Virtual Christmas Ornament Shooting Gallery

About the project

Together with the DDB advertising agency, we created an Augmented Reality application for Magyar Telekom's Christmas promotion. Based on DDB's original concept, the resulting solution let visitors shoot virtual, 3D, animated AR-wrapped Christmas photo messages onto a Christmas tree set up in the WestEnd shopping center in Budapest. By selecting the “create your own ornament” menu option, visitors could work with a hostess to create a postcard with a text message, which was then placed into a virtual ornament ball via an animation. Afterward, a virtual slingshot containing the finished ornament appeared on the tablet screen, overlaid on the live camera view of the tree. To launch the ornament, all you had to do was aim at any point on the tree. The launch was rendered as an AR animation of the virtual ornament flying through the real world — the ball followed a different flight path depending on which of the many targetable points was chosen. Besides sound effects, a special feature accompanied the ornament's arrival on the tree — if you hit one of the real, featured ornaments on the tree, it would light up. You could share your launched ornament on our Facebook page, and of course you could also browse the other ornaments already shot onto the tree. This uniquely engaging application, built for the Android platform, was not made publicly available and was created only for the duration of the promotion.