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Google Helps Target Turn Shopping into Gaming

The nation’s second-largest retailer has partnered with Google to create an in-store game powered by 3-D mapping technology and advanced sensors.

The Target in Sunnyvale looks like an ordinary store. But that’s just boring real life.

Viewed through the camera of a prototype tablet from Google, the store transforms into a scene reminiscent of the North Pole, complete with igloos, icicles and a snowball fight with a green dinosaur named Zoomer.

The nation’s second-largest retailer has partnered with Mountain View’s Google to create an in-store game powered by 3-D mapping technology and advanced sensors developed by Google’s Project Tango.

Called “Bullseye’s Playground,” (named after the white bull terrier that serves as Target’s mascot), the game is supposed to amuse kids for 10 or so minutes while adults finish up their holiday shopping.

But the partnership’s ambition extends far beyond a seemingly rudimentary video game. In the not-so-near future, Target executives envision smartphones and tablets allowing customers to digitally interact with products, unlock deals and navigate the store by mapping out items on shopping lists.

“There’s a lot that’s possible,” Alan Wizemann, vice president of product for Target.com and mobile, said in an interview. “Mobile is really the front door to Target stores for our guests. We’re looking for the next evolution of that, to find the future of retail.”

Over the past few years, big-box retailers like Target, Walmart and Best Buy have struggled to draw customers to stores as more people embrace online shopping. Since big-box stores operate enormous spaces, declining traffic means those chains are sitting on less and less profitable real estate.

So big boxes are exploring new uses for that space — whether opening store-within-a-store concepts with big brands or developing interactive entertainment like “Bullseye’s Playground.”

Mobile devices, especially smartphones, are key to unlocking the possibilities of large store space because they connect the worlds of online and physical retail. Not only do people buy merchandise on smartphones, but these devices allow shoppers to smartly interact with stores.

According to software firm Custora, mobile shopping accounted for a third of all online shopping on Thanksgiving, up from 20 percent last year. Overall e-commerce orders on Thanksgiving jumped 20 percent, “driven by mobile shopping and promotions.”

Until now, customers have used their devices to do relatively basic things like research a product or compare prices. But Target wants to deepen the engagement between store and device.

Google has been exploring solutions to that very challenge. Project Tango is a large scale collaboration between the search giant, companies, university researchers and outside app developers.

The goal is to infuse a mobile device with hardware and software that can calculate hundreds of thousands of 3-D measurements every second, update a user’s position and orientation, and combine that data into a model of the world around the phone.

“Bullseye’s Playground” is Project Tango’s largest prototype to date. Beginning Thursday, employees in four stores in the Bay Area will give out Google tablets to kids to play the game.

Google essentially overlaid the virtual world of “Bullseye’s Playground” with the layout of the store. So wherever the player moves, the game adjusts the tablet’s perspective. A user might be facing a shelf of picture frames in the physical store but see a frozen lake on the device.

“We wanted to experiment with the technology on a large scale, to see what kinds of things would get customers interested,” said Ben Malbon, Google’s director of creative partnerships.

The player can throw snowballs at targets, tap icicles to make them chime or bend down to see a snowman cooking over a fireplace in an igloo. The climax is a faceoff with Zoomer. Not coincidentally, the virtual dinosaur happens to be located near a toy dinosaur ($99 in the real world, in case you were wondering.)

That Target would even explore such technology would seem laughable just four years ago. Back then, high demand for the retailer’s Missoni collection caused its newly designed website to crash several times and delay orders, an embarrassing setback for the company.

But in the years since, Target has launched an all-out effort to catch up. The retailer opened a Technology Innovation Office in downtown San Francisco, hoping to lure top software talent and develop new ideas. Target worked with Facebook to offer a mobile app that allows customers to redeem digital deals in stores and then post it on the social network.

“We really went hard at tech, to no longer see it as an afterthought,” Wizemann said.

That urgency caught the notice of Google, which approached Target in February and completed a prototype in just a few months.

“We like to move quickly,” Malbon said. “We lean toward partners that want to just get on with it.”

©2014 the San Francisco Chronicle