May 2020
Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up incorporates emerging technologies that offer novel functionalities. Much like wildcards, these innovations also introduce countless unknowns into the R&D process.
Emerging technologies incorporated in Big Fix Up include:
Fantasmo:
Unlike GPS positioning which is generally only accurate to a 3 metre radius, or cloud anchors, which enable people to create shared augmented play spaces by temporarily pooling the geographical points of reference between them whenever they scan an environment with their phone (to create mutual play spaces, for example), Fantasmo’s much more accurate virtual position scanning system enabled Fictioneers to create and own a detailed and accurate 3D map of a real world environment where they could then plot and place augmented events (like the Big Lad Battle) for all linked participants to see at the same time.
Flutter:
For years the different proprietary mobile operating systems like Android and iPhone have been causing developers headaches, forcing them to build totally separate applications for each different phone. Up till now, most bridging mobile development programs didn’t seem to work as well as native applications designed specifically for the separate platforms. Google’s Flutter framework offers a breakthrough approach that enables developers to simultaneously build native apps across both iOS and Android. For Fictioneers, this technology made it possible to prioritise a much simpler mobile delivery application that could readily link to and call up augmented reality Unity scenes as needed – an absolute necessity for the Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up multiplatform storytelling approach.
Fictioneers developers discuss the perils and pleasures of working with emerging technologies.
For some people unknowns such as these cause anxiety, for others excitement. For developers, they tend to be stock of the trade.
Unity MARS:
Unity MARS enables augmented reality applications to effectively scan and read environments in exquisite detail in order to transform them into “intelligent” augmented environments. This means, for example, that it can very quickly know where furniture is placed in a room, as well as what it looks like and “intelligently” dress a room, by placing augmented reality content on available locations like chairs and tables. Fictioneers used Unity MARS to create the augmented reality fix up your space packs, making Wallacifying your space, or filling it with Big Fix Up themed augmented reality content as easy as pointing your phone.
M.U.S.T.
Not to be outdone, Fictioneers also developed a new technology platform of their own. M.U.S.T. is a multi-user storytelling scheduling assistant that enables the team to schedule and manage a variety of different multi-platform content in the same multi-platform authoring application, for a variety of different users at the same time – and change all aspects of that story in real-time as needed.
One final word on this topic:
Occlusion:
Have you heard of it?
Word is this audio file is the biggest quiz question spoiler yet
