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Wallace & Gromit’s latest adventure has finally arrived with today’s release of The great solution, a first-of-its-kind, story-driven interactive experience that brings together iconic characters with state-of-the-art augmented reality technology. Revealing a story that evolves over time, The great solution up is the latest example of new and innovative approaches to storytelling made possible by the integration of real-time game engine technology and the ever-increasing computing power of the mobile platform. The free app is now available on iOS and Android devices in the UK, US, and Canada.
Iconic animation studio Aardman has partnered with Fictioneers, a creative consortium of three British companies: Potato, Sugar creative and Tiny Rebel Games – with the support to the investigation of University of South Wales, supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funds, to produce the AR / MR app.
Starting today, new employees to Wallace’s company, Spick & Spanners, can download the app from the App Store or Google Play and get started. When viewers begin the 3-act story, they will begin in Act 1, which includes their first jobs for the company, an AR hologram visit from Wallace, a chance to explore Wallace’s iconic living room as a mixed reality portal. , taking on her first rush AR job, and then meeting the first live-action character in a Wallace & Gromit story, Clarissa Kent. In about a week, on January 25, Act 2 will begin and at this point the story will begin to update several times a day until Act 3 begins in early February.
The great solution is voiced by award-winning British actors Miriam Margolyes and Jim Carter, along with Isy Suttie, Grace Ahmed, Joe Sugg and Ben Whitehead as Wallace. You can see the full list of characters in the story. here.
In producing the app, the Fictioneers sought out cutting edge AR technologies and partners; sought out Unity Technologies, which powers more than 60 percent of the world’s AR and VR content, with its new MARS product and the AR Foundation Toolkit, which gives creators the power to build mixed reality applications (MR ) and augmented reality (AR) that interact with any real-world environment. Technology and support from the Unity team have enabled Fictioneers to bring gadgets and environments to life and give them intelligent and dynamic behavior.
The great solution It is the result of over two years of R&D work by Fictioneers, funded by UKRI through a multi-million pound moving picture demonstrator grant won by the consortium. According to Fictioneers co-founder Susan Cummings, “We won based on a vision for the future of storytelling, powered by immersive technologies, seamlessly blending AR, XR, games, CG video / live action and comic strips. full motion to form a coherent story told in real time to the audience over several weeks. Aardman believed so much in our vision that he partnered with us to create and deliver a new Wallace & Gromit story that is only told in this new way! with the user as an active participant in that story! “
Noting that his most important goal was to show that an enjoyable story could be told in real time through a variety of experiences and interactions, Cummings says, “We hope users come out of it feeling like they have a sense of agency in that story. and also that they fully understood and experienced the story, that there were no gaps in their understanding of the plot. “
Scott Ewings, Venture Lead at Potato and Co-Founder of Fictioneers, adds: “We are very excited to launch The great solution, the first release from our new studio Fictioneers. We believe it is a one-of-a-kind experience, part of our vision to leverage multiple technologies, media types and formats to tell enhanced, collaborative and immersive stories in real time. To do this, we have developed a software platform, the MUST Platform, to enable creative teams to design stories, timelines and activities in real time and then integrate a variety of transmedia to support those stories. With The great solutionWe have created a new, rich and multi-layered experience where, for the first time, you can become part of the Wallace & Gromit story. This will be the first of many releases using the Fictioneers platform. “
In producing the app, Fictioneers used a variety of cutting-edge tools, including Unity’s MARS technology, which gives the phone a more semantic understanding of the space it is in; Unity’s AR Foundation, which enables support for Google’s AR Core and Apple’s AR Kit features; Flutter, Google’s mobile app development technology); Unity “as library”; and Unity’s HD Render Channel, to create new animated videos of Wallace and Gromit. “This is all very demanding on phones, so it has been a process of continuous optimization and testing to support as wide a range of devices as possible,” explains Cummings.
“We use MARS inside the playground of Great arrangement, for the creation of dynamic navigation meshes and identification of appropriate surfaces for the content we are placing (walls, floors, raised surfaces, etc.) ”, he continues. “We also use the MARS simulation environments to test the engine so that we don’t have to constantly compile when we make changes to content, which speeds development.”
Unity’s HDRP (High Definition Processing Channel) tool allowed Fictioneers to quickly iterate the development of the cinematic appearance and match that of pre-rendered images without the long render times. The ready-to-use HDRP shader gave developers the ability to closely mimic real materials, bringing the iconic Wallace & Gromit to life.
“Mixed reality is a rapidly growing and changing area of technology that is very demanding on mobile devices,” shares Cummings, “so it has been a challenge to support as many devices as we can with a stable experience.”
Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic was also extremely challenging. “The end of the story was meant to occur as a city-scale experience in Bristol, England, which we have scanned with lidar,” he reveals. “COVID meant that we reconsidered this ending for now, taking that LIDAR data and turning it into something that we can miniaturize and allow the user to scale for a surface at home or scale for the backyard or a park. That was, of course, the most responsible way of thinking about the ending. And it’s a truly wonderful experience – to have Bristol ‘brought in’, wherever it is. Innovate UK has committed to providing additional funding in 2021 to enable us to deliver the city-scale experience in several cities where we have just started working. “
Merlin Crossingham, Creative Director of Wallace & Gromit at Aardman says, “Wallace & Gromit have innovation, gadgets and technology at the comedic heart of their world. Working with Fictioneers to create The great solution It has been a perfect match, allowing us to bring the duo’s fantastic fictional contraptions directly into the homes of our audiences using the latest real technology. “
Timoni West, Vice President of XR Tools at Unity, summing up the enthusiasm for the project’s launch, as well as the future of innovative storytelling experiences, concludes: “We hope other creatives will experience The great solution and see what’s possible in terms of extending an IP and giving fans another point of contact to interact with virtually. We see the future of augmented reality as part of everyday life and we are committed to ensuring that anyone can participate in this future by creating tools that are widely accessible so that creators can reach the widest possible audience. “
Dan Sarto is editor and editor-in-chief of the Animation World Network.
