To coincide with the Target Retail Accelerator and Fast Company’s Co.Labs partnership launch at SXSW, Target wanted a light handed way to recruit from the pool of talented attendees at SXSWi by creating a fun interactive experience. Thus the Tarcade was born; an oversized glossy 8-bit arcade filled with custom designed game cabinets, a bar, high tables and chairs, custom lighting, giveaways, and signature drinks. The visitors earned points on their NFC cards by checking in on Foursquare. Points were used to play a catalog of classic games. Hacking the system was encouraged. High scores were displayed on a leaderboard and winners of the day received Target gifts.

Defining Objectives.

Conceptual Development.

In order to present the Tarcade concept to the internal team, lo-fi sketches were produced to quickly generate feedback on the high-level concept and then later refined into presentation-ready artwork to share with the client.

Implementation.

The technology solution utilized the Foursquare Push API to push to a Redis pub/sub server which was then integrated into a real-time interface built using Ruby EventMachine, WebSockets and Sinatra. This application interfaced over low-level serial communication with the card dispenser hardware and an NFC reader to vend the cards. Each video game cabinet contained an NFC reader that communicated with a central database and then communicated with Arduino to add credits to the game. A small serial LCD was also integrated to display messages to users such as number of credits remaining.

Guests were invited to hack their cards by decoding the data encoded on the card and rewrite the data for bragging rights and Target gift cards. All the high scores, game metrics and hackers were displayed in real-time using WebSockets and CSS3 3D transformations to create a dynamic experience. The project was a tremendous success with even Dennis Crowley giving us a shout-out on Twitter.

Measurement.

No project is complete without thoughtful reporting and retrospective analysis. I evaluated not only quantitative results, but also qualitative metrics that help build a comprehensive picture of the overall success of an effort. The reports were shared with Target at project completion meetings and allowed the teams to understand the effects of the campaign in the near-term and over time.