We Are Royale's AR Campaign Brings The Pokémon Universe to Life

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are buzzwords these days. Every so often, we sit back and think nostalgically on days when the latest 8-bit Super Mario was just released and we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it. 

Fast forward to today, and we have the ability to take 3D character animations for traditional 30-second spots and create an augmented or virtual reality experience using the same 3D assets.

Now, if you don’t quite know what augmented and virtual realities are, stay tuned. We Are Royale are currently showing how cool this technology is and how it brings a whole new experience to your brand by engaging the consumer.

They teamed up with their friends at Omelet to create a Pokémon Card Pack commercial campaign to be released on both web and broadcast platforms. Naturally, they then thought to ourselves that there was a missed opportunity to create a digital extension of the campaign within the augmented reality and virtual reality worlds. With their design and technical knowledge finely tuned, We Are Royale made an augmented and virtual reality pipeline like no other, creating an AR/VR extension to this amazing campaign.

As video games have done before us, bringing playing cards to life in an interactive way seemed essential. Only this time, we just download an app, point a camera at a card, and watch characters spring to life with a beautiful render (derived from the 15 second linear spots that the agency did for the web and television release). What makes this experiment different is that they ended up using built-in proximity sensors to allow each card to recognise the other and then duke it out without the help of us. Pretty neat, huh?