The holiday season is in full swing, and brands around the world are spreading joy and cheer with innovative WebAR experiences powered by 8th Wall. Let's take a look at some enchanting campaigns that are bringing the holiday spirit to life.

The holiday season, with its festive lights, magic tales, and cozy gatherings, is the perfect time for brands, developers, and agencies to think outside of the giftbox and weave the magic of WebAR with reality. 

This year, 8th Wall introduced powerful new tools and updates to our platform that enable developers to make the holidays even more magical by creating immersive, imaginative interactions. From transforming the skies to placing WebAR in the palm of your hand, there's a whole new dimension of interaction and creativity you can unleash. To celebrate the season, we’ve crafted a few examples of how you can make the holiday season unforgettable using the tools we released this year. Let’s dive into how you can make this holiday season unforgettable. 

Ask Santa Anything: Sky Effects + World Tracking with Inworld AI 
We kicked off the year with the announcement that Sky Effects and World Tracking can now be integrated to transform the entire world into a canvas for AR, a first in the industry. Use these two fields together, developers no longer have to choose between creating something in the sky or on a surface. 

Imagine a Holiday experience where the sky and world before the user come alive with holiday magic. Now, combine it with the new GenAI Modules to create an experience with interactive elements that transform  in response to user interaction. By merging these two technologies, developers can create a personalized experience that speaks to each user. 

Halloween isn’t just a night for kids to collect candy — it’s a season where imagination runs wild and where the boundaries of reality blur. It’s just the right season for developers, brands, and agencies to create WebAR experiences that engage audiences in immersive, interactive ways that traditional marketing can’t match. 

This year, take your Halloween campaigns to new heights with 8th Wall's suite of groundbreaking tools, including all-new features like Sky Effects and World Tracking, enhanced Face Effects, Shared AR, Hand Tracking, and our latest GenAI Modules. 

From skies adorned with witches flying to faces morphed into ghouls and hands that cast eerie spells, let's explore a few ideas on how developers, brands, and agencies can use these powerful new features to craft bewitching experiences that linger in the minds of audiences long past the holiday.

Combine Sky Effects and World Tracking with GenAI Modules to bring spooky campfire tales to life
Are you afraid of the dark? With WebAR, developers can create experiences that bring this question to life and harken back to the spooky ghost stories and terrifying tales around the campfire. 

Using our new GenAI Modules powered by OpenAI and Inworld AI, developers can let audiences craft their own haunting tales on the spot. As the story comes to life, Sky Effects and World Tracking can bring the spooky elements to another life by having the sky dynamically change to match the campfire story or by placing spooky elements in the scene. 

Over the last few years, brands have relied on 8th Wall to create unique, WebAR experiences that delight and engage audiences - especially around holiday moments. As we prepare for another Halloween filled with tricks, treats, and augmented haunts, we’re taking a look back at the WebAR campaigns that have spooked and delighted us in years past. 

Coca-Cola's Halloween Collection at USC

Coca-Cola took the University of Southern California (USC) campus by storm with its Halloween Collection, transforming real-world vending machines into virtual treat dispensers. Students could fill their virtual bags with a myriad of goodies, including AR masks, NFTs, apparel, and concert tickets. This campaign made use of Lightship VPS for Web, a Visual Positioning System developed by Niantic as well as Lightship Maps for Web. It's one of the first commercial projects that integrated augmented reality into physical locations with pinpoint accuracy.

Last month, we challenged you to create your own personalized Character Camera Project to help the holiday season stand out (check out the template here). Submissions were published to your Public Profile to enter (see the contest rules here) and then shared in our Developer Slack community. You can find all of the entries in the #made-with-8thwall channel by searching for the #HolidayChallenge2022 hashtag

With that, let’s share our winners! These are shared in no particular order.

To begin, checkout  "Gingy's Gift Grab" by the InVision Communications team. This fun and festive AR game challenged players to collect as many presents as possible before time ran out by controlling an AR gingerbread character named Gingy. The game's charming aesthetic and smooth gameplay earned it a spot among the top five winners!

The holiday season is upon us, and what better way to get into the festive spirit than by trying out some exciting WebAR experiences powered by 8th Wall? From virtual holiday displays to holiday-themed games, there are endless possibilities for holiday fun with WebAR.

In this blog post, we've rounded up 10 WebAR experiences that are sure to get you in the holiday mood. So grab your device and get ready to have some fun with these immersive and interactive experiences.

This year, brands and agencies around the world leveraged the power of 8th Wall WebAR to get users into the Halloween spirit. From multiplayer games that make use of the user's space to personalized WebAR greeting cards, augmented reality can help people celebrate the holidays in a fun and immersive way.

Coca-Cola is bringing Halloween into the Real-World Metaverse this holiday with an augmented reality activation on the University of Southern California (USC) campus. "The Coca-Cola Halloween Collection" is a phygital experience that transforms actual vending machines around the campus into virtual treat dispensers. This web-based experience let students fill their trick-or-treaters bags with digital and physical items found in select vending machines including AR masks, NFTs, apparel, concert tickets and more.

To get customers into the Halloween spirit, Perfetti Van Melle launched “Meet the Creeps”, a spooky-candy-filled WebAR game. Accessible via QR code on select candy packets, trick-or-treaters and candy lovers alike can immerse themselves into the Halloween Village to help make Halloween sweet again.

In celebration of the 2022 Lunar New Year, P.F. Chang's has launched a limited-time specialty cocktail and immersive experience which honors the Year of the Tiger. Available at P.F Chang’s restaurant locations nationwide, the augmented reality experience brings the spirit of the tiger to life in an unexpected way.