Developing a ground-breaking and international award winning, interactive product for music fans that uses augmented reality technology

The challenge: The concept of an air guitar is not new, but what about an interactive air guitar that really lets you engage with the band? Our challenge was to help South Wales rock band The Last Republic to engage better with their fans by developing the first ever T-Shirt to be used as a playable guitar.

What we did: Working closely with the management team to ensure integration with their wider marketing activities, we developed an interactive T-Shirt that not only helped the band to enhance merchandise sales, but also acted as an important promotional tool. The AiR Guitar T-Shirt enables The Lost Republic to analyse the impact of their physical goods and encourages fans to interact with them online after they have left the stadium.

The result: The AiR Guitar T-Shirt uses a pioneering music technology called Augmented Reality, which allows a computer to read physical gestures and objects in real-time. When the T-shirt is worn it can be recognised by a user’s webcam, allowing fans to ‘strum’ to music and simulate playing a guitar. The product recently won the prestigious ‘bootstrap’ award at the annual SXSW (South by South West) Accelerator Competition in Texas for the greatest achievement with the least amount of money.

Fancy having a play? The AiR Guitar T-Shirt is available to try out here: Play Air Guitar