In April, Motorola announced a multi-year partnership with the San Diego Padres, an agreement that will bring the Moto logo to the team’s jerseys beginning in 2023 and Motorola will bring interactive technology displays and product integrations to the Padres Hall of Fame. I’m a huge fan and season ticket holder for the San Diego Padres, so I was eager to see how the Motorola-Padres partnership would unfold.
The Padres are no strangers to cutting-edge technology – they have a longstanding technology partnership with Qualcomm, and also recently partnered with Boingo to deploy a private 5G network in Gallagher Square to improve mobile POS transactions by using Wi-Fi (and all its potential for interference).
Ahead of a recent regularly scheduled game earlier this month, I had the opportunity to experience “Play Like A Padre,” part of Motorola’s Hall of Fame facelift and the first Snapdragon Spaces AR game ever released to the public. Let’s take a closer look.
AR game Play Like a Padre runs on four Motorola Edge+ phones; Two of them run the AR game on the screen while the other two run it in AR using the Lenovo ThinkReality A3 headset. The Moto Edge+ and ThinkReality A3 make an excellent combination, both powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, giving people the opportunity to try an AR headset while strengthening the Moto brand. If you still want to participate without a headset, you can use the touchscreen experience. The Moto Edge+ is Motorola’s flagship phone, so it’s not surprising that Lenovo paired it with the ThinkReality A3 for this showcase to enable Snapdragon Spaces. However, Motorola and Lenovo have worked closely to ensure the ThinkReality A3 is compatible with as many Motorola devices as possible, and the list keeps growing. Motorola is also offering fans a chance to win a brand new Edge+ phone by posting a photo of the AR experience with the hashtag #HelloPadres – a proven way to engage.
The game was developed by Rock Paper Reality on the Qualcomm Snapdragon Spaces XR developer platform and supports up to four simultaneous players in the same game. Surprisingly, my experience was seamless despite being on public Wi-Fi in a packed 42,656-seat stadium. Being the highly competitive person that I am, when Rock Paper Reality CTO Preston Platt shared his high score with me, I immediately went into hyper-competitive mode and attempted to beat it. The game was simple – you aim by moving your head and shoot using the phone’s touchscreen as a controller. Even though I beat my friend who was with me at the game that day, I still couldn’t match Preston’s high score. Looking back on it now, I can’t tell you how long the game took because I got so wrapped up in the AR itself. In my conversation with Platt, he noted how easy it was to build the experience using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces. He also praised the platform’s cross-platform nature and how effortless it was to enable a high-quality cross-device experience for smartphone and AR users.
Wrap up
The best thing about the Lenovo ThinkReality A3 headset, in my opinion, is how easy it is to put on and take off. It still ends up looking like glasses, which I think could potentially make it less intimidating for AR newbies to pick up and try them out. The location of the experience is great too – fans go to the Hall of Fame to deepen their relationship with the Padres, and the Motorola AR game is a novel and effective way to do that. Previously, the Padres had a partnership with HP that allowed kids to compete in a home run derby in VR. That experience eventually found its way into the breaks between innings. Maybe someday we’ll see Play Like a Padre do the same.
Note: Moor Insights & Strategy writers and editors may have contributed to this article.
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