Project Capri - Idea of Business

Piero Chianese
Jun 23, 2022
3 min read

Occupation/Position held

Backend, Game Designer, Game Developer

We started developing our project as a starting point, a pilot, of an idea of business, trying to figure out how we could get in a spot in the market. We researched on the waiting times and the pub experience, coming up with the awareness that we had to do a tailoring work.

We came up with a little funny acronym, Capri. In our case, Capri stands for Come At Pub Relying on Imagination. And specifically, it’s exactly in pubs that this waiting issue intensifies. Apparently, in fact, Pub and bar-goers are only willing to wait 8 minutes for a drink and 12 minutes for food before leaving to go elsewhere, and The average wait per party is 23 minutes, but nearly a third of all parties are waiting more than 30 and finally only 8% wait longer than 40. After finding this data we decided to start interviewing both publicans and people that regularly go to pubs in order to understand their struggles and gains to create our solution concept which is to help our clients improve the experience they offer to their customers through a tailor-made product. Breaking down this we consequentially get our value proposition and business model. Our customers are, of course, the entrepreneurs, who could eventually become partners, alongside the actual users of our end-products. Our earnings are gonna come from both the entrepreneurs’ fees and in-app advertising.

We partnered with a pub in Caserta, Ruin, where we tried to put all our research into practice and Unsolved Ruins was born.

The app is composed basically of paths where alternating riddles, mini-games and scenes in AR.

Riddles

Riddles are probably the slightly more complex part of the path. We have inserted a significant number of riddles that are presented randomly. The user will have to solve the riddle to continue is adventure through the pub. On the other hand, the fact that they are rather complex riddles, pushes the user to collaborate with his friends, creating an atmosphere of teamwork that entertains people during the night out. What if they’re too hard? Don’t worry! in the event that even more heads fail to solve the puzzle, the user will have the opportunity to read a clue after a few seconds from the appearance of the riddle. In this way the user will not be annoyed by spending too much time on a single step.

Minigame

In our project, we included a series of mini-games to make the experience more challenging. The games we developed are made with SpriteKit, a framework that we also explored in previous projects and the experience we made with it allowed us to use an iPhone feature for two of them to make the gameplay more engaging: the accelerometer. In games, we have chosen mechanics that users are familiar with, such as memory because we think that in this project games have to be both challenging but also easy to understand; in terms of design, assets follow the style of the pub. You can also really “feel” the game in your hands, thanks to the haptic feedback and these two features make you immerse in the pub atmosphere.

AR scenes

Probably the most fun and innovative part of the experience for the user is the one with the AR scenes. The integration of this technology has been one of the most challenging things for us.

Within the path, the user will have the opportunity to frame paintings or walls to receive clues that will allow him to continue the experience. We tried to make the AR scene as simple as possible

Incorporating buttons that if pressed give small hints to the user to indicate the next step. In addition there is also the possibility to repeat the animations whenever you want.

As a pilot project we chose a pub, so we were faced with another problem: ambient light. Usually in pubs there are dim lights, enemies of the AR. Focused on the idea we decided to fix this problem by inserting a light management algorithm in AR that in case of low light turns on the flash automatically.

We are very satisfied of our work.

We were able to integrate technologies such as voice recognition linked to some puzzles and video playback on objects within the scenes. This is amazing!

I believe that this technology, if used in the right way, has great potential!

For this reason we will continue to explore this frame work!

In conclusion

This app is already available on the store and playable entirely for Ruin customers. We also created a small playable demo in Apple Academy called Unsolved Kitchen (TestFlight here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Fr0haNFL, soon i share here the assett to play even at home) to make it clear how scalable this project is!

I believe that this idea is applicable and replicable in pubs, museums, art galleries and many others, and there are already other ideas of future development.