Cape Town’s exceptional Two Oceans Aquarium is a long-standing Flow client. The attraction, housing more than 3 000 sea creatures, including sharks, turtles and penguins, showcases the incredible diversity of marine life found in the ocean surrounding the southern tip of Africa.
Flow developed the Two Oceans Aquarium website in 2010, and then launched a revamped website in 2015.
The site provides useful information for locals and visitors, and also features an extensive species guide, in-depth information on conservation and research projects at the aquarium, and an online booking facility where tickets, membership, diving experiences and penguin encounters can be booked.
As digital partner to the Two Oceans Aquarium, Flow maintains and optimises the aquarium’s site and online shop, and focuses on SEO, attractions marketing and digital innovation.
Case study: Kelp Forest Quest game
In 2017 Flow was tasked with creating a “virtual exhibit” to keep visitors entertained as they walk through the Kelp Forest Exhibit area of the aquarium.
The Kelp Forest Quest is a mini-game developed for the Two Oceans Aquarium. Interactivity with the platform is run through Twitter, where players contribute to the biodiversity and health of the virtual kelp forest. Tweets add specific species to the virtual kelp exhibit, and a digital collections team removes species should the kelp forest biodiversity become unbalanced.
Aside from being displayed on the website, the game is a live, virtual exhibit at the Two Oceans Aquarium. Visitors use their own mobile devices to interact, via the Two Oceans Aquarium Wi-Fi.
Using Twitter, they will tweet their instructions to a certain Twitter handle, using a hashtag of their choice. They will then see their actions reflected in the game a few seconds later. They can interact as often as they like, or they can move on and continue walking through the aquarium.
The premise of the mini-game is to create balance in a virtual kelp forest exhibit. The tank starts out empty, and players then tweet on the Twitter platform from their computers or mobile devices with specific hashtags (for example: #fishname) that correspond to certain fish species. The Ocean Basket Virtual Kelp Forest was designed to be interactive – the in-built game means that instead of visitors passively staring at a virtual exhibit, they are able to participate in setting it up.
The platform performs multiple functions:
- It provides a simple, fun way for visitors to interact with the aquarium
- It is displayed on a big screen in the existing Kelp Forest Exhibit space, thus providing a substitute “attraction”
- There is an educational aspect to the game, informing players of some of the aquarium’s values and conservation messaging
Indicators tell players how many of each type of fish are required to fill the tank and hit the right targets. As a tweet comes in (the game runs a live search for the relevant hashtags), we see the aquarium’s “acquisition team” collect a fish and add it to the tank. However, players will be challenged to keep the optimum number of fish in the exhibit by the aquarium’s “release team”, which at regular intervals removes a random number of fish and “releases” them back into the ocean.
The Kelp Forest Quest game has been a great success. We have received positive feedback from our client, telling us that visitors to the aquarium engage with the space. The aquarium gets on average one million visitors a year, which means a conservative estimate (based on foot traffic) is that the exhibit is engaged with by at least 500 000 individuals.
The core services that were required and provided by Flow for the completion of this campaign were the conceptualisation, full design (in terms of visual aesthetic and UX), development, testing, on-site implementation and final publication of the final product: the Kelp Forest Quest.
The game had to:
- Be easy to use
- Be easy to understand
- Entertain visitors
- Be informative
- Convey accurate messaging around the aquarium’s ongoing conservation efforts
- Accurately reflect the species that live in a kelp forest
- Encourage visitors to contribute to and engage with the exhibit in order to drive bio-sustainability in a virtual space
- Act as a marketing platform to highlight the work of the aquarium
Online links
Reference from client
“Working with the Flow team has been an amazing experience. I often feel like the Flow team is part of our staff complement. They understand our brand, they appreciate our values, they just get it right every single time.” – Helen Lockhart, communications and sustainability manager, Two Oceans Aquarium