January 2013

iRiS AR App

Dane Aleksander—graphic artist in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Before I knew it we had created another brand.

iRiS AR was designed as a template app for universal augmented reality (AR) experiences. As an idea its one constraint was that the functionality was geared to promote a range of corporate augmented reality enabled advertisements, and as a result we decided to have the app take on a generic art direction. An early brainstorm considered the novelty of augmented reality and landed the name “iris” with the idea of branding a new perspective on vision. I created the app icon on a whim on a weekend. I then continued to maintain the brand design along with the graphical user interface of the iRiS AR app.[1]

The iRiS AR app launched in August 2012 as a hub for augmented reality marketing campaigns. Its early success drew awareness to the studio through the design of the iRiS brand, and the icon transitioned to company logo in mid-2012. This news was a pleasent surprise, followed by a scramble to prepare the working files from the app icon for company-wide use. This would include branding printed on little business cards and on large billboard posters.

Drambuie: A Taste of the Extraordinary

The release campaign for the iRiS AR app featured Drambuie—the original iRiS AR experience: A Taste of the Extraordinary. The clients called for a very creative art direction, “an experience of the surreal.” The idea was that a Drambuie bottle appeared in 3D in front of Drambuie billboards when people viewed them with their mobile phone with the iRiS AR app, and people tapped their phone to tip the bottle and see it spin and spill Drambuie… droplets that floated… up into the night sky.

The technical challenge for me was to make the Drambuie bottle and liquid look and animate like the physical product except on a phone and in augmented reality in an environment where computer processing was at a premium. A performance-based animation rig made it possible to spin and tip the bottle on edge without run-time rigid-body simulation or complex animation data. The ‘liquid’ also needed a creative rigging solution because a run-time fluid simulation was not an option. Our lead developer on the project was Lionel “Lio” Mille. Lio and I then needed to optimize the layered shaders in Unity 3D to find the look that best represented the reflection and refraction of Drambuie, both inside its bottle and as it emptied as floating golden droplets.

Select bus stops in Canada, below, were decorated for the occasion.

CN Tower: Edge Walk

Another early and fun client for iRiS AR was CN Tower, a major tourist attraction and the world’s largest free standing tower measuring at 553 metres found in Toronto, Canada. They were promoting an attraction where you can walk around the outside edge of the tower in a harness that is attached at 356 metres up. Ad-dispatch was challenged to re-create the experience on the Edge Walk on a mobile phone. And so to re-create the view of the Toronto skyline and cityscape from the CN Tower, we designed a VR experience that used the same gyroscope technology as is used for AR, and this time with a full digital world for people to look around in. The idea was to give people the experience of the CN Tower Edge Walk from their phone – iPhone, iPad or Android – triggered off bus shelter poster ads around Toronto as well as billboards at Dundas Square.

Our lead animator was sent on a research trip to try to capture that magical feeling of vertigo, hanging off the side of the CN Tower. Oh, and we worked on this project in winter in Canada. The Edge Walk was closed due to cold weather (-35 degrees) and strong winds on the day San “the man” Mathew was scheduled to go up. He went up and gathered reference the very next day. Spoiler: San made it back to the studio and stitched the panorama, below, from his vantage point from the rooftop of the CN Tower.[2]

Meanwhile, I modeled a Canadian Forces Snowbird from a computer at the studio not at several hundred metres up in the sky, and for a bonus feature, below-right, for the same iRiS AR experience. Postscript: The app went on to win a Merit Award at the 2013 Ice awards in the multimedia category.