Lights as a Feather Season 2 Gets a Mixed Reality Treatment via Magic Leap
To promote the season 2 launch of Hulu’s Lights as a Feather, Viacom’s Awesomeness will allow fans to virtually immerse themselves into the world of the paranormal teen thriller show and interact with avatars of the casts in the show through a Magic Leap activation.
The mixed reality treatment to the popular thriller will debut during the VidCon US 2019 which takes place next week from July 10 to 13. The XR experience will leverage the spatial computing capabilities of the Magic Leap headset to immerse users into the show. The virtual rendering has been created by Awesomeness in collaboration with Magic Leap and ViacomXR Lab. ViacomXR specializes in creating augmented reality and virtual reality content across various divisions of the media and entertainment conglomerate.
The Light as a Feather Magic Leap activation will be the first volumetric and extended reality narrative experience that has been based on a real TV show or film developed for the platform. In the mixed reality experience, users will be able to search for clues as they try unraveling the underlying mystery in the show.
While the mixed reality recreation will be featured during the VidCon show, access to the Magic Leap experience outside the show will be limited due to hardware accessibility issues. The Magic Leap One headset goes for a whopping $2300 and has been built mainly for mixed reality developers. Magic Leap has had quite a successful fundraising run even though it is yet to realize commercial access. To date, the mixed reality startup has raised more than $2.6 billion in multiple fundraising rounds. However, in spite of the massive financial war-chest, the company has yet to release a consumer mixed reality headset that will be accessible to the average user.
The plot in the real show on Hulu involves ‘Light as a feather’, a seemingly harmless game until the girls that have played it begin dying just as predicted in the game. In the Light as a Feather mixed reality activation, the fans are immersed into the middle of the story and they get an opportunity to join the cast of the Hulu series even if they appear only as avatars of the real people. Some of the cast you will meet include Liana Liberato, Alex Wassabi, Haley Ramm, Brianne Tju and Brent Rivera and you will join them as they cooperate in ending the curse.
The mixed reality experience of the Hulu show is rendered more like a game than a virtual reality show. Once immersed, you will experience the digital objects in the mixed reality rendering and even be able to interact with the world around you using a Magic Leap headset. The game will start when you are invited by McKenna to assist in breaking the “Light as a Feather” curse. You will be guided to help find objects in the virtual rendering of Violet’s bedroom that will trigger the scares and unlock the secrets. As you progress further into the game, more characters will come in to assist in providing the clues.
The mixed reality rendering for “Light as a Feather” also includes scenes in which the attendees are called in to lie in the middle of physical booth whereupon they are virtually levitated by the chants of the avatars belonging to McKenna (Liberato), Isaac (Rivera), Violet (Ramm) and Alex (Tju). When the virtual recreation ends, the fans get a video of themselves acting out the scenes alongside the casts. This video is shareable on social media.
Light as a Feather Season 2 will premiere on July 26 on Hulu. A second mixed reality activation for the series will be shown in October to coincide with the final eight episodes of Season 2. The show was produced by Awesomeness, Grammnet Productions and Wattpad.
The partnership between the producers and the technological providers Magic Leap and ViacomXR also sees the producers tell the story from a new and cutting-edge perspective, tapping into the current buzz around immersive technologies.
The Light as a Feather mixed reality project provides fans and viewers a window into how spatial computing can be tapped to create new forms of storytelling. For fans, this creates a completely new and compelling way to engage with the story and the characters that they love.
https://virtualrealitytimes.com/2019/07/06/lights-as-a-feather-season-2-gets-a-mixed-reality-treatment-via-magic-leap/https://virtualrealitytimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Light-as-a-Feather-Mixed-Reality-on-Magic-Leap-600x338.jpghttps://virtualrealitytimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Light-as-a-Feather-Mixed-Reality-on-Magic-Leap-150x90.jpgMixed RealityTechnologyTo promote the season 2 launch of Hulu’s Lights as a Feather, Viacom’s Awesomeness will allow fans to virtually immerse themselves into the world of the paranormal teen thriller show and interact with avatars of the casts in the show through a Magic Leap activation. The mixed reality treatment to...Sam OchanjiSam Ochanji[email protected]EditorVirtual Reality Times - Metaverse & VR