There were no restrictions or regulations impacting the execution of the experience.

Signal is on a mission to teach kids to brush twice daily to prevent cavities. Our mobile campaign supports this mission by offering a fun tool for parents to teach kids, at the same time making daily oral care fun.

We cleaned and gleamed up Signal’s toothbrushing companion with a creative AR overhaul.

Building on the existing Little Brush Big Brush webseries, the Facebook Messenger experience expands the story with an encouraging chatbot offering 5 fun-filled crafted to perfection animal masks that teach kids how to care for their teeth.

The experience keeps kids brushing for 21 days through daily reminders, colourful AR interactions and specially designed reward stickers — helping them form a positive habit in a playful way. As one of the first Messenger extensions to use augmented reality for learning, the experience shows there’s so much more to AR than puking rainbows.

We created the 5 augmented masks using Facebook's proprietary software: Spark AR

At the time, Spark AR wasn't created for such complex and long experiences, so we had to overcome technical limitations and requirements to come to our final product.

As simply using masks wouldn’t be enough of a game, we took to the stickerbooks we all know from our own childhood, created a digital version and turned it into the motivating manifestation of our challenge across the 21 days. To bring the Stickerbook to life, we used an HTML/CSS page that keeps track of the progress and rewards of the user. This is where the stickers they receive for adequate brushing are 'stored',shown and shared.

The challenge we faced for the Stickerbook was optimisation, as we used one long image as well as 27 animated stickers & sounds that needed to load immediately. We used a vector-based animation technique called BodyMovin to avoid using heavy gifs and keep the file-size low—all increasing speed and smoothness.

Using characters and storylines the children already knew from the webseries was important for us. This made it easy for children who already knew the characters to dive straight into the experience.

We wanted to find the right balance in animal/human features to be starred in the masks, to get them just right. A challenge, but when we tested the experience on children, their reaction showed us it was a job well done.

We managed to leverage the technology of Spark AR and the Facebook Messenger platform to turn an everyday chore into a fun and joyful experience that puts a smile—and an augmented animal—on your kids face!

The project took 5 months to create and has so far launched in France, Vietnam and Indonesia.