From Coin-Op To Coin-App LAIs Snapshot 2 Assimilates Social Media

CARROLLTON TX -- Snapshot 2, the winner of this year's coveted Innovator Award from the Amusement and Music Operators Association, demonstrates the potential for coin-op's fusion with portable personal devices by effortlessly merging smartphone and photobooth functions.

At the heart of LAI Games' new automated picture machine is the Snapshot Companion App. Customers who download this mobile application are able to transfer images between the booth and Android or iOS smartphones, to modify or share across social networks. The app gives patrons access to any photo they have taken in the booth at any time, and allows them to upload those images to social media. It also enables them to download any image to the booth for printing.

An assortment of booth-based options gives patrons the ability to customize their images with filters, frames, stamps, textures or writing. They can even draw on the touchscreen with their fingers, choosing from a variety of inks and styles.

LAI observed that the Snapshot 2 hardware exemplifies the state of the art, incorporating an intuitive touchscreen interface, dual cameras for classic and "selfie" angles, studio lighting and a dye-sublimation printer that uses low-cost media.

Do-It-Yourselfie

"The photobooth is a traditional amusement that has been around for decades," observed LAI's Allison Timberlake. "And now it is finally catching up with technology and giving people the features they really want. The mobile app is what really sets Snapshot 2 apart."

Integrating a mobile application into a coin-op device is not as easy as it sounds. Not only does the popularity of social media sites shift continually, but frequent updates could be a burden to operators. To solve this problem, LAI engineered a system that uses the customers' mobile devices for the "heavy lifting" on social media sites.

AWARD WINNERS:LAI's Allison Timberlake and Chris Brady proudly display the AMOA Innovator Award for their company's SnapShot 2 photobooth. The photobooth links to customers' smartphones to create special effects and enables photo sharing.

"It would be almost impossible to keep up with every trending social media platform and messaging service, let alone integrate them into our photobooth as they come into fashion," said LAI R&D leader Shannon Perell. "We needed a solution that keeps the photobooth relevant to our target market by leveraging as many of these services as possible, without tying up our development team exclusively on these features."

That solution is to automatically synchronize photos with a patron's phone so the booth need not connect directly to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest.

The Market In Focus

As those of a certain age have no doubt noticed, twentysomethings are glued to their portable devices. This is a trend that has not been overlooked by LAI and other forward thinkers in coin-op. According to Timberlake, the Snapshot 2 is only the first in a series of games that will integrate portable devices into coin-op play.

"We know that we need to incorporate some kind of social media aspect into every new game that comes out," Timberlake said. "This would include applications for all kinds of games, including redemption and prize vending. Mobile apps will become an integral part of coin-op, moving forward."

The merger of entertainment and social media is not new. The "Real Housewives" franchise garners hundreds of thousands of tweets in "real time" when new episodes air. The success of the willfully campy Sharknado and Sharknado 2 was largely fueled by real-time viewer tweets.

Like a tennis match, viewers' eyes move from a scroll of tweets on a portable device to the television screen during this kind of programming, Timberlake observed. "Sharknado and other TV shows were tweeted about in real time during the show, and there are ways to interact with a movie even before it comes out," she pointed out. "Now, our challenge is to transfer that to out-of-home entertainment and into arcades."

Interaction between personal device and coin-op is essential to keeping coin-op relevant for Generation Z (the cohort of people born after the Millennials), Timberlake said, and the social media aspect is especially important. "People want and expect to be able to continue the experience they are having on their mobile devices," she explained. "And they expect to enhance the experience they are having, whether it's getting extra features, the ability for friends to interact with them, or competing with friends not on site."

New Generation Of Games

Of course, many time-honored rules still apply. First and foremost, the game has to attract players. It is not enough to simply slap a QR code on the side of a dull machine and hope for the best.

"Our philosophy is, you have to make the game compelling enough to get people to link the game with their devices," Timberlake reported. "And you have to make it easy to link, easy to share their score or whatever they just won. You have to make it easy to invite friends to come down to challenge them, or to play the companion app on their phone while the other person is playing in the arcade."

Meeting those challenges adds value for the operator by promoting naturally occurring player-to-player competition as well as offering the potential for location-organized competitions.

As for LAI's next move, the company is understandably quiet on the subject, though social media will continue to play a role in its games. "We are currently developing a videogame with mobile integration that builds on the features of our Snapshot Companion App," Perell said. "This next 'companion' app is designed to give gameplay value away from the physical cabinet, while driving players back to the location by highly incentivizing repeat play."

No doubt LAI will tweet the news of upcoming games.

IF YOU CAN'T BEAT'EM, MERGE'EM:Shannon Perell, LAI's head of research and development, is integrating social media into coin-op. The Snapshot 2 is the first in a new line of games that includes this capability.