Santa's Lil Helper

Focused on encouraging family participation, Santa's Lil Helper (SLH) invited users to navigate through Melbourne's historic inner city laneways, tracking down Santa and saving Christmas in the process. By leveraging the power of AR technology, participants were able to use Santa's smartphone to activate dozens of markers hidden throughout the city, triggering an array of 3D and 360-degree content featuring Santa's crew. This immersive experience was developed in collaboration with the City of Melbourne Events team, Telstra, and IBM, enabling users to experience the spirit of Christmas in a whole new way, and helped to drive the advancement of AR development in the tourism and events industry.

Contribution

Date: Jan - Dec 2017

Company: PHORIA

Role: Technical Lead

Skills:

Unity Game Engine, Art Pipeline, Vuforia, C#, iOS, Android

Santa's Lil Helper leveraged Vuforia's cutting-edge (at the time!) image alignment technology to provide a unique Christmas experience to the general public in Melbourne CBD.

Throughout the project, I led the development effort and collaborated closely with a talented team of artists, designers, and business stakeholders to ensure that the application was delivered on time for the City of Melbourne's Christmas event. My responsibilities also included the development of a complex user interface, implementing augmented reality interactions, sequencing, for a simulated phone operating system with a variety of applications such as a camera, map, messages and more. I also oversaw the deployment of the applications on both the iOS and Android app stores, and managed the store pages and build uploads to ensure seamless delivery to end-users during the event.

Santa's Lil Helper was built using Unity, C# and the Vuforia AR SDK.

Website: https://santaslilhelper.com.au/