Tactic.studio
Tactic.studio is an augmented reality and extended reality creative studio founded in 2014. The studio specialises in consumer-facing AR experiences, brand activations, and interactive campaigns that bridge physical products and digital content. Its most widely deployed work is Living Wine Labels — an AR platform that animates the characters printed on wine labels, reaching millions of consumers through retail packaging.
Living Wine Labels
Living Wine Labels began as a collaboration with Treasury Wine Estates and their 19 Crimes wine brand. 19 Crimes features mugshot portraits of historical criminals on its labels; the AR experience brings these figures to life — the label character speaks, tells their story, and interacts with the viewer through the phone screen.2
The experience was initially delivered through a native iOS and Android application. Users downloaded the app, pointed their phone at a 19 Crimes bottle, and the label character animated in real time. The campaign was a commercial success: 19 Crimes grew to become one of the fastest-growing wine brands in the United States, and the AR experience was credited as a significant driver of consumer engagement and repeat purchase.1
The Effie Award — a global marketing effectiveness award judging campaigns against proven commercial outcomes — recognised Living Wine Labels as an effective marketing innovation, validating the direct link between the AR activation and measurable sales performance.1
Migration to WebAR
As the app-based deployment model matured, a structural limitation became clear: requiring a dedicated app download created friction that prevented a significant portion of curious consumers from engaging with the experience at the point of purchase. A shopper holding a bottle in a store was unlikely to download a new app before putting it in their cart.
Tactic.studio migrated Living Wine Labels to WebAR — delivering the experience through a mobile browser, launchable via QR code printed on the label or packaging without any installation step.3 This transition substantially expanded the accessible audience: any smartphone user with a camera-capable browser could activate the experience at the moment of encounter, without prior intent or setup.
The migration used the 8th Wall WebAR platform (subsequently acquired by Niantic), which provides camera-based tracking and AR rendering in JavaScript for both Android and iOS — working around iOS's restriction on WebXR AR access to ARKit by implementing its own tracking pipeline in the browser.
Work Beyond 19 Crimes
The Living Wine Labels platform expanded across Treasury Wine Estates' portfolio and beyond. Additional brands and categories using the Tactic.studio AR platform include Snoop Dogg's wine collaboration, Jack Daniels, and White Claw, among others — extending the packaging AR model from a single brand activation to a repeatable deployment platform for consumer goods.
The studio's broader work includes the Rabble game — an AR-native social experience — and Aviana, a WebAR content management platform designed to make AR packaging activation deployable at scale without custom development per brand.
Context in the AR Landscape
Tactic.studio's trajectory illustrates the broader shift in consumer AR from native app to web delivery. The studio was an early mover on the native app model when it was the only viable option, and an early adopter of WebAR when browser-based delivery became practical — a pattern repeated across the industry as WebAR maturity made the install barrier untenable for consumer activation use cases.4
See also: Companies & Research · Passthrough · WebXR · ARKit · ARCore · History of XR