, it was recognized as successful by our Mango team and the fellow intern mates. It was truly an invaluable experience as an intern to be trusted to speak about a self-proposed idea in front of real-life clients and the team.
Alongside from the ideation to development of the mockup, what truly gave me a valuable career experience was the interpersonal skills that I learned throughout the duration of the project. There was so much communication between me and the team, and I saw the importance of communication being put into action. This was a piece of the internship that really helped me feel grow professionally. I will probably mention it again later, but it felt great to see myself enjoy the active communication happening within the team.
ECLIPSE
A SOCIAL HEALTH HUB IN VR?
Alongside getting to meet Mango's clients and connecting with individuals in Havas Health&YOU, there was a larger, overarching part of the internship which was the Metaverse Individual Project.
Each of us would choose a currently existing metaverse platform to explore its features, build and publish a world there that's in association with Mango's direction as a wellness digital agency, and finally present the worlds to the entire team towards the end of the internship.
Spatial io. 2022
My choice of platform was Spatial.io, which is a metaverse platform that I've been personally interested in since 2019.
Spatial.io initially emphasized itself as a powerful virtual meeting platform. Fast-forwarding to the year 2022, Spatial.io has grown into a Web3 social hub with advanced avatars. Spatial.io worlds are accessible on computers, mobile, and in VR.
VISUALIZING
MODELING & DESIGN
The space was visualized in Maya and Blender, then it was eventually imported into Unity to become compatible with the Spatial World Creator Requirements.
Main HUB
The Mango team gathered at Eclipse using the Oculus, some using Mac and PC. I had a couple of friends visit using their phones to experience the space and ask me questions about the goal of the space.
Presentation Day
Portal - Can’t Sleep?
ECLIPSE
My Thoughts
Eclipse was a project that allowed me to earn more insights about the metaverse, about Spatial as a metaverse and Web3 source, and most importantly how the audience is making use out of the platform. To me, Spatial acted as an easy channel to casually reach out and talk to creators in diverse fields such as music performance, jewelry, real-estate, art, NFT arts, etc. What was interesting about them was that they all had the same interests of utilizing the metaverse to further their market in a fun and interactive way.
Another interesting aspect of Spatial was this : Being represented as a 3D avatar seems to give you the flexibility to do more than who you are or your occupation. I saw a lot of these creators holding either sponsored (in collaboration with the Spatial team) or free seminars or classes in their worlds, or even hosting (or hosting their own virtual rooms) live DJ parties regardless of their "real-life" occupations. I attended one about mental wellness held by DJ Mackey, invited through another creator (who owns a jewelry store in real-life) that I met earlier, and a 3D modeling class held by Michael Firestone, a famous world-builder guru on Spatial.
Me in a white hoodie joining in on DJ Mackey's talk on mental wellness.
The initial impression that I got wasn't as something reflective as what I wrote above. When you're online, you're likely to be more busy voice-chatting different people, waving at their avatars to see if they wave back, walk around some crazily-built 3D rooms (or personalized default rooms), and join parties to see some NFTs hanging on the walls. It's the aftermath of seeing and experiencing all of these that really help me realize the views, the expectations, and the growth of these platforms. Eclipse is definitely cool, but it's hard to ignore the side experiences that really got me seeing and thinking.
Feel free to chat me about this project!
Loved the intern swags!!
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