For the Halo: Starscope activation, Xbox created a website that transformed a gamer’s device into a window into the 15-year-old Halo universe, allowing fans to look in any direction to explore and reacquaint themselves with the remastered worlds and weapons of Halo. The combination of a 3D environment, animation, audio/video, and the rich imagery of the Halo franchise provided a unique immersive experience usually seen only within native apps, all within a user’s browser.
Objective and Context:
For the Halo: Starscope activation, Xbox created a website that transformed a gamer’s device into a window into the 15-year-old Halo universe, allowing fans to look in any direction to explore and reacquaint themselves with the remastered worlds and weapons of Halo. The combination of a 3D environment, animation, audio/video, and the rich imagery of the Halo franchise provided a unique immersive experience usually seen only within native apps, all within a user’s browser.
Target Audience:
The campaign’s target audience consisted of core shooter fans, ages 18 to 24, who loved multiplayer games. These fans had likely played one or all of the previous Halo games on either Xbox or the Xbox 360. Xbox also wanted to bring new fans to the franchise, including those who likely did not own an Xbox or who had never played Halo.
Creative Strategy:
In anticipation of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Xbox gathered the franchise’s most iconic maps, planets, and ships and placed them into a 360-degree immersive digital experience called Halo: Starscope. With this website, a gamer’s device was transformed into a window to the stars, allowing fans to look in any direction to explore and reacquaint themselves with the remastered worlds and weapons of the latest Halo installment.
Overall Campaign Execution:
The Halo franchise spans 15 years and over 10 titles. A ton of gamers grew up with Master Chief and one-upping their friends in multiplayer. There were beloved weapons, maps, locations, vehicles, and characters. Xbox chose the most popular elements to get core fans reminiscing and spark fond memories among the casual players.
Mobile Execution:
Starscope was a mobile-first, 3D environment experience using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS all within a device’s native browser and hosted on the Microsoft Azure web services platform. In it, the 3D world was executed using three.js, a popular JavaScript 3D engine. Xbox coupled this with an internal JS library that Razorfish built for these types of experiences, which is called gyroscope.js. Gyroscope.js allowed the brand to normalize the wide variety of data formats reported by devices to provide a consistent navigation experience among all devices that support accelerometer data.
Roughly 75 percent of the campaign’s budget went to mobile. The overall budget was $150,000, $37,500 of which went to building a desktop version of the experience. The remaining budget was dedicated to creating a mobile version that worked seamlessly across multiple operating systems.
Xbox implemented mobile and tablet-targeted ads that gave viewers a sample interaction of Halo: Starscope, as well as the exclusive content featured within it. It was able to do this by utilizing the experience’s gyroscope.js technology throughout the mobile media placements. This allowed users to move their devices around an ad to explore portions of the immersive worlds within the experience.
