Black Radiance AR Avatar Apps
Overview
About Black Radiance
Black Radianceâ„¢, a Markwins Beauty Brand, has been uplifting women of color with luxurious, empowering, and affordable makeup since 1993. Black Radiance prides itself on its commitment to innovation, inclusivity, and the amplification of black voices.
Saritasa has delivered what we initially hoped for and then some. The team has gone above and beyond in their performance, exceeding our expectations. They have not just designed the avatars and handed them off. They’ve taken us through the process step by step so that we can teach users how to use and download them. Saritasa’s team feels like family to us now.
Sherry WestBrand Marketing Manager at Black Radiance
The Challenge
Merging tech and beauty
Beauty is big business. With the cosmetics industry reaching an estimated market size of $20.13 billion in the US alone, competition is fierce to capture even a fraction of the available market. Add in shifting marketing trends, the rise of influencer culture, and new technologies, and it’s no wonder some brands struggle to stand out. Black Radiance wanted a creative way to attract loyal customers. The brand strives to remain on-trend with the latest technology to offer the best possible products to its customers and to attract new ones.
Designing our solution
The team at Black Radiance knew they wanted to make a big splash at their Beyond Radiant event in Los Angeles, but needed help narrowing the direction and turning their vision into a reality. Our team worked closely with theirs to brainstorm ideas and eventually settled on an augmented reality app that allows users to explore different makeup looks on four unique avatar personas.
Character Creation
We started with creating character concepts, being careful to stick within the Black Radiance brand themes of empowerment, diversity, and self-expression. Our team brainstormed four unique personas based on female archetypes and came up with backstories to really bring them to life.
Customized 3D Avatars
To avoid reinventing the wheel and keep within budget, we researched prefabricated avatars to use as a base. We selected avatars from Ready Player Me and customized them to fit the Black Radiance brand. We customized everything from the outfits to the hair to the facial features. To make the avatars more realistic, we created a custom animation loop to bring the avatars to life.
Makeup Texture Modeling
Each avatar has four unique makeup looks designed based on the persona and real Black Radiance makeup products. Two of the looks are daytime looks, one is a night-time look, and one is a fun bold style showing the range of Black Radiance’s products. The makeup looks were designed on makeup maps and then passed to our 3D design team for implementation on the avatars. Getting the makeup right took a lot of skill and tweaking to ensure the colors, sheen, texture, and lighting looked accurate across different devices.
Developing our solution
Once we locked down the visuals and concept, we focused on delivering a beautiful, intuitive mobile app that brought the Black Radiance brand to life. The app debuted at a live event, accompanied by backdrops to encourage photos and videos with the avatars.
Augmented Reality Experience
The concept behind the avatars was to create inspirational personas that Black Radiance customers can see themselves in. Each avatar has a different personality, occupation, and makeup preferences. Users can get matched with an avatar through an in-app quiz or view them all and choose their favorite. Once the user matches with an avatar, they can launch an interactive augmented reality experience and place her in the real world to view, take photos, and record video.
AR Selfie Mode
Most front-facing phone cameras do not have the same lidar or augmented reality features as back-facing cameras. This technical limitation severely limits the user’s ability to interact with an avatar in selfie mode. Our team went through several iterations of selfie design to find the right way to keep the user and avatar in the frame for fun, shareable photos.
Hybrid Mobile App
The Black Radiance AR app was built using Unity and is a hybrid application available for both iOS and Android devices. In addition to the quiz, AR experience, and selfie mode, users can view the products used to create each avatar’s distinct looks. Our design team took inspiration from the Black Radiance website and marketing materials to design a beautiful, branded experience.
