Let's Play
Client: CBeebies
The game, Let’s Play was created to accompany the CBeebies show, which inspires pre-schoolers to discover the world through creative role-play and dressing up.
The game sees the stars of the programme Sid and Rebecca invite children to dress them up in a range of different fancy dress costumes and place them in a make-believe environment. As well as dressing up the presenters, kids can also use their webcam to delve into the dress-up box and transform themselves into whoever they want to be, via augmented reality. Players can take on the role of many colourful characters, from a pirouetting ballerina, to a brave knight – or perhaps a racing driver or an awesome astronaut – even a mixture of them all!
The opportunity to build the Let’s Play game sprung from some previous augmented reality R&D that Plug-in first undertook in 2009. Back then we prototyped our dressing up system using a Ben 10 dress-up suit which we tried our very best to persuade Prince Andrew to wear at Turner Broadcasting’s 2009 royal summer reception (unfortunately he declined the offer at the time). This piece of work led on to some further R&D for the BBC in the form of Dress Up Box. The stars finally aligned when we heard of The Foundation’s new show, Let’s Play – which delivered a fantastic opportunity to create the most exciting web-based dress-up avatar system out there.
As well as delivering an innovative implementation of AR, we also created the game using the very latest in motion capture technology – a first for Plug-in. Always up for a challenge, Dom and Kat went off to Pinewood to film the presenters at the studio. Dressed in MoCap suits in front of the green screen, Sid and Rebecca spent the day having fun pretending to react to themany costumes that would feature in the game. The MoCap company Centroid turned the footage into 3D animation rigs which we then went onto manipulate back at the studio.
You can imagine that the team had great fun testing the game – well who doesn’t want the opportunity to dress-up and play King for a day?!
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