Wallace and Gromit are stepping out of the screen and into your living room through a new multiplayer adventure that blends augmented reality, comic books, and audio storytelling. This project, led by a consortium of British creative companies with research support from the University of South Wales, tackles a gap in immersive entertainment: how to keep audiences engaged with a story across multiple platforms and over time, rather than in a single, isolated session. The team is building a narrative that evolves based on user choices and interactions, using location-specific AR experiences and alternate reality game elements alongside traditional media. If successful, this could change how entertainment companies design cross-platform experiences, offering a model for keeping audiences invested in a story outside of a dedicated app or headset. The research is applied and commercial, not fundamental science—its immediate impact will be on the creative industries, potentially influencing how future interactive narratives are built for franchises of any scale.
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Partnering with Aardman and based on the globally beloved Wallace & Gromit franchise (celebrating its 30th anniversary this year), get ready for an incredible, first of its kind, story-driven experience created by British companies Tiny Rebel Games, Potato, and Sugar Creative in collaboration with the creative team at Aardman and with research support from the University of South Wales. For us, the future of immersive experiences lies in being able to weave a number of threads together. At the core of these threads: an engaging narrative created in partnership with the incredibly creative team at Aardman and which will appeal to Wallace & Gromit fans of all ages. Around this core, we will utilise a variety of approaches to enable storytelling and to allow users to engage with an evolving narrative. These threads may utilise immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality along with ARG elements, location-specific multi-user AR experiences, comic books and audio storytelling. This is a first of its kind, epic story-driven multiplayer adventure which is built on an engaging narrative, with a myriad of sources of stimulus and communication and a collaborative interactive experience. The end result will be an experience that continually engages with and influences you, as the audience. You will be thinking and caring about the experience outside of the core 'interactive' offering and will be able to dive deeper into the story-line in different ways, at different times, when you choose to do so.
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