Showcase Your Culture Hackathon

Lenslist x Meta Spark

Together with Meta Spark, we challenged XR Creators to take part in the Showcase Your Culture Hackathon and create interactive World AR effects. We wanted to learn how our Creators define culture – by origins, family, friendship group, or passions and hobbies shared with others. This hackathon differed from others, because it was open only for people living in Quest-supported countries. Our goal was not about quantity, but quality – the effects had to be very advanced to get a chance to win a piece of the $50,000 prize pool.

quick recap

154

No. of Submissions

106

Creators, who submitted

No. of Prizes

$50,000

Prize Pool

22 countries

(Quest-supported)

Reach & Diversity

Briefing Period

Creative Brief and Custom Landing Page

Ahead of launching the challenge, we worked with our partner to come up with a creative brief that would not only inform, but also inspire our community to take part in the challenge.

Each and every challenge we host, has a custom landing page (not a branded template), designed to communicate our partner’s mission and image, combined with our voice, the community knows so well.

This time, we also created custom 3D assets to brand the activation in the most innovative way possible and draw even more attention to our challenge.

On top of the LP, we also built a custom registration and submission form, adjusted to the know-how needs of our partner and in accordance with GDPR security and privacy standards, with data hosted on our own servers.

Last, but not least – as the challenge Organizer, we come up with Terms and Conditions together with our legal team and based on our multiyear expertise. Without this document, no challenge can be launched or conducted!

Submission Period

Outreach Campaign

With the submission period open for 4 weeks and thousands of people in our AR Community to reach, we ran 3 rounds of outreach with the ongoing, cross-platform promotional activities. The channels we used:

Lenslist Socials

Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Discord – with more than 35k friends, followers or members on board.

Our Mailing List

Probably the most comprehensive AR yellow pages existing.

Social Media DMs

Direct and not automatized communication is the key to connecting with our community.

Apart from our outreach and promotional efforts, we also organized and hosted two workshops featuring tutorials and appearances from some of the most active and skillful Creators.

Beth Wickerson showcased the making-of of her Gem Smash World AR game, focusing on how to use scripting in Meta Spark Studio. Mitsuko Ono allowed us to explore how she made an effect – Nun the wiser – that won one of our previous challenges, highlighting how to add the interactivity element in an AR experience.

The Results & Selection Period

As a result we got over 150 submissions and judging them was not easy – most effects were really high quality and many of them also told a story – we spent a lot of time trying them and reading Creators’ descriptions explaining some of the customs, places or habits showcased using AR.

Thanks to judges from Meta helping us out, we managed to pick the 38 winning effects – explore a taste of them below!

Once the winners are selected, we start the prize fulfillment process right away. With all the necessary paperwork needed to be signed to transfer the prize money to all different countries, with a data validation piece on top, this process takes a couple of weeks, but considering our experience in the field, we take care of the process from start to finish with no unnecessary issues or delays.

Final Thoughts & Virtual Gallery

First of all – big thank you to all participants, the winners and our friends at Meta for joining forces with us and distributing funds to the community. To spotlight the winners, we created a custom virtual environment using Unity and turned it into the Showcase Your Culture digital gallery. All of the design – from the concept, through 3D modeling and animation was done by us internally.

This challenge proves that this format can work for all types of innovative brands. Why?

Hundreds of Creators developing AR experiences within your brand’s image, mission or campaign means thousands of people create content using these effects at the same time = more visibility, organic reach and brand awareness;

AR Community is ready to come up with high quality content, creative designs and well-developed 3D models (see the winners!);

You can license AR experiences you like most = wide spread of inspired work to choose from instead of 2 or 3 creative proposals from your agency;

AR Creators are social media influencers of creative spaces online and have global reach – the average followers count of an AR Creator is ~30k.

Boosting the innovative, creative and collaborative image of your brand = checking off all three most valuable tenets of web3/metaverse marketing approach.