All Work
Mobile App & Augmented Reality
Mobile App & Augmented Reality
The Brief
We turned a hotel drink coaster into a portal to five cities.
Point your phone. Watch a miniature world appear on the bar top.
AR designed for the moment: built to surprise, delight, and earn a second look.
The Challenge
The brief asked for something that would feel genuinely surprising to a hotel guest sitting at a bar. Most AR campaigns of the era leaned on gimmick: something that worked once and was quickly forgotten. The challenge was to build something with enough visual richness and personality that guests would hold up their phones - and then want to show someone else. The five-city scope added real production complexity. Each scene had to feel distinct and locally specific while sharing the same visual language and performing consistently across both iOS and Android.
Our Approach
We built the AR system on a marker-based image recognition framework, using the coaster artwork as the detection target. The 3D scenes were modeled and animated in-house, with each city's landmarks chosen for immediate recognizability: the Statue of Liberty, the Capitol Records tower, Mardi Gras masks. The Aloft-branded VW tour bus, modeled to match the campaign visual identity, became the narrative anchor that unified all five scenes and reinforced the tour concept throughout. UI design prioritized zero friction. The app opened with a single instruction: aim camera at the coaster. The information screen explained the mechanic simply, and the printable coaster option ensured the experience could travel beyond the hotel bar to anywhere someone wanted to try it.
Marriott's Aloft Hotels brand lives at the intersection of music, travel, and technology. Their annual Project: Aloft Star competition invites emerging artists to compete for a chance to record a single at the legendary Capitol Studios in Hollywood. For 2018 - the first year the competition expanded to a five-city live tour in partnership with Universal Music Group - Aloft needed a way to bring that excitement into every hotel bar on the circuit. They came to Sutter Group with a clear ambition and an unexpected vehicle: a drink coaster. We designed and built an augmented reality mobile app for iOS and Android that transformed the branded Aloft coaster into an image-recognition trigger. When guests pointed their phone camera at the coaster, a fully animated 3D city scene appeared on top of it - a miniature diorama of each tour stop, with the iconic Aloft Hotels VW tour bus circling the scene. Each city got its own world. New York brought the Statue of Liberty shredding an electric guitar against the Manhattan skyline. New Orleans put Mardi Gras masks and a lurking alligator front and center. Los Angeles centered on the Capitol Records building with the Hollywood sign glowing in the background. The bus - modeled to carry the Project: Aloft Star brand - served as the connecting thread across all five scenes, tying the experience back to the tour narrative. For guests who wanted to try it without a physical coaster, the app offered a printable trigger target, making the experience accessible well beyond the hotel bar.
The Outcome
Tour Cities
Mobile Platforms
Year Launched
