Project: Honeyway Train Webcam Game
Client: General Mills – Honey Nut Cheerio’s
Agency: Saatchi and Saatchi New York
The Opportunity
Our client has one of the largest selling breakfast cereals in the USA. The brief was to create an Augmented Reality (AR) experience for Honey Nut Cheerios that places the product at the centre of the action.
Honeyway Train Augmented Reality Game from Boffswana on Vimeo.
The Result
We created a world first Augmented Reality (AR) game using the Unity3D engine.
It was vital that the physical world becomes part of the game as opposed to AR being a gimmick pasted on top. So the actual Cheerios boxes activate and control the game.
It is a unique game experience that offers kids something they haven’t seen before, and most importantly it’s a whole lot of fun.
The game controls are very intuitive and the user controls everything with the box from clicking “Start Webcam Game” all the way to the “Game Over”.
Additional Elements
• Game control designs created to commonly understood video game conventions ensured high level intuitive gameplay.
• Late in the project we added a shadow under Buzz which gave the user subtle hints about buzz’s position (important as the camera could be pointing at the scene from any angle), which made the game easier to play
• A quick interactive tutorial at the start of the game actively demonstrates correct positioning of the box and the steering mechanic.
This dictated the layout of the game and in particular the way the boss fight is handled by having using obstacle avoidance to defeat Handsome Hector.
• Two types of smoothing algorithms combined to get a good trade off between AR accuracy and correcting errors in pose estimation data, while the rotational data for steering buzz runs through a separate pipeline to keep lag low for control.
• The difficulty was tuned after some invaluable feedback from testing the game with children
• As the AR requires a webcam it was also important that there was a non-webcam option.
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