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Stuart Weitzman is bringing the catwalk to your living room. The luxury fashion brand just launched a WebAR campaign that uses holograms of models to showcase its latest line of accessories.
Holograms are in high demand as brands and organizations turn to volumetric captures of actors, celebrities and spokespeople to entertain, educate, train, and sell to customers. When combined with WebAR, these holograms become free to be wherever the user is, including their home.
Back in October, we launched our integration with Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios (MRCS) to support streaming of its volumetric video in augmented reality on the web. Combining Microsoft’s high-resolution, low-latency volumetric videos with 8th Wall’s scalable and frictionless WebAR platform has unlocked a massive market opportunity for holograms. Since this launch, the 8th Wall platform has been used by brands, agencies and even musicians to create WebAR hologram activations that bring a lifelike human experience directly to users.
We gained some valuable feedback in supporting many of the early developers in their hologram project development. This insight was used to implement some powerful changes to our platform to improve the end-to-end development of MRCS hologram WebAR experiences.
Today, we are debuting our official MRCS Hologram project template and a new Cloud Editor feature enabling asset bundle uploads which makes it possible to add MRCS volumetric video (HCAP) files to your project. The release of these new tools makes the 8th Wall Cloud Editor the best platform to create and publish WebAR MRCS hologram content.
The A-Frame MRCS Project Template kick starts your hologram project development by using the latest versions of Microsoft’s HCAP player and 8th Wall’s SLAM engine hyper-optimized for the browser to provide world tracking. It also includes everything you need to set the hologram’s initial scale, enable gestures for manipulation and movement and easily modify looping, muting, control playback, and display messages based on HCAP playback states.
The new asset bundle feature lets developers drag and drop .ZIP files or complete directories into their Cloud Editor projects. The addition of this feature is critical to supporting MRCS HCAP assets. Developers can now drag and drop HCAP asset bundles into a Cloud Editor project, preview the hologram once it has uploaded and then add it to their project.
When ready, the hologram WebAR project can be published instantly to a password-protected staging environment or live to the world — hosted right at the edge, where your users are, with low latency via 197 points of presence globally.
While MRCS hologram projects benefit greatly from asset bundles, this new feature can also be used to upload files with any file extension, including glTF, and brings support for files that rely on referencing relative path files. It also allows developers to serve files as assets which can improve build and load times.
You can check out the new asset bundle feature by logging into the Cloud Editor and clicking the “+” arrow beside “Assets” in any Cloud Editor project. Or, read more about it in our Documentation.
To get started with a hologram project, head on over to the Project Library to clone the MRCS Hologram project or select it as a project template in the Cloud Editor. MRCS Hologram projects will require you to have a volumetric video file (HCAP) from Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios (MRCS) or MRCS partners Metastage and Dimension Studio.
We can’t wait to see what you create!
To educate customers on its journey toward zero carbon and zero waste, Nike worked with production agency Unit9 to transform its shoe boxes into interactive WebAR stories. When scanned, the shoe boxes activate a 3D augmented reality experience that appears on top of the box, and tells the story of Nike’s commitment to sustainability.
Picture it, it’s 1994. Ace of Base’s “The Sign” was topping the charts, Disney’s “The Lion King” was the highest grossing film and on the cover of Time Magazine was the next big thing — the internet. It was also the year a little rectangle was purchased on HotWired.com by AT&T, the very first banner ad, which 44% of people who saw it clicked.
8th Wall has become synonymous with WebAR, powering hundreds of commercial WebAR websites across the world. Our SDK provides instant surface detection, 6DoF world tracking and image target detection to the browser, allowing developers to build and distribute AR without needing to worry about app stores and downloads. Developers use 8th Wall to create web-based AR experiences with greater reach and less friction than comparable standalone apps, while delivering the deep engagement and dwell time that AR provides.
Until now, WebAR has been delivered in the form of microsites: full screen web apps that reside on their own webpage. Over the past year and a half, we have witnessed the complexity of these microsites grow to impressive levels. Real-time multiplayer games, streaming holograms, geo-based scavenger hunts, and much more have elevated this format and proven that web technology is further ahead than most people realize. Now with WebAR in a mature state, I’m proud to announce ‘Inline AR’ as an alternative to the microsite format which can now power even more of the web.
To honor International Women’s Day, Russian bank Sberbank teamed up with digital agencies Mosaic and Hyper Reality to create a WebAR activation that allows users to send the women in their lives a virtual bouquet of flowers.
New Zealand wine company Stoneleigh partnered with immersive Australian agency Unbnd to create an AR-activated brand experience for its Wild Valley wine labels. Customers can scan their wine bottle to “let nature take over,” bringing to life elements of nature from the wine’s coastal climate of Marlborough, New Zealand.
Nike: “Move to Zero” AR Activated Shoe Boxes
To educate customers on its journey toward zero carbon and zero waste, Nike worked with production agency Unit9 to transform its shoe boxes into interactive WebAR stories. When scanned, the shoe boxes activate a 3D augmented reality experience that appears on top of the box, and tells the story of Nike’s commitment to sustainability.
One of the superpowers of augmented and virtual reality is to make the ordinary, extraordinary. And with WebAR and WebVR, you can experience something awesome with just a click of a link. I’ve rounded up five WebAR and WebVR experiences powered by 8th Wall to help you add a little wonder to your world during your stay at home.
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