As Coldplay continues on its massively-successful Music of the Spheres World Tour, fans in over 150 countries worldwide have embraced the companion app Coldplay Music of the Spheres World Tour on iOS and Android to make the most of their experience.

Designed and launched by SAP in collaboration with Coldplay last year, the app allows users to make more sustainable and informed travel decisions when going to and from their concerts by harnessing the capabilities of two best-in-class solutions: SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Sustainability Solutions. Coldplay also integrated SAP Analytics Cloud to gain a deeper understanding of the carbon footprint generated by fans traveling using data collected within the app. This valuable information will assist the band in monitoring the tour's efforts to offset calculated carbon emissions.

While the primary goal of the app is to guide fans to make more sustainable choices and to provide exclusive insights into Coldplay's tour, one stand-out feature has kept fans enthralled. The app offers a fantastical musical mixed reality experience to bring fans deeper into the Coldplay universe, allowing them to dance with augmented reality (AR) aliens from the “Higher Power” music video in their chosen environment and create videos and take pictures that can be shared across social media.

A seemingly unlikely candidate to experiment with mixed reality and music, SAP has been laying the groundwork for their foray into mixed reality solutions for a while now – and they're only just getting started.

Creating a sustainable and fun user experience

The app features a cohesive user experience to support Coldplay's vision of sustainability and aesthetic.

“Our first thought was that we wanted to build an experience of community,” recounts Rana Chakrabarti, Director of Learning Experiences at SAP Academy for Engineering. “We started with the idea: “What if you had Coldplay in your living room?”. While the initial concept was to have the band in the living room with users, allowing them to take selfies, the team quickly pivoted towards the visuals coming from Coldplay's Higher Power video, ultimately borrowing from their highly unique and intricate alien characters and planets and language scripts to develop the bespoke iconography and visual style that spoke to the album's aesthetic.

“We wanted the app to be in touch with Coldplay's visual standards and amazing storytelling concept, while also supporting Coldplay's vision of sustainability through the design itself," says Tanya Pradhan, Communications and Visual Lead for SAP Academy for Engineering. The team opted, for example, for the app to display in dark mode to save battery life and make a positive environmental impact. But the entertainment value of the app also plays a critical role in pushing sustainability. "It's not to be undervalued," argues Rana Chakrabarti, "entertainment is an essential component of the app because it increases user adoption."

Further expanding on the visual style, SAP's Mixed Reality Solutions team then pulled in concepts from Coldplay's experimentations with holographics, augmented reality, and 3D motion graphics.

SAP leveraged Coldplay's unique and intricate space-themed aesthetic to create an entertaining, educational, and informative experience.

The two teams worked together to ensure that users would transition from the two to three-dimensional spatial field in a way that feels seamless. The key was to apply the design principles that SAP uses for its own enterprise applications — simplicity, coherence, responsiveness, and moments of delight. "The app is a real game-changer," says Chris Salmon, Director of Digital and Communications for Coldplay. "It offers interactive and immersive experiences that engage our fans in ways the band had not in the past."

Mixed reality meets the power of enterprise

When it came to developing the augmented reality experience, the Mixed Reality Solutions team leveraged the technology that they've been developing for enterprise applications such as SAP Product Model Viewer, a mobile app that uses 3D visualizations of products and assets in augmented reality to provide frontline workers a better user experience when conducting service, manufacturing or maintenance procedures.

Over the last few years, the team has been working on various mixed reality proofs-of-concepts and solutions across all lines of business, for both office workers and frontline warehouse and field workers. They believe that, just like when smartphones were first introduced into the enterprise context, the use cases for mixed reality are not yet fully grasped, but will soon become an indispensable part of working life.

And they're not wrong. The augmented reality and mixed reality market is growing steadily. According to Grand View Research, increasing adoption of mixed reality technologies across several industry verticals, such as automotive, healthcare, education, construction, and logistics, will see the market size reaching an expected USD 597.54 billion by 2030. Augmented reality interfaces are expected to optimize operational efficiency, productivity, and safety.

"The potential was always huge with mixed reality, and we are at a point where the technology is catching up with our vision," says Johannes Nichell, Senior Developer for SAP's Mixed Reality Solutions team. "But if we wait until the technology is fully there to start producing enterprise apps, it's going to be too late."

Collaborating with cutting-edge artists such as Coldplay represents an invaluable opportunity for SAP's designers and developers to be inspired, experiment with, and learn from what makes certain consumer-facing apps a hit. As the team turns to enterprise solutions, these learnings can help them bring mixed reality solutions into the next frontier.