Angry Birds – Page 3 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

October 8, 2018

Rovio Entertainment Is Planning A New AR App Called Project Magic

The company behind the phenomenally popular Angry Birds franchise has now announced it is working on developing a state-of-the-art augmented reality (AR) app, referred to as ‘Project Magic’ which is planned to provide rich AR experiences for brands, retailers and consumers.

The new app from Rovio Entertainment will transport consumers to a new world which lets them engage with branded content experiences, providing a link between digital and physical licensed products. The app is planned to be released in 2019.

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Project Magic will let fans of Angry Birds use an AR portal to travel to the home of the Angry Birds, called ‘Bird Island’. There, users will be able to explore the island and take part in various AR experiences and enjoy high-quality AR locations.

Simo Hämäläinen, Senior Vice President, Brand Licensing at Rovio Entertainment, commented: “Project Magic represents a major licensing milestone for Rovio’s Brand Licensing Unit as our vision of being able to add digital overlay to licensed products is now reality. We’ve been working diligently alongside our long-time AR partner Zappar to create a cool, always on digital brand licensing ecosystem that not only adds value to consumers, but also helps to bridge the physical and digital worlds of Angry Birds. Licensing partners will have an incredible opportunity to create exceptional branded content experiences across our physical and digital touch points, and our consumers will be able to immerse themselves even further in the wonderful world of the Angry Birds.”

Rovio is developing Project Magic alongside AR specialists Zappar, in order to build on previous work in the AR field conducted by both Rovia and Zappar.

Max Dawes, Partnerships & Marketing Director, at Zappar, commented: “Over the past seven years working in the augmented reality space we’ve learnt a lot about how companies can create value with AR. We’re beyond excited to be able to leverage those learnings on such a huge scale with the fantastic team at Rovio. A brand’s largest owned media channels are their products, their packaging and their stores: through the addition of interactive Angry Birds content these channels can surprise, delight and entertain consumers like never before. In addition, Rovio’s partners will see hard data on when and how consumers are interacting. We can’t wait to unleash the magic!”

For future coverage of Rovio’s work with AR, keep checking back with VRFocus.

September 19, 2018

First-person ‘Angry Birds’ AR Game is Coming to Magic Leap This Fall

Angry Birds, the mobile breakout hit, is coming to Magic Leap in a brand new game called Angry Birds FPS: First Person Slingshot. Due to launch this Fall, the game is quite literally a first-person take on the physics-based slingshot smasher game.

Rovio Entertainment’s Angry Birds franchise is one of the smartphone world’s earliest smash-hits. The original game of the same name has more than 100 million installs on Android, according to the Google Play store. The entire franchise has achieved some four billion downloads, according to the company.

Now, in partnership with Resolution Games, Rovio is bringing Angry Birds FPS: First Person Slingshot to augmented reality on Magic Leap this fall. While the original mobile games give players a side-scrolling view as they launch birds from a slingshot in an effort to knock down wobbly forts, Angry Birds FPS will put the slingshot in players hands, allowing them to launch birds from a first-person view and walk around the opposing structure for the best vantage point.

The game is heading to the Magic Leap One headset this Fall, though an exact release date and price haven’t been announced.

This seems like a smart approach for a game on Magic Leap One, since the structures to be destroyed are naturally distant from the user, and understandably small, which hopefully means that field of view clipping won’t present much of an issue.

While Angry Birds has a distinct family-friendly allure, it’s doubtful that a demographic of younger kids will be playing Angry Birds FPS on Magic Leap’s $2,300 developer kit headset any time soon, though getting the franchise onto the platform could be a win in the long term, and a fun distraction for the developers experimenting with the headset today.

This won’t actually be the first time that Angry Birds found itself experimenting in the VR/AR space. Way back in 2015 the company showed a glimpse of Angry Birds VR running on a Gear VR headset, though the title never saw a public release.

The post First-person ‘Angry Birds’ AR Game is Coming to Magic Leap This Fall appeared first on Road to VR.

March 29, 2018

Movie adaptations of video games are still mostly terrible. Why has no one cracked the code?

Games creators and writers give their theories on how an upcoming crop of adaptations could avoid the same pitfalls as Assassin’s Creed, World of Warcraft and Super Mario Bros

No other film genre boasts such an unimpeachable reputation for dreadfulness as the video game adaptation. Some, such as this year’s Tomb Raider film and the zombie-themed Resident Evil efforts, almost achieve mediocrity. Others are so fascinatingly terrible that they have become Hollywood legend – for instance, the baffling interpretation of Super Mario Bros proffered by edgy British directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton in 1993, in which Nintendo’s bright, joyful Mushroom Kingdom was reimagined as a futuristic dystopia called Dinohattan, where everyone was dressed in fishnets and black leather trenchcoats. A quarter of a century later, it is still impossible to understand why anyone thought that was a good idea.

The ever-expanding Marvel cinematic universe is ample proof that films can do an excellent job of exploring geek culture and fleshing out the paper-thin characters that dominate it; Black Panther has just become the fifth highest-grossing movie ever at the US box office. Millions have now grown up with video games, so why is it that studios have failed to make a single video game movie that doesn’t stink?

Fantastic video game movies do exist – it’s just that none of them are adaptations

June 17, 2017September 16, 2017

What’s next for ‘Angry Birds’ maker Rovio? Potentially an IPO

It's been six years since we first told you about Angry Birds maker Rovio's plans to go public, but now, it seems as though action is on the horizon. The Finnish game maker and animation studio "could list on the stock exchange."

The post What’s next for ‘Angry Birds’ maker Rovio? Potentially an IPO appeared first on Digital Trends.