As one of the most high profile sporting events of the year, we knew we had to drive excitement with an interactive experience that fans could engage with on multiple levels. Designed for desktop and mobile, the Battle of the Baddest AR-enabled microsite brought various media, event coverage and competitions together in one place for fans to explore before the fight – including a mobile WebAR experience featuring AR replicas of the fighters.

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The AR experience allows users to place digital replicas of Tyson Fury and Francis Ngannou into their environment at three different scales – city scale, true-to-life and tabletop – as well as viewing key stats for each fighter. Creating the AR characters from 3D scans of the fighters themselves, we were able to make sure each one represented not just their physical form, but their distinct personalities, characteristics and movements too.

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With limited time to capture the fighters in-studio, we needed to ensure that our assets worked incredibly hard. From a single shoot, we captured photogrammetry and mo-cap data to recreate Fury and Ngannou accurately from all aspects – from their outward appearance to movements and interactions – and by using a real punching bag as a prop during the motion capture phase we were able to bring a true sense of life and physicality to the characters in AR. Capturing film-level VFX assets like this in a short amount of time was definitely a challenge, but it allowed us to integrate incredibly realistic AR avatars that made the whole experience come alive for fans.

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Using the latest 8th Wall features including Sky Segmentation, we were able to detect where the sky separates from the land in order to place the AR assets more accurately in the user’s environment with improved occlusion. Spatialized Audio allowed us to adapt the sounds within the experience depending on where the user placed their AR characters, with real time reverberation underlining just how epic the upcoming showdown will be.

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‘It’s amazing to be able to bring high-end character scanning and performance capture to web-based mobile AR. The performances from the fighters translated perfectly to the medium and the final assets look incredibly realistic, even at larger-than-life-scale with a comparatively low file size.’  - Horton, Executive Creative Director, UNIT9

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