Visit Britain AR game
Framestore designed, built and delivered Visit Britain with British Airways; an augmented reality (AR) board game on the Magic Leap platform. Created as part of the brand’s 100th birthday celebrations taking place throughout 2019, BA will take the game on tour around the world as it hosts a series of events to mark its centenary year.
The players’ goal is to land virtual aircraft on the physical game board to win points and collect icons that represent nine iconic cities around Britain from London to Inverness. As aircraft are landed, the cities are added to a CG arrivals board
Framestore’s team was responsible for the creation of the game from concept to delivery. ‘The initial brief was to create an entertaining experience that celebrated Britain for BA’s 100th birthday and took advantage of the latest technology,’ said Marta Dopierala, Producer at Framestore. ‘This meant that we had a fairly wide remit to come up with the concept and I think we’ve done a really great job of creating a game that’s simple enough for participants to understand quickly while being really engaging and fun to play.’
Over five weeks, the team created several CG elements which players interact with including the BA aircraft complete with jetstreams, 3D icons for each of the featured locations and the game’s arrivals board which populates as the in-game aircraft are landed. The game also features a special BA-branded Airbus A380 which players can land for additional points.
Talking about designing these elements, Simon Lourie, Technical Director at Framestore said ‘the approach to AR is different to the creation of other CG content because a lot more thought needs to go into the triangle count of an object as well as needing to make the most of a limited texture space. For this game, we’d create textures for half of an object and then mirror those onto the other half, which ultimately gave us twice the quality at the same performance cost.
The most fun element of this game are the little aircraft we created because they’re so intricate. If they look closely, players can see their tiny landing gear and little runway animations as they land.
‘This game is a great example of how the Magic Leap platform can be used by brands to connect with their audiences,’ said Jonny Dixon, Framestore’s Global Head of Production, Labs. ‘Augmented reality projects are becoming more popular for brand campaigns because of where they sit between consuming content in 2D and the full immersion of VR. The possibilities for AR are really exciting and it’s a medium our team loves to work with.’
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