The Brief

In home movie experience is not an uncommon thing with today's purchasability of contents through DVDs and online services. From that background, in order to raise the box-office revenue of 'SADAKO 3D2', we needed to create a new value to the theater experience. To achieve this, we have created a system that links smartphones to the screen giving the audience more presence as a horror film. The film studios, agencies, application developers, sound recognition developers worked together as a team. Using smartphones in the theaters are considered as a taboo, but because it was a new attempt, theaters throughout Japan were willing to implement SUMA4D.

This technology was developed for increasing attendance of 'SADAKO 3D2'. SUMA4D takes a photo secretly, capturing the frightening face of the smartphone owner. Also it rings the smartphone once the audience gets home as if it was cursed. These unexpected events add up and motivate the audience to share the experience on the SNS. Due to the introduction of the new theater experience, SUMA4D was picked as a hot topic in many TV programs, which lead to further buzz. SUMA4D recognizes specific sounds in the film to synchronize the timing when these events occur. Events provided by the SUMA4D has a specific timing to trigger it. Due to the difference in processing power of the smartphones, it is impossible to fetch the event at a perfect timing without any adjustments. Unlike other sound recognition systems, SUMA4D adjusts the lag between the recognition and the intended trigger timing. This results to horror events setting off at once, which creates great horror experience that matches with the movie. We plan to adopt this system to other movies.

There were total of over 400,000 audiences in the theaters with SUMA4D, 270% increase when compared to the same film with just the 3D stereographic. A lot of buzz occurred throughout the SNS and it was picked up in over 100 TV programs. Our goal is making theater experience richer and more exciting, leading to the increase in audiences. The most unique feature of this system is as follows. Since the system uses a smartphone, the movie experience merges with real world, which provides entertainment that extends out of the screen. We are planning on introducing additional contents as micro transactions. The movie industry will consider this project on future planning. We have created a new value to the theater experience, leading to expanding the approaches in increasing the attendances. Also, a new business model was created with the release of SUMA4D.