Tech
Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment's interactive gaming experience is a new way to engage fans
MLSE Digital Labs produced Arena Showdown with Scotiabank’s Scene+ program as partner, with AWS providing the cloud infrastructure.
Fans in the upper bowl of the venue compete against the lower bowl, tapping their screens to propel their version of the Leafs’ mascot, Carlton the Bear, around the ice.MLSE
When the Maple Leafs play home games, they now invite their fans to compete on the ice.
In between periods, the video board at Scotiabank Arena displays a QR code that, when scanned, directs users to a web address where they can participate in an interactive gaming experience projected onto the rink surface.
The first edition of this new Arena Showdown is called Rink Racer. Fans in the upper bowl of the venue compete against the lower bowl, tapping their screens to propel their version of the Leafs’ mascot, Carlton the Bear, around the ice. Each section’s average taps per second is tracked and shown on ice as well.
“With the purchase of a brand-new projection system last year for our arena, we really thought about, how could you take the digital components of our app and how could you then intermix it with the physical [space] of the arena?” said Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Chief Technology and Digital Officer Humza Teherany.
In the last four years, MLSE Digital Labs has built about three dozen games, he noted, many in collaboration with major brands such as McDonald’s, the Canadian Olympic Committee and Sprite. This first Arena Showdown contest was produced with Scotiabank’s Scene+ program as partner, with AWS providing the cloud infrastructure.
In its five activations this season, Rink Racer has attracted participation from an average of 2,566 fans in the nearly 20,000-seat capacity arena. The game is intentionally frictionless to join but includes a call to action from Scotiabank when the race ends. The conversion rate for fans to enter the Scene+ promotion has been a stout 47%. (The upper bowl has a 4-1 record over the lower bowl.)
In its five activations this season, Rink Racer has attracted participation from an average of 2,566 fans.MLSE
MLSE invested in a new projector system for the arena — the hardware is from Solotech and was installed with support from consultants at Pixel Magic Design — and the organization began imagining new ways to engage fans in-venue. To deliver a compelling experience, MLSE synchronized the arena’s projector, matrix boards, speakers and the quad and 360 LED lighting systems.
“While that seems very rudimentary, it's quick, it's easy to get to, it engages thousands of our fans all at once, and it's in very short bursty periods of time,” Teherany said of the first experience, adding, “It's meant to be a bit of an immersive experience. And so for version one, we're pretty pleased with it, but we think we can actually level it up quite a bit.”
The game has debuted for the Maple Leafs — hockey’s white ice lends itself well to projections — but a counterpart experience will soon debut for the Raptors. Some of the other 2D games developed by Digital Labs could soon be adapted for both of those sports, as well as for other MLSE franchises, such as Toronto FC in MLS and the Argonauts in the CFL.
Those traditional app games have had dwell times of some 5 to 10 minutes, whereas many digital promotions hold users’ attention for less than a minute, Teherany said. As Scotiabank Arena embarks on roughly $350 million in renovations, MLSE will continue to reimagine ways to infuse tech to make fans’ experience more streamlined and more engaging.
