When Warner Brothers affiliate Legendary Pictures – responsible for such critically acclaimed films as Inception, Where the Wild Things Are, The Dark Knight, 300, and Watchmen – wanted to use Augmented Reality to announce their latest film, they turned to Saskatchewan’s Talking Dog Studios to provide them with the technology to do so.
This week, Legendary Pictures is at San Diego’s Comic-Con International, the world’s biggest comics and pop culture convention, celebrating the beginning of production on their next film: “Godzilla”. Persons attending the conference will receive a t-shirt with an image of the new Godzilla, and when they look at themselves in a webcam at the Legendary Pictures tradeshow booth, they’ll see a superimposed animation of Godzilla’s “atomic breath” shooting out into the air in front of them from Godzilla’s mouth, complete with black smoke rising from the flames and the ground-shaking bellow of Godzilla’s instantly recognizable roar.
This immersive experience was designed by Talking Dog Studios, of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and was supervised by Larry Monte of California’s Corporate Images. Talking Dog have been developing various AR applications for the past year, but owner Rob Bryanton sees this as a major step forward: “Augmented Reality is very open-ended, which is great because the possibilities are so wide, but it’s something that is best experienced rather than described,” says Bryanton. “With the Godzilla installation, we were able to quickly create something that our clients were immediately happy with, so we see this as a great recognition of the skillset that we’ve now developed”.
Another Augmented Reality project just launched by Talking Dog this week works with Android phones and the iPhone – it’s called “Where the Buffalo Roam”. Talking Dog comes from a city formerly known as “Pile of Bones”, which resulted from the huge herds of bison which used to roam the prairies. This free app allows users to look through their phone’s camera and be transported back in time, as they look at a huge herd of 3D buffalo being generated around them. If you have Layar installed you can go directly to our project here http://m.layar.com/open/
For more information about Talking Dog’s AR work, go to “www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar”.
