In 2020, Choctaw Casinos & Resorts doubled down on their Durant location with a 200,000 square foot expansion that features luxury lodging, multiple new restaurants, an absolutely baller pool, and a giant gaming floor. To cap it all off, they commissioned a completely new collection of art, one that features works by over a dozen Native American artists.

To bring this one-of-a-kind collection the attention it deserved, I envisioned and helped to execute the Choctaw Art Walk, a QR code experience that gets people exploring the art using an interactive map, behind-the-scenes videos, unlockable rewards, and a Snap lens that turns them into the art.

I lovingly created multiple parts of this experience. The first is the interactive map, which I modeled in 3D using a floorplan provided by the client. Reducing a technical floorplan with immense detail into a human-readable map was painstaking, but the end result was worth it.

I also made the lens, an AR experience that recreates users in the style of select paintings from the collection using machine learning. This required two major steps: training machine learning models and building the Snap lens.

To build the ML models, I used Google Colab. Each style took about 4 hours to train. Building the lens was a similar feat. While style transfer (the practice of giving your image the style of a painting) is easy to do using templates, this lens is perhaps the first to allow users to see themselves in multiple styles.

We created a number of ways to attract people to the experience. Not least among them are the QR codes at the feet of each painting on premise. We also created QR coasters, room key envelope inserts, and a video that appears on TVs in the casino. In my final contribution to the project, I edited a video recapping the entire experience for PR and social media (at the top of this case story).

Credits:

• Designers: Garrett Owens, Justin King
• Innovation Lead: Sean Donovan
• Development: Click Here Labs