Mohegan Sun Installs 360-Degree Photo Booth

So says the casino giant, which announced Monday “Shine 360,” a 25-foot-wide permanent installation with 48 overhead cameras that lets guests record 12-second video snapshots of a moment from all angles—à la E!’s red carpet Glam Cam—and then share the clips with Facebook and Twitter social followings.

Located outside the arena on the main gaming floor of Mohegan Sun’s Uncasville, Conn., campus, the installation could help amplify the lineup of celebrities that pass through to perform, vp of marketing communications George Galinsky told Adweek. “We're basically going to have nonstop explosions with social media,” he said. “We're going to be having celebrities going through it consistently and pushing it to all their fan bases.”

Dancing With the Stars’ Mark Ballas, for example, already gave it a test run earlier this month while at the casino for a concert. So did The Bachelorette’s Ashley Hebert and her fiance J.P. Rosenbaum, who received a dance lesson from Ballas at the casino.

It’s also a way to turn the casino’s regular army of normal visitors into evangelists for the brand. So far, the installation has been reserved for media and celebrity previews, but on March 2, Shine 360 will open to all guests who have signed up for the company’s loyalty program, the Player’s Club. “It's an opportunity for our regular folks to…have their shining moment, be a star, be in the limelight,” Galinsky said.

Part of the brand’s wider “Time to shine” campaign, Shine 360 was jointly conceived by Mohegan Sun’s lead creative agency People Ideas & Culture and digital agency Profero. It was created with the help of visual effects shop Digital Air, whose technology makes the 360-degree effect possible, and designer Joe Doucet.

An average of 25,000 people are at the resort daily, said Galinsky, up to as much of 35,000 or 40,000 on weekends. Not all of those are members of the loyalty program. But the barrier for entry is low, according to PI&C partner Domenico Vitale. “It takes less than three minutes,” he said. “[And] the moment they swipe their card, we know who went in there, so it's a good CRM tool.”

Galinsky declined to share how much the installation cost to produce but thinks it will pay for itself quickly by bringing the brand’s message to the social networks of its guests. “The media value in digital alone is just going to be incredible,” he said. Or, as Vitale put it, “It's a channel, essentially, that we created.”

Still, the project was outside of Galinsky’s normal comfort zone. “I'm a old-school advertising kind of guy,” he said. “So this was a leap of faith.”