PETRONAS Avatars
Context:
Project developed at Wildbytes for PETRONAS' stands in MotoGP's Grand Prixs.
Technologies:
3D face generation, Unity, C#, 3D rendering, Firebase, AWS S3
Description:
The project was aimed to be displayed at some of the MotoGP's Grand Prixs circuits during the season to promote the PETRONAS sponsorship with the motorcycle competition. With the simple use of an iPad and 3 face photos, the user was able to generate a 3D realistic digital version of themselves. Moreover, they could choose an outift and environment and the system would generate a video of their avatar interacting with the chosen scene, which they would be able to download and share.
The key part of the development of this project was to find a good avatar generation solution. Nowadays, there are many libraries and APIs that allowed to do that, so my first job was to test them and even meet their administrators to understand to what extent they could be adapted to our needs. In the end, the best option was Avaturn which offers the creation of high realistic avatars, which provided the aimed effect. Once decided, a lot of work was done from my team and I to integrate that with the full experience pipeline, which included: Creation of the 3D environments, Integration of the Avatars with those environments and chosen animations, Coordination with the 3D team to integrate the outfits, Configration of the video capture and its uploading to a cloud server, and Synchronization of the iPad App with the Video Generator server, among others.
But the real challenge arrived when it was time to install the experience in the selected circuits which included, India, Thailand and Malaysia. Then I got to experience the preparation of a MotoGP Grand Prix and to deal with on-site complications like not having a good network connection or the optimal hardware. Finally, some improvisation and negotiation with the local technicians made our Avatar adventure in South-East Asia to become a success and moto-fans loved their Avatars!
Here you can see a glance of our Avatar Experience On Tour!