Drawing visitors to a watch fair stand
COSC (the Swiss Official Chronometer Testing Institute) certifies the precision of Swiss watches. Every movement spends several days in the laboratory, tested in five positions and at three different temperatures. It is highly precise work, but hard to show on a stand.
For its appearances at watch fairs, COSC wanted a playful way to attract visitors and help them understand what it does. The idea: an arcade cabinet with three mini games, each inspired by an aspect of certification. COSC came up with the games, and Octoplus Solutions developed them and prepared the cabinet for use on site.
Three mini games, three sides of certification
Optical measurement. Stop a stopwatch as close to 5 seconds as possible. A precision challenge that echoes the laboratory's measurements.
Automatic winding. Press a button as fast as possible for 12 seconds to wind the movement.
Positioning. A Tetris-inspired game where pieces must be placed in the right position, a nod to the five positions every movement is tested in.
Short rounds and rules you grasp in seconds: each game is designed to be picked up without explanation and to start a conversation with the team on the stand.
A plug-and-play cabinet
At a fair, nobody has time to set up a computer. We defined the cabinet's hardware specifications and configured the system so the game launches automatically in full screen at startup. All COSC has to do is switch the cabinet on.
The game is built with Svelte on a Laravel backend. Because it is a web application, it can also be played online at game.cosc.swiss.
In the field
The cabinet has already travelled with COSC to Geneva Watch Days in 2025 and 2026, as well as to the Inhorgenta fair in Munich. At each fair, it just needs to be plugged in for visitors to start playing.
