The Red Cross' AR Experience Puts You at the Heart of War

Discover the story of a little girl living through war. Put yourself in her place, explore her room, feel her experience. All through Augmented Reality.

The new app, “Enter the room", produced by the International Committee of the Red Cross invites each of us to live a unique experience. The global organization wants to raise awareness about the importance of health care in conflict zones.

“Enter the room” was conceived of and developed by French agency Nedd. It uses the "portal effect" which the agency introduced last year, relying on Apple’s ARKit technology.

The result is a new kind of immersive experience, somewhere between AR and VR, which pushes the feeling of presence to a whole new level.

The experience, available on the iPhone (requires iOS11 and an iPhone 6S or higher), begins in real life: as users hold up their phone, a virtual door appears. They are then invited to cross the threshold and explore a seemingly ordinary child’s bedroom, as if they were really there.

Users never see the little girl herself and there are no words. Instead, they can follow the evolution of her life and health over the last 4 years of war by leafing through her memories – drawings, toys, and other objects around the room – and by the sounds coming from outside. The room changes through each successive year to the present day.

Augmented Reality (AR) has been used more and more frequently for gaming and other forms of entertainment, as well as in apps as a utilitarian tool (Ikea, Amazon…), but the ICRC and Nedd wanted to demonstrate that it can be a revolutionary medium for storytelling, an efficient way of communicating a message, portraying emotions and, ultimately, serving a larger cause.