More than three years ago Barclaycard scored a viral hit with its Waterslide app for Apple’s iPhone, inspired from its then TV ad campaign.
We were impressed at how little in-game branding there was and a 2010 follow-up Rollercoaster app offered more fun and impressively un-spammy gaming.
Now the company is back with Toys Unleashed, a new augmented reality (AR) game which forms part of its Christmas publicity campaign.
The free game is available from the Apple App store and features three characters from the campaign – Mr. B the monkey, Chomp and Mike.
The use of AR means the characters will only come to life in your hand (or anywhere ‘skin’ coloured).
Voiced by Gavin and Stacey’s James Corden, Mr B is the main character in the advert which sees him help a customer who is overwhelmed by choice when trying to buy a toy at Christmas.
Gary Twelvetree, Global Brand Director at Barclaycard, said: “Launching Toys Unleashed is a really exciting step for Barclaycard. Following the massive success of the Waterslide and Rollercoaster games, we wanted to create something even more innovative and interactive. This is why we decided to use AR and Shazam for the first time in one of our campaigns.”
Perry Price from app developers DARE added: “Using the latest parallel programming techniques the phone splits the image into appropriate channels, rapidly strips away areas of the cameras feed that aren’t skin, identifies regions that might be a hand and then makes a decision about which of those is the more likely to be the tracked hand – all this takes place at a steady 25fps on most models. ”
