We started our partnership with Defient in early 2020 when the CEO, Sidney Swift - a Grammy nominated producer based out of Los Angeles, California - approached us to build an audio plugin that allows producers to emulate and experience how their track would sound on any speaker system.

Defient is an independent record label working with Atlantic Records to distribute music for their digital artist, ChillPill. The Defient team has a strong focus on digitized media, connecting music and technology. This became the catalyst for a larger partnership between Speer and Defient, with a journey to develop the first augmented reality game synchronized to a music video. This music video featured ChillPill, Soleima and RICO Nasty.

An agile approach to design and develop the product. Pulling inspiration from the ChillPill brand and the music video itself, we developed the style and branding for the app. We then worked in tandem to develop one section of the app at a time, releasing builds, testing and making informed changes along the way.

This application was truly groundbreaking considering that this was something that had never been done before, leaving us with no support or past case studies to help us develop the app. This required a lot of research to try and understand past attempts at video synchronization and why they failed.

Over a six month period, there was heavy research and development performed on various libraries and concepts which eventually led us to developing the synchronization tool. It detects every frame displayed per second of the music video in order to be able to display the right graphics and 3D objects at the right moment for the game to make sense.

We were then able to obtain a patent for this innovative solution which made the experience that much more ground breaking. After that, the mobile application was developed, the synchronization technology was integrated and the music video was released.