Sky TV's Flying Monsters

Pterosaurs take over the App Store

The Challenge
 

Sky is Europe's leading direct-to-consumer media and entertainment company. To celebrate the release of its first 3D stereoscopic TV documentary, Sky wanted to develop an Augmented Reality (AR) application incorporating CGI pterosaurs. Due to the high cost of the licensing fees and technology at the time, Sky required an alternative solution that would best promote its latest David Attenborough documentary in a mobile application.

The Solution

We worked closely with Sky's CGI team to scale down its 3D pterosaur models to fit mobile screens. The 3D capabilities within mobile phones are more limited so the challenge was to simplify them sufficiently to make them look good, render in a suitably responsive manner and retain the visual appeal of their TV counterparts.

The Outcome

We built a cost-effective 3D engine which took the CGI models and repurposed them for mobile phones. Consumers were able to take selfies with a pterosaur, positioning themselves anywhere in the picture and with a variety of backdrops.

Fun fact
 

You can watch the clip below: