Arcade launches Zog trail with Magic Light Pictures and Forestry England

Introducing Zog: A Forest Adventure!

We are delighted to announce the launch of our latest immersive experience, Zog: A Forest Adventure, created with Magic Light Pictures for Forestry England.

Using the very latest augmented reality technology, the free app brings to life lovable dragon Zog and some of his friends from the much-loved Zog film, based on the picture book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, as children and their families follow new interactive trails at 26 Forestry England sites across the country.

Launching on 30 January, the self-led trails encourage children to get exploring and learn more about forests and the trees, plants and wildlife they contain. Featuring lots of bonus activities, the Zog: A Forest Adventure app gives users the chance to interact with the 3D characters from the film as they discover how they can care for the forest and how the forests can care for them in return.

Inspired by the beloved books by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, Zog: A Forest Adventure invites children to join the dragon, Zog, and his friends on a thrilling journey through the forest. After downloading the app, kids can follow a trail and complete a series of exciting challenges that are brought to life through the magic of AR.

We are proud to have partnered with Magic Light Pictures, the creators behind the successful Gruffalo Spotter apps, to bring this experience to life. Zog: A Forest Adventure is the perfect way to get out into the great outdoors and we can’t wait for families to explore the forests and discover the world of Zog and his friends.

Alex Sanson, Senior Brand Manager at Magic Light said: “Forestry England sites offer the perfect classroom for budding little dragons. The new Zog trails offer a great opportunity to young explorers to learn about all the wonderful ways our forests can look after us and how we can look after them. The AR app adds a fun extra element so that children can explore the character, the story and the forest in a new way.”

Venture into the forest to meet Zog and his friends!

Jon Meggitt, CEO at Arcade said: “Several of us at Arcade have young children and know first-hand just how much Zog means to them. Bringing him and his friends to life in magical AR, and giving families even more reasons to get out into forests across the country, has been one of the most exciting and rewarding projects we have worked on. We’re very proud of the result and can’t wait to see all the little dragons earning their golden stars just like Zog!”

The Zog app adds an exciting extra dimension to the hugely popular Zog family forest trails, and follows the runaway success of Magic Light’s BAFTA-nominated Gruffalo Spotter apps, originally launched with Forestry England in 2017.

The Zog: A Forest Adventure app is available from from 30 January 2023. For more details and to download the app for free on iOS or Android please visit https://www.forestryengland.uk/zog.

We’ve been using ChatGPT’s language model for 18 months – and it’s awesome

Alone Together with ChatGPT's language model

As ChatGPT has been making headlines across every corner of the internet over the past couple of months, it’s worth remembering that the incredible technology behind it – OpenAI‘s GPT-3 language model – has actually been around for quite a bit longer. In fact, we have been working with it for the past 18 months, and I thought it would be useful to reflect on our experience.

As far back as mid/late 2021, we chose GPT-3 as the engine to drive our upcoming immersive AI short film series, Alone Together, produced with Dustin Harvey from XO Secret and Afro Viking Pictures. From the moment we integrated it into our app architecture we were blown away by its capability to mimic human speech behaviour, and it continues to amaze us every day.

Alone Together is a collection of episodes in which users watch a dramatic situation unfold between two characters, before finding themselves thrust into one of the roles and tasked with continuing the conversation. They are free to further explore the drama or to veer off and ask the character absolutely anything they want. Whatever the user decides, the character responds in an astonishingly human way – all thanks to GPT-3.

Users can follow the narrative or ask the characters anything they want

A hit at SXSW

Our goal was to explore the boundaries of AI chat in a creative context, and GPT-3 was by far the most promising of the language models available. And it certainly caught the attention of visitors to our demo at SXSW last year, being one of the first implementations of the technology in a creative medium.

The experience goes like this:

Watch a short film episode. After 2-3 minutes the linear film seamlessly becomes interactive, with the user taking the position of the main protagonist, but also now in control of the camera – with which they can look around the film set in 360 degrees. An accurate avatar of another character from the film is sitting opposite the user and speaks to them. The user talks back, and is understood by the avatar, leading them into a conversation. After a couple of minutes, the film becomes linear again.

For the SXSW demo we had developed a single short narrative, but have now developed this into a four-episode series, with each episode both a discrete experience and part of an overarching whole. To avoid any spoilers I won’t go into any more details just yet!

On the path to true human-AI conversation

The more important point, at least for those of us interested in the tech, is what’s happening inside the app. To deliver the user experience above, we complete the following sequence of events in under two seconds:

  • Capture the user’s voice as an audio file (using custom algorithm to determine when user has started and stopped a sentence)
  • Convert the audio to text using iOS native Speech-to-Text engine
  • Send the resulting text to our GPT-3 model using OpenAI’s GPT-3 API
  • Get resulting text response from GPT-3
  • Send resulting text to Microsoft’s Text-to-Speech service
  • Get resulting audio file from Microsoft and play in the app
  • Synchronise the avatar to the resulting audio using SALSA lip-sync plugin
  • Repeat

The result is AI interaction which is getting closer and closer to true human conversational behaviour. Its uses are clearly vast and widespread, but in our case we are thrilled to have successfully used it to unleash entirely new forms of creative expression.

ChatGPT will continue to astonish, terrify, delight and anger the world, but our experience with the GPT-3 model behind it demonstrates the mind-bending creative possibilities that are unlocked by this incredible advanced technology.

Alone Together is coming to festivals this February, with a wider release scheduled for later in 2023.

Jon Meggitt is Co-founder and CEO of Arcade.

jon@arcade.ltd