Wendy Founds Sunrise City Metaverse Experience on Meta’s Horizon Worlds
Wendy’s has founded a new city in the metaverse to focus on its breakfast foods. The new Sunrise City experience of the ‘Wendyverse’ widens the restaurant chain’s presence within Meta’s Horizon Worlds with a celebration of it breakfast creations in a digital experience including an appropriately themed obstacle course.
Sunrise City
Wendy’s opened its newest digital world with a tweet and an offer connecting Sunrise City to its physical locations, a free breakfast sandwich with any purchase. Sunrise City follows the initial test opening of the ‘Wendyverse in April. Sunrise City now joins the Wendyverse Town Square Central and its virtual restaurant s well as the ‘outdoor’ Wendyverse Partnership Plaza where people can play virtual basketball at “The Buck BiscuitDome.” Sunrise City seems to be going for a fantasy medieval feel with its vision of a castle in the sky full of bacon bridges, flying biscuits, and avatars paragliding on breakfast potatoes.
New world just dropped on Horizon Worlds. Get a free breakfast sandwich with any purchase and hop into Sunrise City. https://t.co/EVZxSU2FvT
— Wendy’s (@Wendys) June 15, 2022
“After driving thousands of Meta Horizon Worlds’ users online to shoot some virtual biscuit hoops and generating more than 650 million media impressions, it’s safe to say we successfully broke through with ‘Wendyverse,’” Wendy’s CMO Carl Loredo said in a statement.
Digital Wendy’s
Sunrise City and the other Wendyverse experiences may be informed by some of the restaurant’s other experiments in AI and virtual experiences. The company worked with Epic Games back in 2019 to create the Food Fight mode for Fortnite in 2019. More recently, Wendy’s and Google Cloud made a deal to develop a voice AI in a direction that could lead to a Wendy’s branded voice assistant. Limited versions of a custom voice assistant and branded smartphone for a marketing campaign have already been created, while KFC Canada used Amazon’s Polly technology to make a voice for its Alexa skill speak like Colonel Sanders. The metaverse adds more three-dimensional interactions to Wendy’s plans, however, and will likely be a centerpiece for the company’s marketing efforts for a while/
“For years we’ve been meeting our fans in unexpected ways and places with our unique approach to social media, gaming and engagement,” said Loredo said. “We’re excited to take this to the next level by launching the Wendyverse in Meta’s Horizon Worlds and bringing a totally new dimension of access to our fans. Truly a first of its kind, the Wendyverse bridges the best of today with tomorrow to show up for our fans across every world—with a Frosty and fries in hand.”
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