Wallace & Gromit to help find the Audience of the Future
They have conquered the moon, vanquished evil penguins, and foiled plots to steal sheep. Now, Wallace & Gromit, who are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, are about to bring their fans directly into their adventures via an incredible, first of its kind, story-driven experience that promises to bring together these much-loved, globally iconic characters and state-of-the-art storytelling.
Following on from our recent announcement regarding our consortium’s success in winning Government funding as part of the Audience of the Future programme, we are even more excited to share that we are partnering with Aardman to invent an exciting immersive experience based on the Wallace & Gromit characters.
The new immersive experience will be rich and multi-layered, realised through innovation and technology, bringing Wallace & Gromit alive in an entirely new way, while also creating a new platform for storytelling for the audience of the future. The ambitious plan includes a multi-month campaign leading into a groundbreaking location-based multi-user augmented reality experience in 2020.
Sean Clarke, Executive Director, Rights and Brand Development, Aardman said,
“Aardman is a business built on great storytelling and creative ambition. We are delighted to partner with this bold project, developing brand new Wallace & Gromit content that can be interacted with on many levels. We are sure this will delight and engage fans, offer a unique experience and maintain Wallace & Gromit’s reputation as pioneers of technology.”
Scott Ewings, Potato’s CEO and member of the consortium said,
“This is an extremely exciting area for Potato to be working in, with a consortium of fantastic companies and one of the world’s most loved brands. Potato’s product design and tech expertise and our rapid prototyping and validation methods will be such an important part of this process because while we’re creating a platform for audiences of the future, we have to ensure that what we create is meaningful and sustainable and engages people of all ages. We may be working in areas that have never been tested before and that’s the sort of thing we love. I can’t wait to see how this unfolds.”
UKRI Challenge Director for Audience of the Future, Prof Andrew Chitty said,
“It’s fantastic that we complete our line-up of audience facing demonstrators with this hugely ambitious collaboration between Tiny Rebel Games, Potato, Sugar Creative, University of South Wales and the creators of Wallace and Gromit. Their aim to revolutionise Augmented Reality gaming along with the advances in AI, haptics, audience interaction and film production technologies from our other competition winners means the public will be able to try out some truly groundbreaking experiences over the next 18 months.”
A consortium of companies including Potato, Sugar Creative and Tiny Rebel Games, with research support from the University of South Wales, were chosen by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) as part of the Audience of the Future program, which is a key part of the Government’s Creative Industries Sector Deal announced in March 2018. The consortium has been awarded a multimillion-pound R&D grant to explore and pioneer cutting-edge immersive experiences. And now, working hand-in-hand with Aardman, they will bring a brand-new adventure in the lives of Wallace & Gromit.
There will be many exciting announcements and activities during the project — including state of play updates, the opportunity to take part in immersive experiences, sharing learning about ways of working — and you can follow it all on the Potato website, our Medium publication, or our Twitter feed.
We’re also building our network for the project, so if you’re interested in being involved, sharing knowledge or simply learning more, please email press@potatolondon.com to express your interest.
