Left Field Labs | Building What’s Next in Tech

1. In what ways do you evaluate the business impact of immersive experiences and experiential design when considering partnerships or product innovation?

Honestly, it's about asking the simplest question first: Are we making something people actually want to use and remember? With Twister AIR, success wasn't just about slick AR or clever AI integration—the experience had to resonate emotionally, bring people together, and feel authentic to the almost 60-year history of the game.

We track engagement metrics, but also measure how experiences change brand perception and drive deeper connections. For Twister, winning the Toy Industry's Game of the Year and two Webby Awards was proof we'd nailed the "why" behind the tech.

Impact also means real-world business outcomes. Did we unlock new demographics for the brand? Boost affinity? Drive meaningful conversations in market? With Twister AIR, we saw families across generations re-engaging with the brand, translating directly into sustained sales growth of 23% year-over-year and significant market share gains in the interactive gaming category. Immersive isn't a marketing gimmick; it's a strategic approach to design that hits emotional and business KPIs simultaneously.

2. How does your leadership team prioritize the balance between nostalgia and innovation when reimagining established brand assets?

When we tackled Twister, we knew there was this iconic nostalgia around the property. Who hasn't gotten embarrassingly tangled up on a Twister mat? But nostalgia isn't an excuse to rehash the same experience with a fresh coat of paint. Our job was to keep the spirit – the laughter, movement, and connection endemic to the original – while seamlessly blending it with completely unexpected moments.

Our approach, fundamentally, is about deep listening: to our clients, their audiences, and to our gut instincts about human behavior. This means conducting ethnographic research, hosting co-creation sessions with multi-generational families, and spending time in living rooms watching how people naturally interact with brands. Technology is only valuable if it enhances the emotional DNA of a brand. With Twister AIR, the AR and AI elements weren't tech for tech's sake; they amplified the original joy in a way that felt respectful of its heritage. Families didn't just recognize the classic game, they rediscovered it in a way that felt contemporary yet comfortingly familiar.

3. What criteria do you use when selecting external collaborators to bring emerging technologies into your core offerings or brand experiences?

The criteria for selecting collaborators directly connects to our core mission over the past 17 years: to be the place where people come to build what's next. This foundation has earned us partnerships with some of the world's most ambitious companies as they take their first steps into AI, AR, and emerging tech.

We look for three key qualities in partners. First, they must believe, as we do, that technology should amplify human capacity, not replace it. Second, they need to be willing to experiment and iterate rather than seeking guaranteed outcomes. Third, they must prioritize authentic user experiences over flashy tech demonstrations.

Our track record speaks to this approach—from launching over 3,000 products and experiences with Google over the past decade, including their first generative AI advertising campaign, to engineering Qualcomm's first interactive showcase of on-device AI and helping it travel the globe. With Hasbro, that alignment was immediate. They weren't chasing gimmicks or novelty but were genuinely interested in using emerging tech to deepen real-world play. Hasbro pushed us to go big while never losing sight of what matters most: designing experiences that bring people closer together.

4. How does external recognition, such as industry awards, influence your brand's strategic marketing investments or R&D initiatives?

Awards like the Webby are fantastic markers—they validate the creativity, deep technical expertise, and ambition that goes into our work. But we don't chase awards; we chase impact. Twister AIR's recognition didn't suddenly steer our strategy, but it did help reinforce our confidence that immersive, AI-driven experiences aren’t just resonating but redefining engagement standards.

The market data supports this direction. Today's audiences want to step inside a story, co-create it and share it, with 46% of consumers desiring immersive experiences from brands they're loyal to, and 59% of Gen Z and 55% of millennials expressing heightened interest in such engagements. This consumer hunger has driven the immersive technology market from just $43 billion at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to an estimated $333 billion in 2025.

From a practical standpoint, external recognition becomes a powerful tool for securing client buy-in when we're proposing ambitious, unproven concepts. It tells our partners, "Trust us, we've done this before, and it's worked spectacularly." Awards also give our teams permission to lean further into uncharted territory, knowing that bold creative risks have been validated by industry peers.

5. What cultural shifts are needed to ensure your teams are equipped to embrace the next wave of creative technologies in product development or customer experience design?

For companies like ours who are hired to break the rules, it's necessary to disrupt the status quo—but these breakthroughs rarely happen in status updates or perfectly defined scopes. They emerge in collaborations that blur disciplines and when people feel safe enough to take creative risks.

The culture we're building—and rebuilding every day—is rooted in relentless curiosity. It's right there in our name. We believe in bringing ideas out of left field and staying hands-on in the lab, always experimenting, always asking better questions. Practically, this means we hold weekly "Wild Idea Fridays" where anyone can pitch concepts that might sound impossible, and we dedicate 20% of project time to unplanned experimentation.

We've created a space where anyone can throw out a "this might sound wild, but what if…?"—because those are the moments that spark real breakthroughs. I'm keen to find talent that breaks down binary thinking between pragmatism and imagination—that's where the magic happens. When you keep teams flexible, excited, and openly collaborative, adapting to whatever tech curveball comes next becomes second nature.

6. How do you envision the role of immersive technology evolving within your industry, and how is your organization preparing for that shift?

We're in a truly exciting moment where consumers' psychological desires for connection are converging with advancements in AI and AR. Now more than ever before, companies can deliver high quality, scalable immersive interactions that bridge physical and digital worlds. We're seeing retail, entertainment, and education sectors embrace immersive technology not as a novelty, but as a fundamental shift in how brands create meaningful relationships with their audiences.

The next evolution will be defined by seamless integration—where immersive experiences feel so natural that people forget they're interacting with advanced technology. We're preparing for this by investing heavily in cross-platform development capabilities and building proprietary tools that allow us to rapidly prototype experiences across AR, VR, and mixed reality environments.

Left Field Labs is honored to support a number of technology clients who are actively competing to shape the future of AI. From our work across firms like Salesforce, Meta, and Google, we've learned that AI needs experiential design to become truly accessible. People don't trust what they can't feel. The most powerful AI storytelling isn't happening in keynote slides or purely digital interfaces—it's happening in the wild, when someone experiences a real-life aha moment so seamless, so smart, it fundamentally shifts their understanding of what AI can actually do for them.

Our organization is preparing by fostering deep partnerships with emerging technology platforms, continuously upskilling our teams in new creative tools, and most importantly, maintaining our focus on human-centered design principles that will remain constant even as the technology landscape evolves rapidly around us.

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