Arcade & Meta launch filter for gold-winning garden at Chelsea Flower Show

The Arcade social media AR team has been hard at work on an experience for a very good cause and is delighted to introduce the Rare Space Garden, an Instagram filter designed to give people all around the world a chance to understand some of the principles behind designing a garden for sufferers of rare forms of visual dementia.

The filter was launched to coincide with the famous Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show where the real Rare Space Garden, designed by Charlie Hawkes, was unveiled this week. Charlie’s dementia-friendly design wowed judges and was awarded a coveted Gold medal, as well as Best Sanctuary Garden and Best Construction. The accompanying Instagram filter was designed to give audiences everywhere a small flavour of the process Charlie went through, before inviting them to step into the finished garden via a series of 360 images captured onsite before the show opened to the public.

Meta en The National Brain Appeal approached Arcade earlier in the year and asked if we would partner with them to bring the garden to life in AR for Instagram users everywhere, and we were only too happy to oblige.

“Arcade is all about connecting people to place through play, so when Meta asked us to create a fun and educational world effect filter for this phenomenal cause – and equally fabulous garden – we couldn’t possibly refuse,” said Arcade Co-Founder Alex Book.

“Filters are so often focused on the front camera, augmenting users’ faces in brilliant and hilarious ways, but for us the rear camera and the way it fosters engagement with the world around us is such a fascinating and still under-explored approach. We’re so grateful to the brilliant teams at Meta and The National Brain Appeal for trusting us to bring the Rare Space Garden to Instagram audiences all around the world, and hope we have done justice to their vision.”

Instagram users can try the Rare Space Garden experience on your mobile device by tapping hier. Share your photos from the garden and don’t forget to tag #rarespacegarden!

The Ritual of Sakura pop-up launches in Covent Garden

Arcade partnered with leading experiential agency Backlash to create an immersive pop-up experience for beauty brand Rituals in London’s Covent Garden.

We were asked to design a WebAR experience that ‘Celebrates New Beginnings’, immersing visitors into the world of the new ‘The Ritual of Sakura’ skincare range through a celebration of the Japanese Sakura blossom.

The experience was built using 8th Wall and incorporated a series of scannable markers that triggered different AR experiences, all to a soothing ambient oriental soundtrack.

After catching falling blossoms, discovering sakura-inspired poems, capturing selfies against the scenic backdrop, exploring the Rituals of Sakura range and finally playing a blossom mini-game, visitors end by following the Rituals Instagram account and being rewarded with a brand goody bag for taking part.

Over 1000 visitors to the pop-up enjoyed the experience over the three days it ran and engaged with a smaller version across five stores local to the area.

Penny Grivea, Managing Director of Rituals UK & Ireland, said, “We want to help people improve their wellbeing and focus on harmonising their body, mind, and soul. Our immersive experience celebrates the notion of new beginnings, and Springtime is the perfect opportunity to re-prioritize ourselves, reset our routines and look ahead positively towards the next bright chapter.”

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT WEBAR FOR FMCG, GET IN TOUCH

Glastonbury Stories launches at Glastonbury Abbey

We are thrilled to announce that our latest immersive adventure, Glastonbury Stories, has launched at the world famous Glastonbury Abbey.

Glastonbury Abbey attracts over 100,000 visitors each year and is famous for its stories spanning millennia, including Joseph of Arimathea and the legends of King Arthur – including his possible burial site within the ruined abbey. Glastonbury Stories invites abbey visitors to embark on a quest through time, exploring its rich, evocative history as they journey across the site.

Our adventure casts visitors in the role of a visting pilgrim, following in the footsteps of so many before them. But their task is about more than making the pilgrimage. You see, Glastonbury Abbey is a special place, a thin place, where time does not work in the same way as elsewhere.

You can reach back, and history can reach forward. Medieval artefacts, voices of the past, and even long-lost buildings may slip through portals in time to the present day.

Those who to take up this quest will overhear conversations from long ago and help return lost artefacts to their proper owners, healing these rifts in time. Some may even get a precious glimpse back through time to ghostly echoes of the buildings that once so proudly stood on the site.

So head down to Glastonbury Abbey today, immerse yourself in its astonishing history and, if you dare, take on the challenge of keeping the abbey and its stories safe for generations to come.

The Glastonbury Stories app is free to download and use, and is available on the app stores now. For more details and to download the app on iOS or Android please visit the Glastonbury Abbey website hier.

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

The Hundred Cricket Attax Cards Brought To Life In AR

Many of us remember fondly the thrill of opening a new pack of stickers or cards, seeing which sporting heroes we had picked up this time. Got. Got. Need! Ooh, a shiny!

But how awesome would it have been for those players to leap up out of the cards and show off their skills right in front of us? Well, now they can!

A NEW KIND OF COLLECTIBLE

The world of collectible cards took leap into the future with the release of this year’s Topps Cricket Attax, a set of cards featuring all the superstars from The Hundred, cricket’s newest and most exciting competition.

Not only could fans build up their collection of players from all the teams, they could also see many of them leap up out of the cards and show off their signature skills in magical WebAR!

By simply scanning the QR code on the back of the limited edition cards, fans could open a special web page using just their mobile browser, and point their device at the card to unlock the player as a 3D avatar.

Enjoy watching the player show what makes them so special, pause or slow down the motions to get a unrivalled view of their techniques, and take a photo or video to keep and share.

MEET THE PLAYERS

Topps Cricket Attax AR was built on WebAR platform 8th Wall to complement ‘Meet The Players’, the ground-breaking AR experience that lets fans get even closer to the avatars via the Sky Sports and The Hundred apps.

Users can enjoy a whole variety of skills and even step through portals to visit the players’ home grounds! Learn more about Meet the Players, including the motion capture and avatar creation process hier.

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT WEB AR, GET IN TOUCH

National Gallery Launches on Roblox

Keeper Council is a free, family-friendly game for Roblox inspired by The Keeper of Paintings augmented reality experience at The National Gallery in London.

Designed to offer 7-11 year olds a way to engage with the World of Keepers even if they are not at the Gallery, Keeper Council is a combined ‘tycoon’ and ‘obby’ Roblox game that invites kids to explore the magical crossroads where Keepers from all over the world meet up to hone their skills and catch up on all the latest Keeper goss.

Players are challenged to adventure through the mystical Keeper Council world, meeting different Keepers, completing their quests and being rewarded with masterpieces from The National Gallery so they can build their very own collection.

Like the Keeper of Paintings game itself, Keeper Council was developed in collaboration with a diverse set of young audiences, with over 80 children helping the Arcade team to create a game that met their very high standards!

Keeper Council represents an exciting new approach to engaging children for the Gallery and a first for the entire sector on Roblox, which was selected as the ideal platform to develop a game for remote audiences given its near-universal familiarity amongst the target age group.

"The result is a truly innovative experience that young people will love, whether they’ve been to The National Gallery before or not."
Professor James Bennett
Director of StoryFutures
"The way the project has evolved with the children through the design process is really special."
Lawrence Chiles
Head of Digital, The National Gallery
"We are grateful to the Gallery for letting us set this new benchmark in cultural engagement with them. We can't wait for families to meet the Keeper Council and get playing!"
Jon Meggitt
Jon Meggitt
Co-Founder, Arcade

Keeper Council and The Keeper of Paintings were commissioned by The National Gallery and StoryFutures, Royal Holloway, University of London, as part of StoryFutures China, a research and development project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). StoryFutures China is led by Brunel Design School, Brunel University London.

Read the full press release and coverage on The National Gallery website hier.

The game is free to play and currently available on desktop and laptop on Roblox hier.

Game. Set. Snap! at Wimbledon

Emma Raducanu, star of our AR magic mirror experience at Wimbledon

A fantastic couple of weeks of sport came to an end on Sunday 10th July, but not before thousands of Wimbledon visitors got the chance to have their photo taken with superstar HSBC Global Ambassadors Emma Raducanu and Tim Henman!

Well ok, not actually with them, but the next best thing – an AR pic next to a virtual version of these tennis heroes.

This activation was developed for HSBC, a partner of The Championships, Wimbledon. In collaboration with CSM Sports and Entertainment, ‘Game, Set, Snap’ was installed at two Wimbledon fan zones for the duration of the two-week tournament.

The experience uses ‘magic mirror’ techniques, employing a combination of touchscreen, 4K camera, media player and 2D chroma key holograms to create the effect. Each session also generates a unique URL which users can access via QR code, with a simple web interface and backend allowing fans to download and share their images privately and securely.

Although crowd favourite Emma was eliminated early, the good news for fans was that they could still meet her in a shot of their choice, and walk away with a souvenir photo to share with the friends and family.

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT IMMERSIVE FAN ENGAGEMENT, GET IN TOUCH

The Keeper of Paintings launches at The National Gallery

Children and Augmented Reality Characters in the National Gallery

The Keeper of Paintings and the Palette of Perception, the free mobile-based immersive game set at The National Gallery in London, has officially launched to the public.

The AR app is the first of its kind launched by The National Gallery, and has been created with the help of over 80 children.

Having been selected as winners of the StoryFutures China Storylab commission in early 2021, the launch is the culmination of a year-long project by the Arcade team, working in collaboration with The National Gallery, StoryFutures and a wider partnership group including Royal Holloway University of London and Brunel University of London.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF THE KEEPERS

This child-led experience takes place in the National Gallery, London but also, through augmented reality, a wider imagined world of Keepers where a group of magical beings who help care for some of our world’s most precious objects. 

Young Gallery visitors are asked to help guide a fictitious Keeper of Paintings to find a lost ‘Palette of Perception’ – a magical object with special gems that gives them ‘powers’ – to engage with the paintings digitally. As they move through the Gallery responding to the app’s story, a new digital world is revealed where visitors can solve puzzles, find hidden secrets, and collect the gems connected to the paintings.

The app is designed to be fun and rewarding for children and their families, but its primary goal is to foster interest and engagement with the Gallery’s masterpieces. The challenges within the game all require the kids to explore the art with their eyes, and include regular breaks in which they are prompted to put the phones away and chat about the paintings with their friends and family.

The cleverness of the app design is that the rewards only come via close study [of the paintings] with the naked eye.

The Sunday Times
Video afspelen

Jon Meggitt, Co‐Founder of Arcade and lead developer, says: ‘We were absolutely thrilled to win the opportunity to develop this experience in partnership with this special and talented group, but working alongside StoryFutures, the National Gallery, the wonderful kids of the Children’s Advisory Group and all the other partners has exceeded every one of our expectations.’

Lawrence Chiles, Head of Digital at the National Gallery, London, says: ‘It’s fantastic that we are able to launch our first dedicated app for children that creates a new perspective on the paintings at the National Gallery. Arcade, the children and all the partners involved have created something really magical.’

Professor James Bennett, Director of StoryFutures at Royal Holloway, University of London, says: ‘The National Gallery and Arcade have taken on a massive innovation challenge. This project shows what can be achieved in linking great storytelling with innovative new immersive technologies. Perhaps the most exciting thing is that the story of The Keeper of Paintings has only just begun.’

DOWNLOAD TODAY

The Keeper of Paintings and the Palette of Perception is designed for 7-11 year olds, will run at The National Gallery for at least 12 months, and can be downloaded for free on the Apple and Google stores now.

To plan your visit to The National Gallery, please visit www.nationalgallery.org.uk/keeper

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE KEEPER OF PAINTINGS OR TO TALK TO THE TEAM, GET IN TOUCH

Old Operating Theatre Goes Immersive

AR hologram of doctor

The Old Operating Theatre, as Europe’s oldest surviving operating theatre, has some astonishing stories to tell. Standing in the space, you can almost hear the echoes of 19th century surgeons carrying out amputations with no anaesthetic as dozens of smoking students shouted their approval or concern.

The museum is open to the public near London Bridge and offers a chance to step back through history – but now gives visitors an opportunity to hear these stories from one of the surgeons themselves, thanks to the magic of augmented reality.

Visitors to the Old Op can use an app to meet Mr Benjamin Travers, a renowned British surgeon who was appointed as lead demonstrator at Old St Thomas’ Hospital and was in charge when the women’s operating theatre was created.

Mr Travers appears as an AR hologram and welcomes visitors to the operating theatre, assuming them to be medical students late for his latest class. Across three short interactions he explains the surgery of Mrs Elizabeth Raigen, a patient whose injuries required her leg to be amputated below the knee, a procedure described at the time in The Lancet, one of the oldest medical journals in the world. Hear all about this fascinating – if slightly gruesome – surgery, from the surgeon himself!

Mr Travers augmented reality experience is live at The Old Operating Theatre now, and is free with admission. Book your museum ticket hier.

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT AUGMENTED REALITY FOR ARTS & CULTURE OR TO TALK TO THE TEAM, GET IN TOUCH