This installation was live at several Russian hotels where Visa had their fan experience centers during the World Cup 2018. We looked to some of the automatic beer systems currently on the market and decided that we needed to use some existing technology to facilitate the build, but we were going to need to do totally custom integration and programming in order to bring this idea to life. This was made more challenging by the fact that the installations were managed from the US and Russian networks did not allow us to access out own kiosks until we figured out how to sidestep this network lockdown. We also had to pay careful attention to liquor service laws and define ways of having an automated kiosk verify age and eligibility of customers looking to get a beer.

Payments aren’t sexy, but transactions can feel magical when you remove the friction to paying.

Visa needed to communicate the idea of contactless payments to a large audience in a fun way that showed the magic and delight of not having to pull our a wallet or phone. Visa did this by engaging fans at one of the largest sporting events in the world and allowing guests to have a moment of fun that demonstrated personalization and technical proficiency of Visa’s capabilities, all in the time it took to pour the perfect pint of beer. People are becoming more familiar with tap to pay, but the leap to contactless payments will be a huge game changer and Visa wanted to demonstrate everything they are doing to enable this type of transaction by demonstrating it in real time while telling a personalized story of what it gets you.

The goal was for guests to come away with a better understanding of what is happening behind the scenes with Visa technology and how they are enabling secure contactless payments worldwide. People were engaged, came for repeat visits and had a better understanding of Visa’s contactless payments capabilities. This tied into the functionality of the Visa Now App witch we revamped as part of this installation to allow it to integrate with real world experiences. We have also deployed this same Perfect Pint concept at the Visa Payment Forum in Washington DC and are working to deploy it at several more events in 2019. The comprehensive back end control system means that additional kiosk instances can be spun up and connect to the overall system seamlessly no matter how many there are or where they are in the world.

This installation featured several pieces of technology brought together in unique ways to accomplish a totally touchless payment experience. The system used NFC readers and Intel Realsense cameras to generally track the crowd in front of the kiosk. This means that we still needed to track the specific person using the kiosk and identify them. We used a pressure pad on the floor of the unit to tell us that someone was ready to use the experience and then combined the app, sensor and camera data to get a positive identification of the person using the experience. This system then connected with our backend infrastructure that was tied into both the VISA app and the custom back end infrastructure allowing us to surface the users favorite team, what games they were attending and other information to serve them a customized infographic experience while they waited the 90 seconds for their beer. We then used a highly modified version of the Pubinno Smart Tap system to serve the beer. We also used a system of flash chillers and regulators to ensure that when different beers were poured they came out at the right temperature and with the perfect amount of head.