Sea Ray app wins Qualcomm Vuforia Vision Award

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Sea Ray recently received a Qualcomm Vuforia Vision Award for the company’s L650 Fly Augmented Reality application. The global contest awards five winners each year out of hundreds of entries. In addition to the Sea Ray award, other 2014 winners were Samsung, LEGO, Sesame Street Workshop and the Guinness Book of World Records.

“We’re so pleased with the consumer and critical reception the L650 Fly app has received,” said Matt Guilford, vice president of marketing for Sea Ray. “The app was designed to bridge a gap between consumer enthusiasm for our new L-Class flagship and limited product availability in the field, given high retail demand. With many of our yachts already spoken for, the app provides a novel, compelling way for prospective customers to experience the boat.”

The app features both interior and exterior tours of Sea Ray’s flagship model. The boat design in the app is taken directly from the Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) files used to build the L650 Fly, so the experience within the app is as close as possible to the actual boat.

“It’s increasingly difficult to give people a totally novel experience; something they’ve never done before. We’ve had the Augmented Reality app at several boat shows and VIP events where people are absolutely blown away at what they’re seeing,” said Guilford. “It’s remarkable that simply by looking through a particular lens (in this case, an iPad or iPhone equipped with the free app), you can be having an entirely different experience than the person next to you looking at the same thing. The ability to change colors or add options – like a hardtop or teak decking or sun shades – and see it instantly reflected in a highly-accurate 3D model floating in front of you is helping push the limits of digital interaction.”

Sea Ray employed Ignition Digital Images Inc., a Toronto-based company, to help with the app development. While Sea Ray and Ignition Digital Images Inc. have been working together for more than five years on various projects, this was the second implementation of the award-winning Augmented Reality technology for Ignition Digital Images Inc., after Mercedes Benz of Canada partnered with them to help launch their all-new C Class automobiles a few months earlier.

For the exterior tour, users point an iOS device with the free app at a “target,” available here. Users can zoom, rotate and interact with the boat. The interior tour offers a  gyro-based interface; wherever a customer points the iOS device, they see what would be there if they were standing in the boat.

The app is available for iOS devices for free in the Apple App Store here. The target for the app can be downloaded here. A list of Qualcomm Vuforia Vision Winners can be found here.

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