Dubai Summer Surprises
AR and VR experiences that turned Dubai Summer Surprises into a citywide interactive playground.
Dubai Summer Surprises has run every year since 1998: a month-long citywide festival of shopping, entertainment, and family life that fills Dubai during its hottest weeks. By 2024, the challenge was not relevance but depth: how to give a generation raised on digital entertainment a reason to move through the city rather than sit with a screen.
HoopAI was commissioned to design a connected ecosystem of AR and VR experiences distributed across malls, plazas, and landmarks: three distinct formats that put visitors inside the festival rather than in front of it.
The three formats each operated at a different scale. Gamified Shopping Adventures ran inside VR environments modelled on the festival's retail landscape. Family-Friendly AR Games used marker-free augmented reality at event nodes across the city, accessible to children from five years up. Virtual Tours and Treasure Hunts used GPS-anchored AR to turn Dubai's most recognisable sites into waypoints on a city-scale puzzle.
Running beneath all three was a real-time performance layer invisible to visitors but essential to organisers: dwell times, engagement patterns, completion rates across every node. It allowed the team to tune difficulty and reward cadences while the festival was live, a form of continuous refinement that traditional event programming rarely allows.
"The most memorable festival experiences are not watched but inhabited. Moments where the visitor becomes an agent rather than an audience."
