the early Years
2012-2015
Magnetic Mobile has been innovating with AR and VR technologies since 2014. The Magnetic team was part of the original Marxent team and worked as the retail loyalty division of the company.
In that time, the Magnetic team (then known as the Marxent retail loyalty team) created the first AR retail app in convenience for Speedway using a trackable marker on a cooler display. This tracker then launched in the Speedway mobile app and allowed the user to stack ice-cubes in a Speedway cup. This was one of the first in-store experiences in the industry and made this team an early adopter of the technology.
Becoming Our Own
2016
The retail loyalty team spilt from Marxent as our own company: Magnetic Mobile. This allowed Marxent to focus on the Home Vertical in VR and AR, and allowed Magnetic to further our own customers and retail opportunities in the convenience sector. Our primary focus was web and mobile app development centered around retail loyalty experience. We carved out a niche in web and mobile campaign and messaging development with core work from national retailers using our messaging and native app products.
Building our AR Chops
2016-2017
We continued to innovate with additional national retailers, creating two winter games sponsored by Pepsi for Culver’s, the fast-casual restaurant, in 2016 and 2017. This included: a sweater try-on-and-share promotion using a trackable on a specially designed co-branded cup by Pepsi and Culver’s, and an AR puzzle game that allowed users to build a virtual puzzle.
The design was created by Culver’s agency Heibing, but Magnetic developed all the code using Vuforia, an early platform designed for Augmented Reality experiences. Both experiences were only accessible via the Culver’s mobile app, because of permissions needed at the OS level.
AR Mobile apps & Push Messaging
2018-2019
We focused much of our development resources helping our sister company, Marxent, develop a white-label native app solution to host their proprietary AR technology and 3D Cloud content management system. We created an app wrapper that could be integrated within the retailers’ website to launch AR furniture AR experience. These experiences leverage the great technology API Marxent had created and also allowed the retailer to send in-app and push messages to customers with deep links into the AR experiences.
Retailers that worked with us included: Bob’s Discount Furniture, Lay-Z-Boy, and American Furniture Warehouse. Working alongside the Marxent team, we delivered an app that could pass data via the app’s webkit experience directly into the retailer’s shopping cart using a deep linking API.
This also included state-of-the-art Geolocation Message tracking the retailer could set for each store, so that they could message customers when they enabled location and crossed a preset longitude and latitude.
These features, along with Marxent’s augmented reality technology and expertise, allowed us to become familiar with AR quality assurance, object render, issue tracking, and the unique needs of retailers in the e-commerce space in regards to retail website staging and production deployments.
Charge AR
Building our own AR Product
The Charge product team has been designing award-winning 5-Star digital products for over a decade that are used by millions of consumers every day. We understand the medium and the consumer retail experience.
Our Clients
