The BBC series-inspired immersive event takes visitors to the four corners of the Earth with augmented reality
The Green Planet Augmented Reality (AR) Experience, inspired by the hit BBC series, opened its doors last week to visitors in an exhibition aimed at educating on biodiversity with the power of immersive technologies.
Combining a stunning masterpiece of tailored audiovisual effects, real-time 3D (RT3D) content, 5G, and AR, audiences can learn about the world’s distinct ecosystems through a guided tour narrated by Sir David Attenborough, one of the BBC’s most veteran and celebrated broadcasters, as an avatar.
The event, hosted on Regent Street at London’s Piccadilly Circus, transforms common spaces into six real and virtual biomes complete with live plants and surreal backdrops.
People interested in the event can visit The Green Planet Experience’s website for more information and to book tickets, which remain limited due to the massive popularity of the event.
XR Today spoke with Factory 42’s John Cassy, Chief Executive and Founder, Stephen Stewart, Chief Technology Officer, and Jamie Davies, Creative Director. The award-winning studio‘s team created, managed, and executed BBC Earth’s hit immersive experience for audiences.
XR Today: Can you tell us about Factory 42, its history in XR, and some of its previous projects?
John Cassy: Factory 42 was set up to create experiences that matter and use immersive technologies to tell stories in new ways. Established in 2016, it works with a range of leading companies, including Sky, BBC, Google, and EE, plus respected talent such as Sir David Attenborough.
It has had four projects selected for the SxSW Film Festival, including next month’s instalment, where a single biome of the sold-out ‘The Green Planet AR Experience’ in London will be featured.
The company is also the recipient of one of the UK’s largest innovation grants for research and development (R&D), and has built a reputation for high quality and pioneering XR experiences.
Factory 42 is best known for projects, including the Broadcast Award-winning Painting the Future with the Royal Academy of Arts and Hold the World with Sir David Attenborough at London’s Natural History Museum.
The company is based at Somerset House in London, and the team is made up of software developers, artists, producers, academics, researchers, writers and directors.
XR Today: What was the inspiration for developing The Green Planet AR Experience? How did you collaborate with the BBC and Sir David Attenborough to realise this project?
John Cassy: The Green Planet AR experience came about after Sir David Attenborough introduced Factory 42 to Mike Gunton, Creative Director of the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU) and Executive Producer of The Green Planet TV series.
Factory 42 had been developing an idea for a green world-focused XR experience in conjunction with Sir David, Kew Gardens, and Talesmith Films, an award-winning wildlife filmmaker.
Sir David suggested that it tie in with Green Planet and the BBC agreed. Mobile network EE boarded the project soon afterwards.
The partners later bid for funding from the UK Government’s Department of Digital Culture Media and Sport’s (DCMS) 5G Create Fund and were one of nine projects to receive funding to test new 5G use cases.
The project aims to put nature at people’s fingertips and give them a personal tour of the green world with Sir David, one of the icons of broadcasting. It also aims to demonstrate the powers of 5G technology and how it can enable new types of bandwidth and data-heavy experiences created for consumers.
The project is a genuine partnership between Factory 42, BBC Studios, EE, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Talesmith, Dimension Studios (who created the volumetric video of Sir David), and venue partner The Crown Estate.
The BBC’s NHU created an extraordinary blue-chip Natural History TV series, and Factory 42 worked closely with it and BBC Studios Interactive to reimagine the series as an immersive AR experience blending the physical and digital worlds.
Sir David acted as presenter and editorial contributor with his performance, captured in a holographic green screen studio near Heathrow Airport. Kew Gardens scientists also ensured all of the plants created digitally were accurate.
XR Today: Can you describe some innovative technologies used to develop the Experience? Who were your key technology partners and which solutions did they provide?
Stephen Stewart: ‘The Green Planet AR Experience’ uses a variety of innovative technologies to help leverage the power of the private 5G network provided by EE.
The experience runs in real-time through the Unity game engine with procedurally-generated digital plants and environments utilizing the power of the Unity Universal Render Pipeline (URP).
Sir David Attenborough appears as 4K volumetric video throughout the experience via the Microsoft HoloVideo solution, and NVIDIA’s CloudXR solution enables edge rendering of AR content to use its industrial-grade GPUs to deliver this content over 5G to each connected Samsung S21 handset.
Google’s Cloud Anchor solution accurately maps the digital content into the physical spaces at Regent Street, with their MediaPipe TensorFlow hand tracking technology enabling digital butterflies to land on each visitor’s hand.
XR Today: Why did you partner with EE, and what makes 5G such a vital component for creating AR experiences, namely for large, simultaneous viewership?
Stephen Stewart: ‘The Green Planet AR Experience’ was designed to showcase the 5G superpowers of latency, bandwidth and coverage.
The low-latency, high-bandwidth, and robust coverage provided by EE’s private 5G Standalone (SA) network allowed us to push the visual fidelity of AR content and support seamless interactivity for each visitor.
Using the power of edge computing to have water ripples and 400,000 individual blades of seagrass react to a visitor’s presence in AR just wouldn’t have been possible without 5G, particularly for large groups who want to enjoy the experience together.
John Cassy: We spoke to two large mobile network operators about the project and EE leapt on the opportunity, immediately seeing the potential to demonstrate the capabilities of 5G in new ways.
XR Today: What kind of feedback have visitors to the Green Planet AR Experience offered in surveys, namely on its ergonomics, quality of content, and informativeness?
Jamie Davies: We have had an overwhelmingly positive reaction so far to ‘The Green Planet AR Experience’, with a whole host of people from Stephen Fry and University professors to working parents and young children citing it as truly immersive, educational, informative, moving and fun.
The gentle interactions we have peppered throughout the experience have really helped key information on the plants and environment stick with visitors.
The ergonomics and ease of use have been great to see too, with people using the phone as we intended, as an exploratory and dynamic tool to get up close and personal with the experience.
The quality of content has really helped here, with 5G enabling far better graphics and resolution than ever before as well as some strong product design by the Factory 42 team, enabling people of all ages to quickly get to grips with the experience and get the most out of it.
XR Today: What kinds of projects does Factory 42 hope to create in the near future? Do you see any use cases for your studio solutions such as conferences, sporting events, or even training exercises?
John Cassy: Factory 42 is on a mission to make knowledge entertainment through experiences that matter. By that, we mean there is a huge creative and commercial opportunity to engage audiences with purpose-driven experiences that are fun and entertaining but also resonate with them a long time after being completed.
‘The Green Planet AR Experience’ shows how audiences from the age of 7 to 77 can engage with new technologies and stories together in a shared space and take knowledge and enjoyment from it.
We have a number of projects in the pipeline that involve large brands and ambitious new forms of storytelling. We will continue to push boundaries in creating high-quality XR experiences at scale.
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